The Survival of True Intercommoning in Lancashire in the Early-Modern Period

Abstract

English medieval law assumed there was no land without a lord and that the normal landholding was the manor, held directly or indirectly of the Crown. However, it is clear that at an early period much wasteland was held at a higher level, as a resource to be shared by all the surrounding manors. Although true intercommoning had probably generally died out by the sixteenth century, in NorthWest England it lingered in those upland and lowland wastes where there was neither pressure on grazing nor a topography with natural boundaries. Yet shared resources of this kind conflicted with developing early-modern ideas of private property and with the growing desire on the part of landlords to increase the profitability of their estates, while the court of the Duchy of Lancaster played a positive role in the process by which these late surviving intercommons were partitioned, enclosed, and improved.