ArticlePDF Available

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from across Western Europe, 1300-1800

March 2016
Journal of Agrarian Change 16(4)

Authors:

Erasmus University Rotterdam

The view of the commons as archaic, ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’ institutions for the management of resources has now been revised in favour of a more positive one, for both past and present societies. Indeed, it is clear that the commons had multifarious ecological and economic benefits for both medieval and early modern rural societies in Western Europe. That being the case, many scholars have seen the increasing expropriation of the commons in the transition to the early modern period as a sign of increasing inequality characterizing pre-industrial Europe, and many have lamented the loss of communal grazing privileges connected to processes such as land enclosure – pushing poor peasants into the ‘abyss’ with the removal of their final form of welfare. However, in this paper it is argued that the social distribution of the benefits to the commons were rarely, if ever, entirely equitable. In fact, in many historical contexts the benefits of the commons could also be highly restricted – crystallizing and entrenching stratifications themselves, and even serving as the ‘vehicle’ of further inequality. The expropriation of the commons did not necessarily make Western European rural societies any more unequal.

Content uploaded by Daniel Curtis

Content may be subject to copyright.

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early

Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A

Survey of Evidence from across Western Europe,

1300–1800

DANIEL R. CURTIS

The view of the commons as archaic, ‘backward’ and ‘irrational’ institutions for the

management of resources has now been revised in favour of a more positive one, for both

past and present societies. Indeed, it is clear that the commons had multifarious ecological

and economic beneﬁts for both medieval and early modern rural societies in Western

Europe. That being the case, many scholars have seen the increasing expropriation of the

commons in the transition to the early modern period as a sign of increasing inequality

characterizing pre-industrial Europe, and many have lamented the loss of communal

grazing privileges connected to processes such as land enclosure – pushing poor peasants

into the ‘abyss’ with the removal of their ﬁnal form of welfare. However, in this paper it is

argued that the social distribution of the beneﬁts to the commons were rarely, if ever,

entirely equitable. In fact, in many historical contexts the beneﬁts of the commons could

also be highly restricted – crystallizing and entrenching stratiﬁcations themselves, and even

serving as the ‘vehicle’ of further inequality. The expropriation of the commons did not

necessarily make Western European rural societies any more unequal.

Keywords: commons, equality, inequality, Western Europe, pre-industrial

FROM THE ‘BACKWARD COMMONS’ TO THE ‘DYNAMIC COMMONS’:

A CHANGING PERCEPTION

Although the ‘commons’ are now being used in a wider sense to refer to many different types

of institution for collective action,1both past and present (De Moor 2010b, fn. 3; 2011), the

more traditional and restricted deﬁnition refers to two resource-management systems (with

multifarious nuances and differing versions) found in the pre-industrial Western European

countryside, and which experienced formalized institutional crystallization roughly around the

twelfth and thirteenth centuries (with undoubtedly much earlier informal antecedents).2The

common ﬁelds were essentially private cultivated arable lands farmed collectively. As one

particular ‘subtype’ of the open ﬁelds (a basic system of scattering of plots across a number of

ﬁelds), the common ﬁelds allowed one of the ﬁelds (often one out of three, but there was

Daniel R. Curtis, Research Institute for History and Art History, Utrecht University, Drift 6, 3521 BS, Utrecht,

The Netherlands. E-mail: d.r.curtis@uu.nl.

Daniel Curtis is a postdoctoral researcher on an ERC-project led by Prof. Bas van Bavel entitled ‘Coordinat-

ing for Life. Success and Failure of Western European Societies in Coping with Rural Hazards and Disasters,

1300–1800’ (grant no. 339647). Thanks also go to the referees for their most helpful advice.

1Now sometimes referred to as ‘common pool resources’ (CPRs).

2Within a prior context of the crystallization of formalized local lordships and communes between the tenth

and twelfth centuries (see Reynolds 1997; Wickham 1997).

bs_bs_banner

Journal of Agrarian Change, Vol. •• No. ••, •• 2015, pp. ••–••.

exceptional variation) to spend time fallow, in the process not exhausting the nutrients of

the soil (Thirsk 1964, 3).3The other form of the commons was the shared but rationed

and regulated access rights and obligations over resources such as pastures, forests, wastes and

marshes (De Moor et al. 2002a, 18–19). This type of commons offered multiple uses and

resources, including the right and space to graze animals, to pick herbs, fruit and fungi, to

hunt and ﬁsh, and to extract fuel and building materials in the form of dung, timber and peat,

as well as the distribution of some plots for cultivation, at times (Iriarte-Goñi 1998; Grüne

2011). To avoid confusion and limit the scope of this paper, only this second form of the

commons is explicitly considered.

Roughly in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, the

commons increasingly came under attack from internal and external encroachments. Many

commons proved resilient over the long term, however, and their ﬁnal death knell in many

parts of Western Europe only came in the nineteenth century – often through parliamentary

and state privatization.While some late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century observers decried

the likelihood that any family ‘for whatever reason is left without [common] pasture and

woods’ and ultimately ‘reduced to poverty and vagabondage’ (Lorenzetti 2013, 183), according

to most liberal reformers of this time, the commons were feudal and antiquated remnants of a

bygone age, standing in the way of progress, enlightenment and commerce (Demélas and

Vivier 2003; Congost and Lana 2007), and they celebrated their removal.As a result, nowadays

in Western Europe, the proportion of common land is very much reduced, though signiﬁcant

remnants still exist in eastern and southern France, south-west Germany, northern Spain and

much of Switzerland, to name but a few places. The negative nineteenth-century liberal and

‘enlightenment’ ideology critical of the role of the commons has had strong support, however,

from certain parts of twentieth-century academia too. The most famous and inﬂuential is a

widely cited ‘Tragedy of the Commons’ paper written by ecologist Garrett Hardin (1968) in

an issue of the journal Science. Hardin attacked the commons on an ideological level, warning

us of the dangers of overpopulation and the likelihood that avaricious individuals acting in

their own self-interest would inevitably deplete any ﬁnite common resource. These kinds of

views in the 1960s were given much credence, considering that this was a time when

Malthusian explanatory frameworks for how the pre-industrial economy and society operated

were at their most dominant – with great emphasis on the ‘fact’ that ﬁnite resources always

were susceptible to over-exploitation, particularly through population pressure.4

The commons of past and present societies have also had their value questioned on a more

indirect level too, through the rise of alternative schools of thought within economics and

economic history.Two of those most detrimental to the cause of the commons were the New

Institutional Economics literature, connected in the ﬁrst instance to the work of Nobel

Prize–winning scholar Douglass North (see the classic North and Thomas 1973; 1977, esp.

234; also North 1990), and the explicitly Neo-Marxist property-rights approach of Robert

Brenner (1976, 1982), where a clear paradigm came to be established that economic growth

and development went hand in hand with the creation of clear, modern, inalienable property

rights. Indeed, it there is a surprising degree of convergence between both theoretical

approaches, perhaps demonstrated most of all in their shared assumption that the motive

3Of course, this is an idealized description of a system that could offer considerable variation. On the diversity

of fallow ﬁeld arrangements across Europe, see Hildebrandt (1988, 86–7). In some cases – for example, in Clark

(1998, 73) – the open ﬁelds and common ﬁelds have been unclearly associated as one and the same thing, which

is incorrect.

4Of course, now no longer seen as ‘fact’, with history showing that ‘natural Malthusian limits’ were rarely

reached (Van Bavel and Thoen 2013, 22).

2Daniel R. Curtis

structure of interest groups is largely determined by material resources in income, property

and security. Even today, these kinds of theories have credence with some of the biggest

names in economics and economic history, where it has even been argued that the emergence

of modern secure property rights was a signiﬁcant causal factor in explaining why the

Industrial Revolution happened to occur in England ﬁrst and not elsewhere in the world

(Landes 1998; Acemoglu and Robinson 2012; Ferguson 2012) and why the early modern

Low Countries came to be the ‘First Modern Economy’ (De Vries and Van der Woude

1997). The basic logic underlying much of the institutionalist literature was that people avoid

investing in property that is insecure or too complex (de Soto 2000). Naturally, this had

repercussions for the wider perception of the commons, which came to be seen as a ‘back-

ward’ form of agricultural organization hindering the emergence of more commercialized

economies (Clark 2001), while a story was established that the progressive triumph of capital-

ist forces was pushed through on top of a deﬁnition and enforcement of private property

rights. The revolution in English agriculture, which was comprised of the emergence of more

modern property rights, land consolidation and agrarian capitalism – processes that ultimately

included the gradual dismantlement of the commons – was apparently a necessary precursor

to the eventual Industrial Revolution (Brenner 1976, 68). For Brenner in particular, where

peasant communities were able to resist changes in property relations, including the abolition

of the commons and the expropriation of small peasant property, they were also able to block

the emergence of ‘more efﬁcient’ productive forces and ‘capitalistic’ agriculture and wage

relations in the countryside (1982, 17). Inherent in all these kinds of approaches is the

implication that ‘what is common, brings ruin to us all’: an assumption that there is no chance

for productivity rises as individuals tend not to be willing to invest in a common good. In a

way, this links back to the early literature offered by Garrett Hardin, where it is assumed that

those members of the commons will only take from the resource and not contribute to

increasing it.

In contrast, however, the expropriation and decline of the commons has been presented in

a different light by a recent group of historians, economists and social scientists explicitly

engaging with the New Institutional Economics and Neo-Marxist view on property rights,

but instead putting forward an almost overwhelmingly positive role for the commons, past,

present and future; especially with regard to current concerns over environmental and societal

sustainability (Poteete et al. 2010; Rodgers et al. 2011; De Moor 2012). The key ﬁgure

associated with this change from a ‘negative’ to a ‘positive’ narrative over the commons is most

certainly the Nobel Prize–winning literature of Elinor Ostrom, who ultimately has shown

that contrary to the Malthusian inevitabilities extolled in Hardin’s ‘Tragedy of the Commons’

or the inevitable block to economic growth suggested by the traditional New Institutional

Economics literature, the commons were not monolithic or immobile institutions, but could

be adapted ﬂexibly to cater for new economic, political and demographic pressures and

exogenous shocks (1990).As Runge suggested, the persistence of collective institutions such as

the commons over many centuries cannot be seen as the manifestation of backwardness or

‘irrationality’ but as logical adaptations to very particular social environments and contexts

(1986, 632). In a way, the revised positive conception of the commons ﬁts very neatly into a

general revision of the role of ‘modern’, ‘clear’ and private property rights. There are now

many cases identiﬁed across pre-industrial Europe of economic growth being achieved simul-

taneous to the establishment and entrenchment of very complex and multi-layered property

rights (Béaur et al. 2013), and accordingly, the assumed link between ‘modern property rights’

and economic development has been met with sharp counter-criticism (Vries 2012; Jones

2013). Essentially, what is now being suggested is this: no form of property right is inherently

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 3

or intrinsically ‘better’ than any other, and the effectiveness of property rights and the land

market in general was (and is) determined by being embedded within particular social

contexts (Congost 2003, 90). In that way, the commons were not mired in antiquated feudal

relations but could coexist as active components of commercializing rural economies (Curtis

2012) – just to use one example, in the Ebro River plains and Pyrenees of northern Spain,

common pastures were formally consolidated in the thirteenth century, at the very time that

local and international wool markets began to expand (Pascua Echegaray 2011).

