‘Common rights were not something specifically granted by a generous landlord, but were the residue of rights that were once much more extensive, rights that are in all probability older than the modern conception of private property’ ( Hoskins) It was only when agriculture became organized that certain landowners began to acquire exclusive rights. As the centuries passed common rights were progressively extinguished. Parliamentary enclosure accelerated the process. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the surviving areas of common land were looked on with disfavour by the authorities. They were said to be agriculturally unproductive, aesthetically unpleasant, politically dangerous and socially disruptive, providing meeting grounds for criminals, drunkards, prostitutes and malcontents. The political meeting which led to the ‘Peterloo massacre’ of 1819 was held on common land and in 1848 the Chartists gathered on Kennington Common.
Some commons were saved from extinction by being converted into parks. Others, like Wimbledon Common and Boxmoor (see page 81), were protected by charitable trusts. John Stow records that Moorfields in London ‘were turned into pleasant walks, set with trees for shade and ornament’ during the seventeenth century, and that by 1720 they were ‘no mean cause of preserving Health and wholesome Air to the City; and such an eternal Honour thereto, as no Iniquity of Time shall be able to deface’ (see page 82).6 His optimism was ill-founded: the fields were sold for building development in 1814. Many other commons survived as public parks with restricted use. The Meadows in Edinburgh, the Strays in Harrogate and Clapham Common in London are, to the uninformed observer, indistinguishable from other municipal parks. Blackheath, in south-east London, is an interesting example. It survived as common land until it was threatened with building development in the nineteenth century, during what Hoskins describes as ‘the attack on the commons’.