As a result, a dominant ‘positivist’ conception of the commons has emerged in recent years

as a necessary counter to those extolling the virtues of private property forms, where it has in

fact been shown that the commons (sometimes in combination with private property

arrangements) gave pre-industrial societies real identiﬁable beneﬁts, including the possibility of

negating risks, creating advantageous economies of scale and reducing transaction costs (De

Moor 2008). In the historical context, Tine De Moor in particular has shown how the

commons, in some conditions and circumstances, could be used as an effective institutional

framework for limiting environmental degradation and in turn improving the sustainability of

rural societies and economies (2009, 2010a). Historical cases have been used to show that

when the commons were forced into dysfunction and unravelled, environmental degradation,

in the form of assarting, soil erosion and sand drifts, frequently followed close behind (Van

Zanden 1999). Very recent research has shown the ‘logic’ of persistent operation of the

commons in those areas of the Mediterranean bearing the most fragile of dry soils (Beltrán

Tapia 2014).

Indeed, according to some historians such as Jane Humphries, the beneﬁts of having access

to common rights of pasture were immense – as little as two cows for a commoner in late

eighteenth-century England could have been the equivalent of 6 months’ worth of wages for

a fully employed male agricultural labourer (1990, 23–31). Smallholding peasants in particular

could take advantage of the lowering of transaction costs connected with maintaining ﬂocks

or herds of animals, and many had interests in the collective investments that could be made

into drainage facilities and boundary markers and fences (Tan 2002, 472). Indeed, ‘exclusion

costs’ such as the fencing off of open spaces were often high, and so did not compensate for

any apparent advantages that came with privatization (Iriarte-Goñi and Lana 2013, 131).

Sometimes the economic surplus was simply not high enough to sustain the costs of private

property regimes (Runge 1986). These kinds of arrangements made even more sense when

one considers that access to credit and capital in rural Western Europe in the medieval and

early modern periods was desperately uneven (Briggs 2009; Schoﬁeld and Lambrecht 2009;

Zuijderduijn 2009), and particularly distorted for ordinary rural peasant producers looking to

make investments.

Rather than uncontrolled over-exploitation, good practice and management of the

commons was often enforced by the common members themselves (De Moor 2009), and

these social control characteristics were sometimes cheaper than top-down monitoring and

enforcement mechanisms (Laborda Pemán and De Moor 2013, 13). Thus the commons also

frequently acted as an ‘information-enhancing’ institution – dispersing ‘resource knowledge’

across a wider segment of the population (Casari 2007, 220). Formal restrictions were put on

grazing times and numbers, while limitations were put on, for example, the numbers of trees

felled for commercial or private gain (Sommé 1990). In any case, formal institutions such as

‘forest courts’ were frequently set up to examine possible infringements made by commoners

(Hayhoe 2002, 52; Schütte 2004), and sanctioning and punishment of ‘bad practice’ was an

effective tool to deter individual expropriation of collective resources (Tukker 2010). Finally,

the commons have also been shown to have had particular utility for those societies with

4Daniel R. Curtis

poor or distorted access to commodity markets (Lana 2008, 165), and for peasant societies

across Western Europe, a system that led to protection and predictability rather than surplus

production for volatile and unstable markets was sometimes more valuable (Curtis 2014a, ch.

2) – particularly given that the pre-industrial marketplace offered transaction costs of its own

for rural producers (Hoppenbrouwers and Van Zanden 2001, 22–6).

Of course, further indirect evidence for the signiﬁcance and importance of the commons

to rural communities across Western Europe in the Middle Ages and the early modern period

is the amount of occasions where we see rural peasants actively defending and attempting to

preserve their perceived common rights to marshes and woodlands in the face of would-be

colonists (Birrell 1987; Monsalvo Antón 2001; Menant 2004; Dyer 2006).The same passionate

defence frequently extended to collective rights and access to water sources too (Heimpel

1963; Devailly 1973, 361; Blickle 1986). In some regions with a strong tradition of freedom,

autonomy and the commons, such as Drenthe in the northern Low Countries, rural commu-

nities were willing to resort to violence to maintain independent control over their collective

resources in the face of perceived outside encroachments and infringements (Te Brake 1981;

Van Bavel 2010).The signiﬁcance of the commons to many Western European rural commu-

nities can be seen in how vigorously their territorial borders were disputed, particularly in

pastoral transhumant areas such as the mountain areas of northern Spain, where conﬂicts were

extremely commonplace at an inter-community level (Wickham 1985, 437–51; 2007). In fact,

such was the passionate defence of communities’ rights to common resources, and their fear

of ‘outsider’ expropriation and interference, that commoners often resorted to violent suppres-

sion of non-entitled ‘foreigners’ (Canellas López 1988, 35, 63, 90–2). By the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, as governmental revolutionary legislation all across Europe was calling

for the dismantlement of the commons, village communities were standing up in deﬁance to

these threats (Jones 1985; Vivier 1998; Serrano Alvarez 2014).

Thus it is clear that the commons could function for the theoretical beneﬁt of rural

societies in Western Europe in the Middle Ages and the early modern period, sometimes

lasting all the way up to the late nineteenth century. These beneﬁts could take a variety of

forms from context to context – sometimes economic, sometimes ecological, and sometimes

as a form of risk limitation or protection. It is logical then that a long tradition of scholars

have come to note the increasing expropriation of the commons in the transition to the early

modern period and the emergence of agrarian capitalism, but have lamented the loss of

communal grazing privileges as pushing poor peasants into the ‘abyss’ (Turner 1984; Neeson

1993, 55) and being indicative of an increasing inequality characterizing pre-industrial

Western European societies (Tawney 1912, 234–80). This kind of interpretation found favour

with some of the most inﬂuential and signiﬁcant Marxist historians such as E.P. Thompson

(1968, 233–58; 1993, 97–184), and indeed was a view posited by Marx himself (1987), though

it is certainly not an exclusively Marxist interpretation. Thus, early modern enclosures and

eighteenth- to nineteenth-century government privatization of the commons were not nec-

essarily seen as ‘social progress’, but as acting detrimentally to the interests of the poor, ‘a

primary factor leading to the rural poverty in Andalucía in the 19th century and the conﬂict-

ridden crisis that has continued to plague this area of Spain’, as just one example (Fernandez

1987, 28). Rather than a ‘positive’ development according to the New Institutional Economics

doctrine, the implicit assumption that common property beneﬁtted poorer households has

fostered an opinion that its abolition damaged the economic position of the poor, removing

their safety net and furthering economic inequality (Hammond and Hammond 1911; Allen

1992). Indeed, such sentiments are typiﬁed in the view that ‘village communitarianism was

often beneﬁcial for the poor and the needy of the community, and it discouraged the growth

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 5

of economic inequality and the concentration of wealth if a few hands’ (Hopcroft 1994,

1581), and ‘a communal system, and a strong communitarian spirit, meant that the poor were

always provided for so that none were completely without means of survival’ (Hopcroft 1999,

51). In more recent years, this strand of thinking has been given further credence by recent

literature on contemporary commons in developing countries, where it is suggested that the

rural poor are ‘disproportionately dependent’ on common-pool resources (Baland and Platteau

1996; Beck and Nesmith 2001, 119; Jodha 2001).

Did the commons really offer such a lifeline and welfare option to the very poor of

Western European rural societies, however – did they make societies more ‘equitable’ or

compensate for economic inequalities maintained elsewhere? Was their expropriation an

obvious sign that Western Europe was becoming more unequal in the transition to the early

modern period and beyond? These are pertinent questions because it is well known now

across late medieval and early modern Western Europe that village communities were rarely

homogenous pools of peasants, but were highly stratiﬁed both socially and economically

(Menant and Jessenne 2007; Aparisi and Royo 2013). It was even the opinion of a long and

signiﬁcant paper by Bruce Campbell, in the journal Past and Present, that the economic and

demographic crises seen across Western Europe in the late Middle Ages were compounded

not by lordly extraction from subordinates but through tenant-on-tenant extortion – essen-

tially emphasizing the sharp internal hierarchies that had also been forged within the ranks of

the ‘common folk’ themselves (2005). Many more ‘prosperous’ peasants acted to the detriment

of their poorer neighbours. Thus, accordingly, if the commons did provide such beneﬁts to

medieval and early modern societies as identiﬁed above, a logical question to ask is: to what

kind of people? How far down the social hierarchy did these beneﬁts extend? Did their social

distribution change over time? The point being made here is that if we are to lament the loss

of the commons as entirely indicative of increased inequality within Western European rural

societies and the general worsening position of the poor, the commons must have been easily

and well accessible to the poorer sections of society in the ﬁrst place. But was this the case?

A COMMONS FOR ALL? CONTEXTUALIZING THE COMMONS

From a survey of a broad range of literature on the medieval and early modern commons

across Western Europe, the best answers to the questions posed in the paragraph above are as

follows. On occasion, the commons do appear to have supported a more ‘equitable’ economic

exploitation of resources, bestowing great beneﬁts even to the very poorest of rural society.

More often the case, though, it is clear from the literature now that the beneﬁts of the

commons did not descend upon each inhabitant of a rural community in equal measure all

the time – far from it. It has now been established by the likes of Ostrom on a theoretical

level, and conﬁrmed by De Moor and Leigh Shaw-Taylor on a more empirical and historical

level, that the commons were rarely ‘open access’ or a complete ‘free for all’ as conceived of

by Hardin, and cannot simply be seen as some form of ‘primitive communism’. Just as private

property forms work to the exclusion of others, so too did collective property forms. Some-

times, a wider pool of inhabitants did have access to the beneﬁts of the commons, but then

over time, as pressure on resources increased, the criteria for entry into the commons became

more exclusive and more restricted. Particularly in the transition from the late Middle Ages to

the early modern period, the lines of demarcation as to who was really considered to be a

‘member of the community’ and who was not became sharper. Ultimately, as is shown in a

compilation of the evidence across medieval and early modern Western Europe below, the

commons rarely could make rural societies ‘more equitable’ just through their mere presence

6Daniel R. Curtis

alone, even if they could offer a basic lifeline in meagre rights to the most impoverished and

needy within rural society. Indeed, a society with extensive common land was not necessarily

more egalitarian or offered more support to the poor than a society with limited or no

commons – at least not inevitably. The economic and ecological beneﬁts of the commons and

their social distribution depended on the social context into which they were embedded,

dictated by speciﬁc arrangements in the negotiation of power between interest groups, the

strength or weakness of family, feudal and territorial relationships, and the extra-economic

demands put on rural communities, as well as being shaped by exogenous pressures such as

demographic growth and commercialization.

One of the clearest works of support for the ideas presented above comes from a very

recent paper, making systematic and explicit use of comparisons between medieval and early

modern rural societies in Western Europe. According to Maïka de Keyzer, it is indeed posited

that ‘when a wide variety of interest communities were able to create a balanced distribution

of power, inclusive access rights could be maintained. Imbalanced distributions of power,

where one particular group was able to monopolise the village and/or the government of the

institution . . . led to restrictive access regimes’ (2013a, 521). What De Keyzer goes on to

show is that the social distribution of the beneﬁts of the commons could be quite diverse and

could vary between rural societies. In the Campine region of Brabant (southern Low Coun-

tries) from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, a fragile yet ecologically balanced form of

mixed farming was established, and supported by a persistent system of commons rights over

arable, pastures and heaths. This was one case where the social distribution of the beneﬁts to

the commons was highly equitable and descended far down the social hierarchy (De Keyzer

2013b). While in other regions of Europe rights to the commons could be attached to

privileged farms or families (Saavedra 1992, 68; Hoppenbrouwers 2002), acceptance or inte-

gration into the community (Floristán Imízcoz 1985; Izquierdo Martín 2001, 67), through

payments of fees or licenses, or directly linked to landholding or livestock ownership (de

Brandao 1994, 45–90), access to the commons in the Campine was open to almost all

inhabitants of the villages, regardless of socio-economic status, excluding only urban citizens,

vagrants and very recent immigrants. In one village, Zandhoven, it was noted that nearly all of

the 80 registered households were recorded as being active users of the commons. This was

not the case of the commons themselves offering higher levels of equality to rural society, but

instead of the commons having more ‘equitable features’ as a result of being embedded within

a very particular socio-political context. In the Campine, rural communities had strong rights

to land, political representation and freedoms from feudal dues, and when coupled with a

highly balanced distribution of power between interest groups (tenant farmers, independent

peasants and cottagers on a local level, and a special triangular balance between seigneurial

lords, territorial lords and urban governments on a broader level),5a (relatively) peaceful

equilibrium of stakeholders acquiring sufﬁcient beneﬁts from the commons could emerge

(Van Onacker 2013a,b). As suggested by literature on the contemporary commons (Varughese

and Ostrom 2001), heterogeneous societies with a number of different social stratiﬁcations did

not necessarily have commons that were more likely to fail. More important was the precise

context in which this heterogeneity existed (Poteete and Ostrom 2004, 453).

More ‘inclusive’ common regimes did occur elsewhere in Europe. For example, the

wastelands bought by the Council of Jerez de la Frontera from King Phillip II in 1588

apparently had forest-use rights attainable for all inhabitants of Jerez (Andalusia), regardless of

property ownership or kinship networks, and no entrance fees ever appeared in sources

5See the colonization context that created this situation in Steurs (1982).

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 7

(Jiménez-Blanco 1996). Elsewhere, in the eighteenth-century Bardenas commons of Navarra

(northern Spain), the resources were also more ‘open access’ in the sense that all one had to

do to obtain access rights was be an ‘inhabitant’ of one of the 22 municipalities included, and

the only barrier for entry was an entrance fee for stockbreeders (Floristán Samanes 1949;

Urmeneta and Ferrer 2009). In many parts of Scandinavia, where the population pressure on

large forested areas was persistently low, there was also more often a trend towards a ‘less

exclusive’ regime of access rights to the beneﬁts of the commons (Sundberg 2002).

As De Keyzer goes on to show, however, the other extreme was more frequently the norm

across Western Europe. Elsewhere, the commons did not generally support a wide social

distribution of beneﬁts in many rural contexts – as seen from her other two cases in the

Brecklands of East Anglia (England) and the ‘Geest’ region of Schleswig-Holstein (northern

Germany). In the Brecklands, access to the rights of common pasture before the Black Death

was already dictated by manorial lords, who granted these lands out to smaller tenants

through a fold-course system (Bailey 1989, 1990). Lords did not need to exclude tenants

because they beneﬁtted in turn from steady streams of rents and feudal dues. It was only after

the Black Death, when population decline and international markets dictated a move towards

more capital-intensive pastoral farming, that the lords began to monopolize sheep ownership,

depriving tenants of the right to keep sheep or enclose their own land (Whyte 2011). In

other words, this became a system whereby lords enforced common grazing rights and tenants

were in no position to withdraw their land from the collective system. Elsewhere, in the

Geest region of northern Germany, the commons within a village tended to belong to a fairly

homogenous group of medium-sized independent peasant farmers, holding on average around

15 hectares of land each, who had secured strong property rights, privileges and political

representation on the basis of their favourable colonization process, and where feudal lordship

was weak due to the difﬁculty of getting people to settle in the inhospitable environment in

the ﬁrst place (Lange 2003; Rasmussen 2010). The commons here supported a regime of

mixed farming, given the limitations of the sandy infertile soils, and thus the dominant

medium-sized farmers (the Hüfner) made sure they were in charge of the relevant by-laws and

reserved the best rights for themselves (Rheinheimer 1999).After a level of land consolidation

and accumulation by these farmers in the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, however, a

by-product was the inevitable appearance of a larger group of poor landless labourers. The

Hüfner therefore installed stronger measures to keep the beneﬁts of the commons restricted to

themselves (Poulsen 1999), discouraging immigrants, and prohibiting the construction of new

cottages on ‘old lands’ and the commons (De Keyzer 2013a, 535).

Rights of common up to the high Middle Ages may have helped support the very poorest

of rural societies eke out a precarious living, as seen in the hunting and ﬁshing rights in the

early medieval marshes and woodlands of the Po Valley of northern Italy (Fumagalli 1974,

62–3; Montanari 1979, 34–5, 48–9, 267–70), but later in the Middle Ages they came increas-

ingly under attack from reclamations and expropriation into private plots (Comino 1992; Rao

2006; Alfani 2011). After the formalization of collective institutions for resource management

in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the trend across Western Europe generally was one of

increasing inequality in spite of the presence of the commons (see, e.g., Bekar and Reed

2013) – and the commons even became an ‘arena’ through which this inequality could be

manifested and established. In some cases, those lower down the social hierarchy could

theoretically enjoy the beneﬁts of access to the commons in terms of grazing, but in practice

were not able: if only a select few interest groups owned all the herds of cows or sheep, only

a select part of society would in practice beneﬁt from optimal functioning of the commons

(De Moor 2009, 17). Indeed, this kind of situation was frequently seen on some of the baldíos

8Daniel R. Curtis

of Castille, where the only social groups with enough livestock to ‘fully’ take advantage of the

commons were the aristocracy and local elite farmers: curiously, it was these commons with

polarized usage that actually were the ones that were least attractive for investors and thus the

most difﬁcult to privatize during the great sixteenth-century sale (Marcos Martín 2013, 118).

The problems of such inequality were also explicitly recognized by the small peasants of

fourteenth-century Vilafamés, in the northern parts of the Kingdom of Valencia, where these

smallholding inhabitants complained against contributing to the universitas tax payable to the

lord of Montesa on the grounds that only a limited number of rural elites were truly

beneﬁtting from access to the communal pastures (Royo 2013, 94). In turn, situations such as

these could also work detrimentally to the future sustainability of the commons as an institu-

tion, a low participation rate bringing with it associated problems in regulation and invest-

ment (as in more contemporary situations: Trawick 2001; Bankoff 2007). The same type of

story, with strong parallels, has been told with regard to the effective functioning of water

management institutions (another possible form of institution for collective action) in the late

medieval and early modern Low Countries and northern Italy; the polarization of landown-

ership, frequently becoming absentee, lessening the amount of stakeholders with the propen-

sity to invest labour, time and funds in a sustainable ecosystem (Soens 2011; Campopiano

2013; Curtis and Campopiano 2014).

Resource users differ in their ability to use the commons, and are not inevitably partners

pursuing the same economic strategies. Although a slight exaggeration, there is much truth in

Meg McKean’s point that ‘in common property systems everywhere . . . entitlement to

products of the commons was almost always based on private holdings and thus reproduced

the inequality in private wealth’ (McKean 1992, 262). Even commons that were more ‘open

access’ in that they were open to most residents were still stratiﬁed in the extent of usage

rights – which were directly proportional to wealth, as seen in early modern común de vecinos

of Navarra (Lana 2008, 175). This point is also validated in reverse by the eighteenth- and

nineteenth-century privatization process of common lands seen in Westphalia and Baden,

where allotments to newly privatized lands were determined by vested use rights rather than

‘informal use practices’, in the process replicating the inequalities seen in the earlier commons

in the new property structure – a minority of long-resident elite peasants receiving the

majority of the land, while the smaller peasants and wage labourers were often left empty

handed (Grüne 2013, 159).

Thus, in more places than not in medieval Western Europe, the commons were restrictive

and exclusive to certain social groups.They were as much about keeping members out as they

were about deﬁning who was a member (Netting 1997, 31). Although talking about the

common ﬁeld system and not common grazing when writing, ‘Communal control of limited

resources rested not in the hands of all inhabitants nor, with exceptions, even in those of all

heads of households. The assembly of cultivators was everywhere dominated, if not monopo-

lized, by the better off peasants’, Hoffman’s point remains entirely relevant to the argumenta-

tion offered in this paper about common rights to wastes (1975, 62). And in the transition to

the early modern period, such trends only intensiﬁed – possibly under heightened pressures of

degradation and commercialization (De Moor 2009, 6). The transition over time was very

clear in some of the Alpine regions of northern Italy, where it has been shown that the

restriction of the beneﬁts of the commons to speciﬁc groups within the mountain commu-

nities only became sharper in the early modern period (Tagliapietra 2011). The same process

was seen on the Po plains too, as maintenance of the rights to the commons came to be of

such concern to rural households in the sixteenth- and seventeenth centuries that a trend

towards endogamous marriages between those of the ‘Bocca Viva’ (those holding superior

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 9

rights in the commons) came into being – conﬁrming and crystallizing these collective rights

through restricted kinships networks and inheritance (Alfani 2011, 58–9). Such concerns

about access to the commons may even have extended to decisions to select godparents for

children (Alfani 2009).

Rights to the commons were not set in stone, but were easily adapted to changing

circumstances. Indeed, in parts of Campania, in the Kingdom of Naples, documents have

shown that access to the commons came under ‘ofﬁcial’ review every 9 years by an elite

committee of massari (large farmers or stewards of farms) and bracciali (peasant farmers), and

was often redistributed according to economic, demographic and environmental changes

(Villari 1977, 84–5).6In the context of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century popula-

tion pressure in Cambridgeshire, in central England, many new households without land built

on to the common or on to other tenants’ lands were not given common rights at all

(Spufford 1974, 21, 133), and it was generally across Western Europe from the sixteenth

century onwards that more explicit distinctions were made between dwellings with and

dwellings without common rights (De Moor et al. 2002b, 254). Indeed, in an important paper

in the journal Past and Present, Shaw-Taylor empirically conﬁrmed that the so-called ‘travesty’

of loss of common rights through enclosures in England actually was not so disastrous for the

agricultural labouring poor after all – ‘most labourers did not have common rights’ – and the

rights they did have were meagre compared to the more prosperous farmers (Shaw-Taylor

2001, 125).

Furthermore, early modern commons did not just restrict speciﬁc groups within the

community, but the boundaries between communities also became a greater point of conten-

tion, as ‘original’ inhabitants became more fearful of ‘foreign’ incomers (Rao 2011). Move-

ments within communities came to be more closed and more endogamous, to safeguard the

integrity of the common resources (Casari and Lisciandra 2011, 30). Thus inequality could at

times also increase on a supra-village or regional level. Admittedly, on a few occasions, the

exclusive management of the commons was relaxed and loosened to allow ‘non-members’ the

rights to beneﬁt from the collective resources, such as in the Flemish common described by

De Moor, where outsiders were permitted before the mid-eighteenth century to pasture

animals (when population pressure was low), or in the forests of mountainous eastern Tuscany,

where wealthy Florentines in the fourteenth- and ﬁfteenth centuries were allowed to add

their ﬂocks and herds to the local grazing animals (De Moor 2009; Curtis 2012). It must be

said that in both cases nonetheless, extremely high fees were charged for these privileges.

Ultimately, in most cases the commons did little to prevent further inequalities, instead

often being the indirect vehicle through which inequality came to be further established in a

society. One excellent example of this process in action was the long-term development of

the large-scale transhumant collective form of sheep farming seen in the mountains of the

Abruzzo and the plains of the Tavoliere in northern Apulia. Formal crystallization of this

through the Royal Customhouse (the Regia Dogana) only came in the ﬁfteenth century,

though large-scale transhumance undoubtedly had taken place in the region going all the way

back intermittently to the Roman period (Roselaar 2010), and this collective institution

remained in place until its privatization under state reform in 1806. The ecological rationale

behind this common was to create a balance between arable and pastoral land on the plains of

northern Apulia, and the results of limiting cultivation and avoiding over-intensive exploita-

6At times, massari could be stewards of estates with hundreds of hectares. The term bracciali also includes

agricultural labourers without land in certain parts of southern Italy, but only those with land (usually more than

10 hectares) were part of the committee on the commons.

10 Daniel R. Curtis

tion were clear – some of this soil had the highest fertility in the whole of the Italian

Peninsula (Marino 1988). However, the collective institution itself also allowed crystallization

and perpetuation of imbalanced and inequitable power relations – in effect, it was the very

tool that legitimized close Neapolitan state control of the regional economy. In the interests

of taxation, the distant government of Naples favoured large landowners on the plains and

those with larger ﬂocks, and therefore they were given access to the best grazing lands

(Nardella 1990). In some cases, the state on occasion supported expropriation of small culti-

vators – reintegrating the land as part of larger pastoral complexes (Altobella and Muscio

1997, 40–3). This was in contrast to the Neapolitan belief in the Royal Customhouse as a

tool for ‘pacifying’ the countryside and promoting harmony between the collective whole of

social groups through balanced justice and good government (Marino 1993, 232–3). As has

been demonstrated in recent literature, the collective system of agriculture in this part of

southern Italy worked simultaneously with an extreme level of social and economic inequality

– especially by the eighteenth century (Curtis 2013). Many other commons across the south

tended to be inﬂuenced in similar ways by ‘outside’ forces and interests, partly connected to

the long-term persistence of their ‘feudal’ character (Bulgarelli Lukacs 2011).

Much of the evidence presented above shows that the mere presence of the commons did

not necessarily make pre-industrial rural societies more equitable by virtue of their skewed

social distribution in access rights, but perhaps the point should not be pushed to extremes.

The commons were not always entirely the tools of elite elements of rural society. For

example, in medieval Alsace and Béarn (France), powerful manorial lords did explicitly nego-

tiate with their peasant communities about forming the by-laws (Warde 2003, 70). Further-

more, the laying down, organization and operation of the common arable ﬁelds, and the

boundaries of common pastures and wastes, was a process born out of negotiation between

villagers (represented sometimes by formalized communes) and lords (Bierbrauer 1991). And

elite groups were not always successful in manipulating the workings of the commons for

their own ends: seigniorial lords’ attempts to seize the commons in some cases, such as the

early modern Haute-Marne region of the eastern Champagne area of France, led to formal

challenges from rural communities in courts (Clère 1988). In some societies, such as in the

Betuwe region of the Central Dutch River Area, where a precondition of entry into the

commons was ownership of one of the houses (generally close to the village green known as

the brink) tied to old inheritance rights (Koch and Maris 1949; Van Bavel 1999), local

inhabitants began to protest to magistrates at their increasing exclusion (Curtis 2014b). These

appeals were sometimes, though not always, upheld.

Furthermore, although the commons in themselves could not directly increase the

equitability of medieval and early modern Western European rural societies through their own

internal functioning, as has been consistently argued throughout this section of the paper so

far, it must be noted that their basic existence could at least prevent further inequalities in a

more indirect way. Of course, from the late Middle Ages onwards, the commons increasingly

came to be expropriated and parcelled out – often as a function of the incessant indebtedness

of the rural communes (Curtis 2014b). However, in some cases, it can be said that the

commons did serve to limit or prevent further polarization of landownership in the country-

side, by acting as a complex jurisdictional barrier that any potential urban investor had to get

around if he wanted to accumulate more private property in the rural hinterlands. Indeed, it

has been suggested in recent scholarship that both feudal and collective rights to resources

often posed an institutional block to the transfer of land by disrupting the emergence of ﬂuid

and ﬂexible land and lease markets (Whittle 2000, 305–6; Feller 2003; Van Bavel 2003, 130–1;

Brakensiek 2004; Van Bavel 2008; Congost and Santos 2010, 15–23) – ultimately, the kinds of

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 11

factor markets that may have been one explanatory variable for accentuating economic

inequality between peasants (Bekar and Reed 2013). So to use but one example, during the

fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries both powerful institutions and wealthy burgers from the

city of Florence began to accumulate expropriated land from peasants in the nearby rural

contado (Curtis 2012, 482–3). During this process, some of the remaining commons were

eroded to make way for new consolidated sharecropping farms (de la Roncière 1997). The

Florentine state also began to crystallize territorial jurisdiction over land in the more distant

distretto; for example, in the mountains and valleys to the east of Florence, such as the

Casentino region. However, notarial charters used to trace the workings of the Florentine

land market show little sign of urban landownership in these Appennine mountains to the

east and north (Cohn 1999, 22–4). Rural producers here kept land in their own hands – over

half the households in the Casentino in the 1427 Florentine Catasto were small-scale peasant

producers who owned their own land, and the Gini index for inequality in taxable property

distribution here was 0.58 (very low in relation to other rural regions of medieval and early

modern Western Europe) (Curtis 2012, 482).7Much of this persistence in peasant property

ownership is down to the dominance of the commons in these regions, which proved to be

complicated and troublesome barriers for potential urban investors to overcome.8Further-

more, the commons were used by a balance of social interest groups who were highly

antithetical to the interests of the Florentine government – particularly local feudal lords

(Pirillo 2001; Bicchierai 2005, 115). Indeed, the signori recognized the beneﬁts of maintaining

amicable relations with the rural communities, going as far as to grant mountain villagers

their own control over the collective operation and regulation of the forests (Zagnoni 2007).

Villagers came to cling on tightly to their highly prized communal rights over pastures and

woodlands (Bicchierai 2007), preventing sales to outside parties and assarting, and thereby at

least ‘indirectly’ maintaining higher levels of equality by preventing or disrupting outside

incursions from wealthy urbanites.

CONCLUSION: THE COMMONS AS THE VEHICLE FOR INEQUALITY?

Although institutionally formalized in the high Middle Ages, by the late medieval period and

certainly the early modern period the commons were being eroded away through sale and

expropriation. The point made in this paper, however, is that even within those societies that

managed to retain large parts of their commons over the long term, they were not necessarily

more equitable than in societies without commons. Indeed, as argued recently by Jose Miguel

Lana, the commons tended to be based on notions of ‘equilibrium’ (social and ecological), not

‘equity’ (in an economic sense) (Lana 2008). The commons had no real powers of egalitarian

redistribution in themselves: their mere presence could not make societies more equitable –

only sometimes in an indirect way, as noted in the above paragraph, by proving to be an

obstacle for absentee land consolidation. The redistribution of polarities in wealth and

resources was not their function for most rural societies. Indeed, although it was possible, as in

the case of the Campine, for all the known beneﬁts of the commons to be distributed far

down the social hierarchy, to include even the poorest cottagers, the more frequent situation

was that the commons were used by more powerful interest groups (in what were already

7‘One’ on the Gini index represents total inequality (all the resources in the hands of one person/institution),

while ‘zero’ on the Gini index represents total equality (all the resources shared equally between all persons/

institutions).

8Other issues that may have put off urban investors, such as distance from urban centres and poor-quality land,

have been convincingly rejected in Curtis (2012).

12 Daniel R. Curtis

heavily stratiﬁed communities) to further or entrench their own positions, sometimes in direct

detriment to the poorer members of the village. As time went on, in a context of further

environmental degradation and commercialization, it eventually became necessary to change

and adapt the rules governing the commons – making them more exclusive and more heavily

restricted.

Thus, as a corrective to those lamenting the expropriation of the commons or those

over-emphasizing their theoretical beneﬁts without proper attention to their social context,

the erosion of the commons that started from the late Middle Ages onwards in some parts of

Western Europe did not inevitably increase inequality, because the commons themselves were

never about enhancing equitable distribution of resources. In fact, the commons were some-

times actually one of the vehicles or mediums for manifesting or crystallizing this inequality,

depending on the social context. In some contexts, it is clear that the many identiﬁed beneﬁts

of the commons could reach down the social hierarchy and help even the very poorest in

society to eke out a miserly living; yet in other contexts the commons, as a malleable

institution, could just as easily be shaped to the interests of more powerful groups and elites –

in the process, possibly detrimental to the poorest within society. In many cases, the commons

even supported both outcomes simultaneously: giving the very poor a small package of rights

as a contribution to meagre subsistence (as in the right to hunt and take wood), yet at the

same time entrenching a dominant position of those with access to ‘better’ rights (especially

with regard to grazing).9Perhaps with the very basic rights to hunt and ﬁsh, the commons

did indeed prevent the most impoverished rural folk from falling into the ‘abyss’ completely,

the ﬁnal form of rural welfare, but they most certainly did not compensate for inequalities

manifested more generally within rural pre-industrial societies.

In that way, the commons are evidence of what has already been suggested in much

broader theoretical literature, that institutions do not work inevitably to the highest level of

efﬁciency or ‘rationality’ or serve the best interests of ‘wider society’, but are adapted (or

remain persistent, as is often the case) to serving the needs of dominant interest groups with

the highest levels of bargaining power (Ensminger 1996). Essentially, the commons as an

institution had no direct powers of redistribution – and no agency in themselves to make

society more or less equitable.Their powers were entirely dictated by the social context, and

dependent on the layers of power and social relations on top of which they were placed.

Therefore, any argument about the superiority of the market, the state, private property or

collective property for developments such as economic growth or economic inequality is

ultimately meaningless. None of these methods of resource management has any inherent or

intrinsic value – they are ‘blank slates’ and will simply work more or less effectively according

to being embedded within a deeper contextualized set of social relations.

REFERENCES

Acemoglu, D. and J. Robinson, 2012. Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty. New York:

Crown Business.

Alfani, G., 2009. ‘Parrains, partecipanti et parenté.Tendances de longue durée dans la sélection des parents spirituels

au sein d’une communauté exceptionnelle: Nonantola, XVIe–XVIIIesiècles’. In Baptiser. Pratique sacramentelle,

pratique sociale (XVIe–XXesiècles), eds G. Alfani, P. Castagnetti and V. Gourdon. Saint-Etienne: Publications de

l’Université de Saint-Étienne.

Alfani, G., 2011.‘Le partecipanze: il caso di Nonantola’. In La gestione delle risorse collettive nell’Italia settentrionale (secoli

XII–XVIII), eds G. Alfani and R. Rao, 48–62. Milan: Franco Angelli.

9A dual system of beneﬁts recognized in Iriarte-Goñi (2002).

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 13

Allen, R., 1992. Enclosure and the Yeoman. The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450–1850. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Altobella, C. and A. Muscio, 1997. ‘Aspetti del contrasto agro-pastorale dei territori della Dogana delle pecore di

Puglia: usurpazioni, reintegre e trasformazioni’. In Agricoltura e pastorizia in Capitanata: la storia e le ragioni di un

conﬂitto (secc. Xv–xix), ed. A. Leone, 1–61. Bari: Università degli Studi.

Aparisi, F. and V. Royo, eds, 2013. Beyond Lords and Peasants: Rural Elites and Economic Differentiation in Pre-modern

Europe. Valencia: University of Valencia Press.

Bailey, M., 1989. A Marginal Economy? East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Bailey, M., 1990. ‘Sand into Gold:The Evolution of the Fold-Course System in West Suffolk, 1200–1600’. Agricul-

tural History Review, 38: 40–57.

Baland, J.-M. and J.-P. Platteau, 1996. Halting Degradation of Natural Resources – Is There a Role for Rural Communities?

Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bankoff, G., 2007. ‘Dangers to Going It Alone: Social Capital and the Origins of Community Resilience in the

Philippines’. Continuity and Change, 22: 327–55.

Béaur, G., P. Schoﬁeld, J.-M. Chevet and M.T. Pérez Picazo, eds, 2013. Property Rights, Land Markets and Economic

Growth in the European Countryside (Thirteenth–Twentieth Centuries). Turnhout: Brepols.

Beck, T. and C. Nesmith, 2001. ‘Building on Poor People’s Capacities: the Case of Common Property Resources in

India and West Africa’. World Development, 29 (1): 119–33.

Bekar, C. and C. Reed, 2013. ‘Land Markets and Inequality: Evidence from Medieval England’. European Review of

Economic History, 17 (3): 294–317.

Beltrán Tapia, F., 2014.‘Social and Environmental Filters to Market Incentives: the Persistence of Common Land in

Nineteenth-Century Spain’. Journal of Agrarian Change, DOI:10.1111/joac.12056.

Bicchierai, M., 2005. ‘La signoria dei conti Guidi in Valdarno: osservazioni ed ipotesi’. In Lontana dalle città: il

Valdarno di Sopra nei secoli XII–XIII, eds G. Pinto and P. Pirillo, 83–116. Rome: Viella.

Bicchierai, M., 2007. ‘La lunga durata dei beni comuni in una comunità Toscana: il caso di Raggiolo in Casentino’.

In Comunità e beni comuni dal medioevo ad oggi, ed. R. Zagnoni, 45–60. Pistoia: Porretta Terme.

Bierbrauer, P., 1991. Freiheit und Gemeinde im Berner Oberland 1300–1700. Bern: Historischer Verein des Kantons.

Birrell, J., 1987. ‘Common Rights in the Medieval Forest: Disputes and Conﬂicts in the Thirteenth Century’. Past

and Present, 117: 22–49.

Blickle, P., 1986. ‘Wem gehörte der Wald? Konﬂikte zwischen Bauern und Obrigkeiten um Nutzungs- und

Eigentumsansprüche‘. Zeitschrift für Württembergischen Landesgeschichte, 45: 167–78.

Brakensiek, S., 2004. ‘Farms and Land – a Commodity? Land Markets, Family Strategies and Manorial Control in

Germany (18th–19th Centuries)’. In Landholding and Land Transfer in the North Sea Area (Late Middle Ages – 19th

Century), eds B. van Bavel and P. Hoppenbrouwers, 218–34. Turnhout: Brepols.

Brenner, R., 1976.‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-industrial Europe’. Past and Present,

70: 30–75.

Brenner, R., 1982. ‘The Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism’. Past and Present 97: 16–113.

Briggs, C., 2009. Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bulgarelli Lukacs, A., 2011. ‘La gestione delle risorse collettive nel Regno di Napoli in età moderna: un percorso

comparativo’. In La gestione delle risorse collettive nell’Italia settentrionale (secoli XII–XVIII), eds G. Alfani and R.

Rao, 227–45. Milan: Franco Angelli.

Campbell, B., 2005. ‘The Agrarian Problem in the Early Fourteenth Century’. Past and Present, 188: 3–70.

Campopiano, M., 2013. ‘Rural Communities, Land Clearance, and Water Management in the Po Valley in the

Central and Late Middle Ages’. Journal of Medieval History, 39 (4): 377–93.

Canellas López, Á., ed., 1988. Diplomatario medieval de la Casa de Ganaderos de Zaragoza. Zaragoza: Real Sociedad

Económica de Amigos del País.

Casari, M., 2007. ‘Emergence of Endogenous Legal Institutions: Property Rights and Community Governance in

the Italian Alps’. Journal of Economic History, 67 (1): 191–225.

Casari, M. and M. Lisciandra, 2011.‘L’evoluzione della trasmissione ereditaria delle risorse collettive in Trentino tra

i secoli XIII e XIX’. In La gestione delle risorse collettive nell’Italia settentrionale (secoli XII–XVIII), eds G. Alfani and

R. Rao, 17–31. Milan: Franco Angelli.

Clark, G., 1998. ‘Commons Sense: Common Property Rights, Efﬁciency and Institutional Change’. Journal of

Economic History, 58 (1): 73–102.

Clark, G., 2001. ‘Common Rights to Land in England, 1475–1839’. Journal of Economic History, 61 (4): 1009–36.

Clère, J.-J., 1988. Les paysans de la Haute-Marne et la Révolution française: recherches sur les structures foncières de la

communauté villageoise. Paris: Editions du Comité des Travaux Historiques et Scientiﬁques.

14 Daniel R. Curtis

Cohn, S., 1999. Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Comino, G., 1992. ‘Sfruttamento e ridistribuzione di risorse collettive: il caso delle confrarie del S. Spirito nel

Monregalese dei secoli XIII–XVIII’. Quaderni Storici, 81: 687–702.

Congost, R., 2003. ‘Property Rights and Historical Analysis: What Rights? What History?’ Past and Present, 181 (1):

73–106.

Congost, R. and J. Miguel Lana, eds, 2007. Campos cerrados, debates abiertos: análisis histórico y propiedad de la tierra en

Europa (siglos XVI–XIX). Pamplona: Universidad Pública de Navarra.

Congost, R. and R. Santos, 2010. ‘Working Out the Frame: from Formal Institutions to the Social Contexts of

Property’. In Contexts of Property: the Social Embeddedness of Property Rights to Land in Europe in Historical

Perspective, eds R. Congost and R. Santos, 15–38. Turnhout: Brepols.

Curtis, D., 2012. ‘Florence and its Hinterlands in the Late Middle Ages: Contrasting Fortunes in the Tuscan

Countryside, 1300–1500’. Journal of Medieval History, 38 (4): 472–99.

Curtis, D., 2013. ‘Is There an Agro-town Model for Southern Italy? Exploring the Diverse Roots of the Agro-town

Structure through a Comparative Case Study in Apulia’. Continuity and Change, 28 (3): 377–419.

Curtis, D., 2014a. Coping with Crisis: the Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre-industrial Settlements. Farnham: Ashgate.

Curtis, D., 2014b. ‘The Impact of Land Accumulation and Consolidation on Population Trends in the Pre-industrial

Period: Two Contrasting Cases in the Low Countries’. Historical Research, 87: 194–228.

Curtis, D. and M. Campopiano, 2014.‘Medieval Land Reclamation and the Creation of New Societies: Comparing

Holland and the Po Valley, 800–1500’. Journal of Historical Geography, 44: 93–103.

de Brandao, H., 1994. Terra, herança e familia no Noroeste de Portugal. Porto: Ediçoes Afrontamento.

De Keyzer, M., 2013a. ‘The Impact of Different Distributions of Power on Access Rights to the Common

Wastelands: the Campine, Brecklands, and Geest Compared’. Journal of Institutional Economics, 9 (4): 517–42.

De Keyzer, M., 2013b. ‘The Common Denominator: Regulation of the Community of Users of Common Waste

Lands within the Campine Area during the 16th Century’. In Beyond Lords and Peasants: Rural Elites and Economic

Differentiation in Pre-modern Europe, eds F. Aparisi and V. Royo, 217–38. Valencia: University of Valencia Press.

de la Roncière, C., 1997. ‘Rentabilité, bien commun, écologie: la forêt communale de San Gimignano’. In Milieux

naturels, espaces sociaux: études offertes à Robert Delort, eds E. Mornet and F. Morenzoni, 131–42. Paris: Publications

de la Sorbonne.

Demélas, M.-D. and N. Vivier, eds, 2003. Les propriétés collectives face aux attaques libérales (1750–1914): Europe

occidentale et Amérique Latine. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

De Moor, T., 2008.‘The Silent Revolution: a New Perspective on the Emergence of Commons, Guilds, and Other

Forms of Corporate Collective Action in Western Europe’. International Review of Social History, 53: 179–212.

De Moor, T., 2009. ‘Avoiding Tragedies: a Flemish Common and its Commoners under the Pressure of Social and

Economic Change during the Eighteenth Century’. Economic History Review, 62: 1–22.

De Moor, T., 2010a. ‘Participating is More Important than Winning: the Impact of Socio-economic Change on

Commoners’ Participation in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Flanders’. Continuity and Change, 25: 405–33.

De Moor, T., 2010b. ‘Eendracht maakt macht: de rol van instituties voor collectieve actie in de vroegmoderne

samenleving’. Leidschrift Historisch Tijdschrift, 25 (2): 7–20.

De Moor, T., 2011. ‘From Common Pastures to Global Commons: a Historical Perspective on Interdisciplinary

Approaches on Commons’. Natures, Sciences, Sociétés, 19 (4): 422–31.

De Moor, T., 2012. ‘What Do We Have in Common? A Comparative Framework for Old and New Literature on

the Commons’. International Review of Social History, 57: 269–90.

De Moor, T., L. Shaw-Taylor and P. Warde, 2002a.‘Comparing the Historical Commons of North-West Europe: an

Introduction’. In The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850, 15–31. Turnhout: Brepols.

De Moor, T., L. Shaw-Taylor and P. Warde, 2002b. ‘Preliminary Conclusions: the Commons of North West

Europe’. In The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850, 247–59. Turnhout: Brepols.

de Soto, H., 2000. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York:

Basic Books.

Devailly, G., 1973. Le Berry du Xesiècle au milieu du XIIIe: étude politique, religieuse, sociale et économique. Paris: Mouton.

Dyer, C., 2006.‘Conﬂict in the Landscape: the Enclosure Movement in England, 1220–1349’. Landscape History, 28:

21–33.

Ensminger, J., 1996. Making a Market: the Institutional Transformation of an African Society. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Feller, L., 2003. ‘Quelques problèmes liés à étude du marché de la terre durant le Moyen Age’. In Il mercato della terra

secc. XIII–XVIII, ed. S. Cavaciocchi, 21–45. Prato: Atti della Settimana di Studi.

Ferguson, N., 2012. The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die. London: Penguin.

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 15

Fernandez, J., 1987. ‘The Call to the Commons: Decline and Recommitment in Asturias, Spain’. In The Question of

the Commons: the Culture and Ecology of Communal Resources, eds B. McCay and J. Acheson, 266–89. Tuscon,AR:

University of Arizona Press.

Floristán Imízcoz, A., 1985.‘Vecinos residentes y vecinos foranos en Navarra a mediados del siglo XVII’. Cuadernos

de Etnología de Navarra, 45: 5–15.

Floristán Samanes, A., 1949. ‘Una descripción de las Bardenas Reales en el siglo XVIII’. Príncipe de Viana, 10:

475–81.

Fumagalli, V., 1974. Terra e società nell’Italia padana. I secoli IX e X. Turin: Einaudi.

Grüne, N., 2011. ‘Transformation of the Commons in Rural South-West Germany (18th–19th Centuries)’. Historia

Agraria, 55: 46–74.

Grüne, N., 2013.‘Individualisation, Privatization, Mobilization: the Impact of Common Property Reforms on Land

Markets and Agricultural Growth in Germany. A Comparative View of Westphalia and Baden, 1750–1900’. In

Property Rights, Land Markets and Economic Growth in the European Countryside (Thirteenth–Twentieth Centuries), eds

G. Béaur, P. Schoﬁeld, J.-M. Chevet and M.T. Pérez Picazo, 157–78. Turnhout: Brepols.

Hammond, J. and B. Hammond, 1911. The Village Labourer, 1760–1832. Gloucester: Alan Sutton.

Hardin, G., 1968. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’. Science, 162: 1243–8.

Hayhoe, J., 2002. ‘Litigation and the Policing of Communal Farming in Northern Burgundy, 1750–1790’. Agricul-

tural History Review, 50 (1): 51–68.

Heimpel, H., 1963. ‘Die Federschnur: Wasserrecht und Fischrecht in der Reformation Kaiser Sigismunds’. Deutsches

Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 19: 474–88.

Hildebrandt, H., 1988. ‘Systems of Agriculture in Central Europe up to the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries’. In

Anglo-Saxon Settlements, ed. D. Hooke, 275–90. Oxford: Blackwell.

Hoffman, R., 1975. ‘Medieval Origins of the Common Fields’. In European Peasants and their Markets: Essays in

Agrarian Economic History, eds W. Parker and E. Jones, 23–72. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Hopcroft, R., 1994. ‘The Social Origins of Agrarian Change in Late Medieval England’. American Journal of Sociology,

99 (6): 1559–95.

Hopcroft, R., 1999. Regions, Institutions, and Agrarian Change in European History. Ann Arbor, MI: University of

Michigan Press.

Hoppenbrouwers, P., 2002. ‘The Use and Management of Commons in the Netherlands: an Overview’. In The

Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850, eds T. De Moor, L. Shaw-Taylor and P. Warde,

87–112. Turnhout: Brepols.

Hoppenbrouwers, P. and J.L. van Zanden, 2001. ‘Restyling the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism: Some

Critical Reﬂections on the Brenner Thesis’, in Peasants into Farmers? The Transformation of Rural Economy

and Society in the Low Countries (Middle Ages – 19th Century) in Light of the Brenner Debate, 19–40. Turnhout:

Brepols.

Humphries, J., 1990. ‘Enclosures, Common Rights, and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late

Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’. Journal of Economic History, 50 (1): 17–42.

Iriarte-Goñi, I., 1998. ‘La pervivencia de bienes comunales y la teoría de los derechos de propiedad: algunas

reﬂexiones desde el caso Navarro, 1855–1935’. Historia Agraria, 15: 113–42.

Iriarte-Goñi, I., 2002. ‘Common Lands in Spain, 1800–1995: Persistence, Change and Adaptation’. Rural History,13

(1): 19–37.

Iriarte-Goñi, I. and J. Miguel Lana, 2013. ‘The ‘Concurrence’ and ‘Hierarchization’ of Rights to Property: The Case

of Public Lands in Spain’. In Property Rights, Land Markets and Economic Growth in the European Countryside

(Thirteenth–Twentieth Centuries), eds G. Béaur, P. Schoﬁeld, J.-M. Chevet and M.T. Pérez Picazo, 123–38.

Turnhout: Brepols.

Izquierdo Martín, J., 2001. El rostro de la comunidad: la identidad del campesino en la Castilla del Antiguo Régimen.

Madrid: Consejo Económico y Social.

Jiménez-Blanco, J-I., 1996. Privatización y apropiación de tierras municipales en la Baja Andalucía: Jerez de la Frontera,

1750–1995. Jérez: Ayuntamiento de Jerez de la Frontera.

Jodha, N., 2001. Life on the Edge: Sustaining Agriculture and Community Resources in Fragile Environments. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.

Jones, E., 2013. ‘Economics without History: Objections to the Rights Hypothesis’. Continuity and Change, 28 (3):

323–46.

Jones, P., 1985. Politics and Rural Society: the Southern Massif Central, c. 1750–1880. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Koch, A. and A. Maris, 1949.‘Meentgenootschappen in Land van Buren’. Bijdragen en Mededelingen Vereniging Gelre,

99: 163–204.

16 Daniel R. Curtis

Laborda Pemán, M. and T. De Moor, 2013. ‘A Tale of Two Commons. Some Preliminary Hypotheses on the

Long-Term Development of the Commons in Western and Eastern Europe, 11th–19th Centuries’. International

Journal of the Commons, 7 (1): 7–33.

Lana, J.M., 2008.‘From Equilibrium to Equity.The Survival of the Commons in the Ebro Basin: Navarra from the

15th to the 20th Centuries’. International Journal of the Commons, 2: 162–91.

Landes, D., 1998. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. New York: W.W.

Norton.

Lange, U., ed., 2003 [1996]. Geschichte Schleswig-Holsteins von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart. Neumünster: Wachholtz

Verlag.

Lorenzetti, L., 2013. ‘Property Relations, Socio-economic Change and the State: the Valtellina in the Nineteenth

Century’. In Property Rights, Land Markets and Economic Growth in the European Countryside (Thirteenth–Twentieth

Centuries), eds G. Béaur, P. Schoﬁeld, J.-M. Chevet and M.T. Pérez Picazo, 179–94. Turnhout: Brepols.

Marcos Martín, A., 2013. ‘Before the Liberal desamortizaciones: the Sale of baldíos in Sixteenth-Century Castille’. In

Property Rights, Land Markets and Economic Growth in the European Countryside (Thirteenth–Twentieth Centuries), eds

G. Béaur, P. Schoﬁeld, J.-M. Chevet and M.T. Pérez Picazo, 105–22. Turnhout: Brepols.

Marino, J., 1988. Pastoral Economics in the Kingdom of Naples. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Marino, J., 1993. ‘Economic Idylls and Pastoral Realities: the ‘Trickster Economy’ in the Kingdom of Naples’.

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 24: 211–34.

Marx, K., 1987 [1867]. Capital: a Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1:The Process of Capitalist Production. New York:

International.

McKean, M., 1992. ‘Success on the Commons: a Comparative Examination of Institutions for Common Property

Resource Management’. Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4 (3): 247–82.

Menant, F., 2004.‘Les chartes de franchises de l’Italie communale: un tour d’horizon et quelques études de cas’. In

Pour anthropologie du prélèvement seigneurial dans les campagnes médiévales (XIe–XIVe). Réalités et représentations

paysannes, eds M. Bourin and P. Martin, 239–67. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne.

Menant, F. and J.P. Jessenne, eds, 2007. Les élites rurales dans l’Europe médiévale et moderne. Toulouse: Presses

Universitaires du Mirail.

Monsalvo Antón, J.-M., 2001. ‘Usurpaciones de comunales: conﬂicto social y disputa legal en Ávila y su Tierra

durante la Baja Edad Media’. Historia Agraria, 24: 89–122.

Montanari, M., 1979. L’alimentazione contadina nell’alto medioevo. Naples: Ligouri.

Nardella, M., 1990. ‘Produzione mercantile e intervento dello Stato nella seconda metà del Cinquecento: le terre a

cerealicoltura estensiva della Dogana delle pecore di Foggia’. In Undicesimo convegno sulla preistoria, protostoria e

storia della Daunia, 279–90. San Severo.

Neeson, J., 1993. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Netting, R., 1997. ‘Unequal Commoners and Uncommon Equity: Property and Community among Smallholder

Farmers’. The Ecologist, 27: 28–33.

North, D., 1990. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

North, D. and R. Thomas, 1973. The Rise of the Western World: a New Economic History. New York: Cambridge

University Press.

North, D. and R. Thomas, 1977. ‘The First Economic Revolution’. Economic History Review, 30: 229–41.

Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the Commons: the Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Pirillo, P., 2001.‘Il popolamento tra signorie territoriali e dominio ﬁorentino’. In Costruzione di un contado: i ﬁorentini

e il loro territorio nel basso medioevo. Florence: Le Lettere.

Pascua Echegaray, E., 2011. ‘Communities and Sustainability in Medieval and Early Modern Aragón, 1200–1600’.

International Journal of the Commons, 5 (2): 535–56.

Poteete, A. and E. Ostrom, 2004. ‘Heterogeneity, Group Size and Collective Action: the Role of Institutions in

Forest Management’. Development and Change, 35 (3): 435–61.

Poteete, A., E. Ostrom and M. Janssen, 2010. Working Together. Collective Action, the Commons, and Multiple Methods in

Practice. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Poulsen, C., 1999. ‘Landesausbau und Umwelt in Schleswig 1450–1550’. In Dünger und Dynamit. Beitrage zur

Umweltgeschichte Schleswig Holsteins und Dänemarks, eds M. Jakubowski-Tiessen and K.J. Lorenzen-Schmidt,

66–72. Neumünster: Wachholtz Verlag.

Rao, R., 2006. ‘Lo spazio del conﬂitto: i beni comunali nel Piemonte del basso Medioevo’. Zapruder, 11:

8–25.

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 17

Rao, R., 2011. ‘Dal bosco al riso: la gestione delle risorse collettive nella bassa vercellese fra dinamiche socio-

istituzionali e trasformazioni ambientali (secoli XII–XVIII)’. In La gestione delle risorse collettive nell’Italia

settentrionale (secoli XII–XVIII), eds G. Alfani and R. Rao, 141–56. Milan: Franco Angelli.

Rasmussen, C., 2010. ‘Innovative Feudalism: the Development of Dairy Farming and Koppelwirtschaft on Manors in

Schleswig-Holstein in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’. Agricultural History Review, 58: 172–

90.

Reynolds, S., 1997. Kingdoms and Communities in Western Europe, 900–1300. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Rheinheimer, M., 1999. Die Dorfordnungen im Herzogtum Schleswig. Dorf und Obrigkeit in der Frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart:

Lucius und Lucius.

Rodgers, C., E. Straughton, A. Winchester and M. Pieraccini, eds, 2011. Contested Common Land: Environmental

Governance, Past and Present. London: Earthscan.

Roselaar, S., 2010. Public Land in the Roman Republic: a Social and Economic History of Ager Publicus in Italy, 396–89

BC. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Royo, V., 2013.‘Manifestations of Difference: Conﬂicts of Interest in Rural Valencia during the Late Middle Ages’.

In Beyond Lords and Peasants: Rural Elites and Economic Differentiation in Pre-modern Europe, eds F. Aparisi and V.

Royo, 87–110. Valencia: University of Valencia Press.

Runge, C., 1986.‘Common Property and Collective Action in Economic Development’. World Development, 14 (5):

623–35.

Saavedra, P., 1992. A vida cotiá en Galicia de 1550 a 1850. Santiago de Compostela: Universidad de Santiago de

Compostela.

Schoﬁeld, P. and T. Lambrecht, eds, 2009. Credit and the Rural Economy in North-Western Europe, c. 1200 – c. 1850.

Turnhout: Brepols.

Schütte, L., 2004. ‘Markenrecht und Markengerichtsbarkeit in Nordwest-deutschland’. In Allmenden und Marken vom

Mittelalter bis zur Neuzeit, eds U. Meiners and W. Rösener, 31–45. Cloppenburg: Kataloge und Schriften des

Museumdorfs Cloppenburg 14.

Serrano Alvarez, J., 2014. ‘When the Enemy is the State: Common Lands Management in Northwest Spain (1850–

1936)’. International Journal of the Commons, 8 (1): 107–33.

Shaw-Taylor, L., 2001. ‘Labourers, Cows, Common Rights and Parliamentary Enclosure: the Evidence of Contem-

porary Comment c. 1760–1810’. Past and Present, 171: 95–126.

Soens, T., 2011. ‘Floods and Money: Funding Drainage and Flood Control in Coastal Flanders from the Thirteenth

to the Sixteenth Centuries’. Continuity and Change, 26 (3): 333–65.

Sommé, M., 1990.‘Règlements, délits et organisation des ventes dans la forêt de Nieppe (début XIVesiècle – début

XVIesiècle)’. Revue du Nord, 72 (5): 511–31.

Spufford, M., 1974. Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Steurs, W., 1982.‘La région entre Dommel et Peel (Brabant septentrional): peuplement rural, géographie politique et

création de villes, 1200–1400 environ’. Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire, 60 (4): 791–808.

Sundberg, K., 2002. ‘Nordic Common Lands and Common Rights: Some Interpretations of Swedish Cases and

Debates’. In The Management of Common Land in North West Europe, c. 1500–1850, eds T. De Moor, L.,

Shaw-Taylor and P. Warde, 173–94. Turnhout: Brepols.

Tagliapietra, C., 2011. ‘Charters, Partnerships and Natural Resources: Two Cases of Endogenous Regulation in Italy’.

Economic Affairs, 31 (2): 30–5.

Tan, E., 2002.‘The Bull is Half the Herd: Property Rights and Enclosures in England, 1750–1850’. Explorations in

Economic History, 13: 470–89.

Tawney, R.H., 1912. The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Longmans, Green.

Te Brake, W., 1981. ‘Revolution and the Rural Community in the Eastern Netherlands’. In Class Conﬂict and

Collective Action, eds L. Tilly and C. Tilly, 59–66. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE Publications.

Thirsk, J., 1964. ‘The Common Fields’. Past and Present, 29 (1): 3–25.

Thompson, E.P., 1968 [1963]. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Thompson, E.P., 1993. Customs in Common. London: Merlin.

Trawick, P., 2001. ‘The Moral Economy of Water: Equity and Antiquity in the Andean Commons’. American

Anthropologist, 103: 361–79.

Tukker, A., 2010.‘Sanctionering en controle als sleutel tot overleving: gemene gronden in Gelderland en Overijssel

van de vijftiende tot de achttiende eeuw’. Leidschrift Historisch Tijdschrift, 25 (2): 115–30.

Turner, M., 1984. Enclosures in Britain, 1750–1830. Studies in Economic and Social History. London: Macmillan.

Urmeneta, A. and V. Ferrer, 2009. ‘La ganadería extensiva en ecosistemas semiáridos: Las Bardenas Reales, mil

años de pastoreo y multifuncionalidad en la encrucijada’. In La multifuncionalidad de los pastos: producción ganadera

18 Daniel R. Curtis

sostenible y gestión de los ecosistemas, eds R. Reiné Viñales, O. Barrantes Díaz, A. Broca and C. Ferrer Benimeli,

415–38. Huesca: Sociedad Española para el Estudio de los Pastos.

van Bavel, B., 1999. Transitie en continuïteit: de bezitsverhoudingen en de plattelands-economie in het westelijk gedeelte van het

Gelderse rivierengebied (ca. 1300 – ca. 1570). Hilversum: Verloren.

van Bavel, B., 2003. ‘The Land Market in the North Sea Area from a Comparative Perspective, 13th–18th Centu-

ries’. In Il mercato della terra secc. XIII–XVIII, ed. S. Cavaciocchi, 119–46. Prato: Atti della Settimana di Studi.

van Bavel, B., 2008. ‘The Organisation and Rise of Land and Lease Markets in Northwestern Europe and Italy,

c.1000–1800’. Continuity and Change, 23: 13–53.

van Bavel, B., 2010. ‘Rural Revolts and Structural Change in the Low Countries, Thirteenth – Early Fourteenth

Centuries’. In Survival and Discord in Medieval Society: Essays in Honour of Christopher Dyer, eds R. Goddard, J.

Langdon and M. Müller, 249–67. Turnhout: Brepols.

van Bavel, B. and E. Thoen, 2013. ‘Rural History and the Environment: a Survey of the Relationship between

Property Rights, Social Structures and Sustainability of Land Use’. In Rural Societies and Environments at Risk:

Ecology, Property Rights and Social Organisation in Fragile Areas (Middle Ages – Twentieth Century), eds B. van Bavel

and E. Thoen, 15–42. Turnhout: Brepols.

van Onacker, E., 2013a. ‘De markt als middle: peasants en de land- en kredietmarkt in de vijftiende- en zestiende-

eeuwse Kempen’. Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, 10 (1): 40–70.

van Onacker, E., 2013b. ‘Leaders of the Pack: a Typology of Village Elites in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Century

Campine Area’. In Beyond Lords and Peasants: Rural Elites and Economic Differentiation in Pre-modern Europe, eds F.

Aparisi and V. Royo, 189–216. Valencia: University of Valencia Press.

van Zanden, J.L., 1999. ‘The Paradox of the Marks: the Exploitation of the Commons in the Eastern Netherlands,

1250–1850’. Agricultural History Review, 47: 125–45.

Varughese, G. and E. Ostrom, 2001. ‘The Contested Role of Heterogeneity in Collective Action: Some Evidence

from Community Forestry in Nepal’. World Development, 29: 747–65.

Villari, R., 1977. Mezzogiorno e contadini nell’età moderna. Rome: Laterza.

Vivier, N., 1998. Propriété collective et identité communale: les biens communaux en France, 1750–1914. Paris: Publications

de la Sorbonne.

de Vries, J. and A. van der Woude, 1997. The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the Dutch

Economy, 1500–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vries, P., 2012. ‘Challenges, (Non-)Responses, and Politics: a Review of Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew

Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850’. Journal of World History, 23 (2): 639–44.

Warde, P., 2003.‘La gestion des terres et usage collectif dans l’Europe du Nord-Quest’. In Les propriétés collectives face

aux attaques libérales (1750–1914): Europe occidentale et Amérique Latine, eds M.-D. Demélas and N. Vivier, 61–78.

Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes.

Whittle, J., 2000. The Development of Agrarian Capitalism: Land and Labour in Norfolk, 1440–1580. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Whyte, N., 2011. ‘Contested Pasts: Custom, Conﬂict and Landscape Change in West Norfolk, c. 1550–1650’. In

Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain, ed. R. Hoyle, 101–26. Farnham: Ashgate.

Wickham, C., 1985. ‘Pastoralism and Underdevelopment in the Early Middle Ages’. Settimane di Studio del Centro

Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 31: 401–51.

Wickham, C., 1997. ‘Debate: the Feudal Revolution’. Past and Present, 155: 196–208.

Wickham, C., 2007. ‘Espacio y sociedad en los conﬂictos campesinos en la Alta Edad Media’. In El lugar del

campesino: en torno a la obra de Reyna Pastor, ed. A. Rodríguez López, 33–59. Valencia: University of Valencia Press.

Zagnoni, R., 2007. ‘Comunità e beni comuni nella montagna fra Bologna e Pistoia nel medioevo’. In Comunità e

beni comuni dal medioevo ad oggi, 8–15. Pistoia: Porretta Terme.

Zuijderduijn, J., 2009. Medieval Capital Markets: Markets for Rents between State Formation and Private Investment in

Holland (1300–1550). Leiden: Brill.

Did the Commons Make Rural Societies More Equitable? 19

Collective land arrangements that decommodify land for agroecological transformations

Article

Full-text available

Jun 2024

Rights and access to land are major pressing issues among mainly first-generation agroecological farmers in the Netherlands. Due to short-term tenure contracts and high land prices, these farmers face an insecure future. Because of this, they are often unable to make long-term ecological investments, such as planting trees and taking measures to improve soil health. A growing group of farmers are devising new, more communal forms of land ownership and tenancy, that counter market forces and existing policies. In this article, we shed light on these farmers’ discourse and how it informs the construction of new forms of land ownership and tenancy. In the related research project written and led by farmers, information has been gathered in the form of meeting minutes, interviews covering problems and perspectives related to the land tenure regulation, and commons. This information has been systematized and validated by farmers. Agroecological farmers find themselves in an uncomfortable situation that is challenging in 2 ways. On the one hand, they are calling for revision of land tenure regulations to ensure long-term land contracts for their existence and on the other hand they are seeking to replace property rights in favor of more collective possession-based arrangements. Our analysis shows how a discourse of decommodification seems to underlie the strategies and practices implemented by farmers. It focuses on place-based developments to secure the autonomy of farmers and communities. We argue that, to safeguard the possession and use of land for agroecological farming in the future, both developments of land decommodification (long-term tenancy and commons) should be supported. This can be done by integrated policies on land sale and lease that align with the ecological carrying capacity and agroecological production capacity of land, and that ensure compensation for monetary downgrading of agricultural land.

Forest Peasants, Outland Commodity Production and Trade. Old and New Research on Innovation, Profit, Risk, Vulnerability, Resilience and (Elite) Communalism.

Chapter

Full-text available

Feb 2022

Eva Svensson

Lifecycle land decumulation strategies in a seventeenth‐century rural community

Article

Full-text available

Dec 2024
ECON HIST REV

Economic historians have tried to better understand how and why land was redistributed in rural communities, although our empirical insights have been limited by a lack of serial evidence for land distribution within the same locality across a long period. This article exploits the unusual survival of Veldboeken (field books), which allow a careful annual reconstruction of land distribution within an unremarkable seventeenth‐century village in the south of the modern‐day Netherlands. We show that, despite high levels of dynamism in the local land markets, including high and changing levels of leasehold, varying and flexible tenancies, and frequent transfers of land between parties, the overall aggregate distribution of land did not change very much over time. Employing a systematic lifecycle analysis of active land‐market participants, we advance a broader concept of pre‐industrial ‘decumulation’ – where landowners and land users used adaptive mechanisms within the land market to not just consolidate land but also work out ways of getting rid of it and achieve optimal (and often smaller) farms and estates. Accordingly, we do not find any social logic or natural tendency towards accumulation, consolidation, and greater inequality.

Back to the future: How economic history can gain more relevance by abandoning modernization thinking

Article

Full-text available

Aug 2024

Bas Van Bavel

Economic history has built a solid scientific foundation over the past decades but runs a risk of becoming marginalized. This paper suggests various ways to enhance its academic and societal relevance. It proposes taking pressing societal issues as clear starting points and using history as a ‘laboratory’ to address them. To effectively do so, a sharper focus on the social and environmental contexts of economic development would be needed. This may be furthered by closer involvement in multidisciplinary teams, where economic historians would bring in the chronological dimension, making use of their historical skills. Relevance will also be increased by abandoning modernization thinking. This would encourage more openness to processes of contestation, reversal, and divergencies, and more fully using the research opportunities offered by periods further back in time and all across the globe, not because these are different from the ‘modern’, Western situation but because they are relevant as sources of knowledge in themselves – knowledge that may be vital in light of the grave challenges present societies are facing.

Conclusion

Chapter

Jul 2023

Spike Gibbs

The conclusion lays out the four key arguments of the book. Firstly, manorial structures remained important to community governance across the late medieval and early modern eras. Secondly, the impetus for this continued vitality came from communities of tenants who recognised the value of manorial structures for their own needs. Thirdly, manorial governance could create a degree of inequality within communities, but this was constrained and varied between villages. Fourthly, state formation did not radically disrupt these manorial structures. These arguments lead to several historiographical interventions. They challenge the notion of a late medieval decline, support positive interpretations of lord-tenant relations, demonstrate that long-term dynamics could create a ‘middling sort’ and suggest some reasons for England’s early development of high state capacity. Finally, the chapter makes some comparisons with other European regions, demonstrating that while the emergence of local elites managing aspects of their community’s economy and society was universal, the exact relationship between lord, state and community created different governance structures.

Bibliography

Chapter

Jul 2023

Spike Gibbs

Providing a new narrative of how local authority and social structures adapted in response to the decline of lordship and the process of state formation, Spike Gibbs uses manorial officeholding – where officials were chosen from among tenants to help run the lord's manorial estate – as a prism through which to examine political and social change in the late medieval and early modern English village. Drawing on micro-studies of previously untapped archival records, the book spans the medieval/early modern divide to examine changes between 1300 and 1650. In doing so, Gibbs demonstrates the vitality of manorial structures across the medieval and early modern era, the active and willing participation of tenants in these frameworks, and the way this created inequalities within communities. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Coping with Dismantling Forces: Traditional Management and Transformations of Székely-Hungarian Village Commons of Transylvania, in the 16–21th Centuries

Article

Full-text available

Oct 2022

Urban Space and Everyday Adaptations: Rethinking commons, co-living, and activism for the Anthropocene City

Article

Full-text available

Jul 2022

This paper addresses Jem Bendell’s concept of “deep adaptation” in the Anthropocene through the lens of everyday urban practices in contemporary Northern Europe. It proposes that this “deep adaptation” should be defined less in relation to a socio-ecological “collapse” and more through everyday occurrences in present-day urban environments. Entering into a critical conversation with Bendell’s conceptual “4 Rs” framework, the paper draws on primary data from several cities in Sweden and Germany to show how, in practice, resilience can be found in the “quiet activism” of leisure gardeners; how ingrained notions of restricted land use may be relinquished through “commoning” urban space; how novel constellations of co-living restores old ideas of intragenerational urban cohabitation; and, finally, how a path to reconciliation may be articulated through an ontological shift away from an anthropocentric urban planning, towards one that recognises other-than-human beings as legitimate dwellers in the urban landscape. Accounting for urbanities of enmeshed societal, ecological, and spatial trajectories, the paper reveals an inhibiting anthropocentrism in Bendell’s framework and ultimately points to how his “creatively constructed hope” for the future may be found, not in an impending global collapse, but in everyday adaptations and embodied acts that stretch far beyond the human.

Vulnerabilities avoided and resilience built. Collective action, poor relief and diversification as weapons of the weak (The Campine, Belgium, 1350–1845)

Article

May 2022

In this article we analyse the root causes of the high level of resilience of one particular peasant society: the Campine area. While peasant societies have often been deemed one of the most vulnerable societies in the face of crises and disasters, because of their lack of capital, technology and power, we show that peasant communities possessed some important weapons of the weak. Thanks to strong property rights, collective action, a diverse economic portfolio and inclusive poor relief institutions the Campine peasants were able to weather both the late medieval crises, harvest failures as well as the threat of sand drifts between the fourteenth and nineteenth century.

Introduction. The Rural World in the Sixteenth Century

Chapter

Jan 2021

La gestion des terres en usage collectif dans l'Europe du Nord-Ouest

Chapter

Jan 2003

Paul Warde

Propriété collective et identité communale: Les biens communaux en France, 1750-1914

Book

Jan 2000

Nadine Vivier

Les propriétés des communes ont été l’objet de querelles interminables. Au xviie siècle, temps de la montée de l’individualisme agraire, elles acquièrent la réputation d’inutilité et d’improductivité. Depuis lors, le communal a toujours été stigmatisé, érigé en symbole de l’archaïsme des petits paysans cramponnés à leurs usages collectifs. Loin de cette schématisation, Nadine Vivier met en évidence la diversité des attitudes régionales. Refusant de réduire les biens communaux à une simple question économique, elle analyse l’attachement des villageois aux coutumes locales, et elle retrace la succession des enjeux dont ils sont l’objet. Enjeu social lorsque, sous Louis XV, ils sont déclarés patrimoine du pauvre, afin de fixer les miséreux dans les campagnes. Puis la Révolution en fait aussi un enjeu politique. À travers tout le xixe siècle, la propriété collective se maintient, patrimoine nécessaire à l’autonomie de communautés face au pouvoir central, à leur maîtrise de l’espace et à la conscience de leur identité.

Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820

Book

Jul 1993

J. M. Neeson

This is one of the most important and original contributions to English rural history to be published in the past generation. Winner of the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society in 1994, Commoners challenges the view that England had no peasantry or that it had disappeared before industrialization: rather it shows that common rights and petty landholding shaped social relations in English villages, and that their loss at enclosure sharpened social antagonisms and imprinted on popular culture a pervasive sense of loss.

Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434

Book

Dec 1999

Jr Samuel K. Cohn

This book offers a comprehensive approach to the study of the political history of the Renaissance: its analysis of government is embedded in the context of geography and social conflict. Instead of the usual institutional history, it examines the Florentine state from the mountainous periphery - a periphery both of geography and class - where Florence met its most strenuous opposition to territorial incorporation. Yet, far from being acted upon, Florence's highlanders were instrumental in changing the attitudes of the Florentine ruling class: the city began to see its own self-interest as intertwined with that of its region and the welfare of its rural subjects at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Contemporaries either remained silent or purposely obscured the reasons for this change, which rested on widespread and successful peasant uprisings across the mountainous periphery of the Florentine state, hitherto unrecorded by historians.

The Development of Agrarian Capitalism

Book

May 2000

Jane Whittle

A Marginal Economy?: East Anglian Breckland in the Later Middle Ages

Book

Jun 1989

Mark Bailey

A theory of the margin has long featured in the work of medieval historians. Marginal regions are taken to be those of poor soil or geographical remoteness, where farmers experienced particular difficulties in grain production. It is argued that such regions were cultivated only when demographic pressure intensified in the thirteenth century, but that a combination of soil exhaustion and demographic decline resulted in severe economic contraction by the end of the fourteenth century. Marginal regions are seen not just as sensitive barometers of economic change but as important catalysts in that change. Despite the importance placed by historians on the general theory of the margin, this book represents the first detailed study of a 'marginal region'. It focuses upon East Anglian Breckland, whose blowing sands are among the most barren soils in lowland England. Drawing upon a wide range of sources, this study reconstructs Breckland's late medieval economy, and shows it to be more diversified and resilient than the stereotype depicted in marginal theory.

Contrasting Communities: English Villages in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Book

Oct 1974

Margaret Spufford

This book is a detailed history of the economic, educational and religious life of three contrasting communities, Chippenham, Orwell and Willingham in Cambridgeshire from 1525 to 1700. The three villages had very difference economic settings, in which the pattern of landholding changed over this period and the general and particular reasons for the changes that took place. The study also covers the educational opportunities open to the villagers, and examines religious affairs, the effect on peasant communities of the Reformation and the disturbance in the devotional life of the ordinary villager, which often culminated in dissent and disruption under the Commonwealth. Dr Spufford has penetrated into the social life of the English village at all levels, and with fascinating detail has created a whole social universe around her villagers or a 'picture in the round' view. The book will be invaluable to economic, social, and ecclesiastical historians of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as historians of Britain generally, and those with a special interest in Cambridgeshire.

Politics in the Rural Society: The Southern Massif Central c.1750-1880

Book

Jun 1985

P. M. Jones

This is a study of rural society, with particular reference to the peasantry. It focuses on an area of France which is defined as the southern Massif Central, the four departments forming the southern perimeter of the highland plateau of central France, and spans a century which marked the apogee of peasant civilisation in this region and which witnessed the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. The book adopts a broadly cultural definition of the peasantry, and offers a comprehensive account of the rhythms of rural life over some three or four generations. However, the main emphasis is on the political responses of the peasantry in an age of revolutionary experimentation with democratic institutions. As such the book is a social history of political behaviour at the grass roots.

Regions, Institutions, and Agrarian Change in European History

Book

Jan 1999

Rosemary Hopcroft

Die Dorfordnungen im Herzogtum Schleswig: Dorf und Obrigkeit in der frühen Neuzeit. Band 1: Einführung. Band 2: Edition

Book

Dec 1999

Martin Rheinheimer

Did the Commons Make Medieval and Early Modern Rural Societies More Equitable? A Survey of Evidence from across Western Europe, 1300-1800

Abstract

Recommended publications

Ethnic Segregation, Housing Systems and Welfare Regimes in Europe

Tine De Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’. Reconsidering her theoretical framework for explaining the emerg...

The Impact of Land Accumulation and Consolidation on Population Trends in the Pre-industrial Period:...

Tine de Moor’s ‘Silent Revolution’. Reconsidering her theoretical framework for explaining the emerg...

The emergence of concentrated villages in medieval Western Europe: Explanatory frameworks in the his...