Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 278

I first became interested in the subject of urban common lands more than a decade ago, when I assumed, naively, that somewhere there was to be found ‘the’ book on the subject. This, I imagined, would probably be a large quarto volume, with a guilt-embossed spine, published some time in the third quarter of the nineteenth century. To my considerable disappointment, though, I found that apart from Maitland’s majestic 1897 account of Cambridge’s common fields in his Township and borough, this was one area where our Victorian ancestors had let us down. They were much more concerned with the defence of Hampstead Heath and Epping Forest than the history of the Strays of York or Port Meadow in Oxford. There was no ‘big book’ on urban commons; nor, sadly, was this deficiency remedied in the three volumes of the Cambridge urban history published in 2000, which mentioned the topic only in passing.

Now, though, in many respects the gap has been filled. This volume is the result of a three-year research project by English Heritage, into the history, archaeology, topography and modern development of urban commons in more than 300 towns, large and small. Although this is not a dense monograph, the work’s great strength is its inter-disciplinary methodology and its chronological range. Where a historical account would be constrained by written sources to the last 500 or 700 years, the archaeological surveys employed here allow the study to range over more than 2000 years, from the surviving prehistoric earthworks on Newcastle’s Town Moor, to the damage caused by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show on Worcester’s Pitchcroft in 1903, or from early medieval enclosures on Westwood Common in Beverley, to the archaeological remains of the Greenham Common Peace Camp of the 1980s.

The study looks at a range of themes, which reflect the complex, multifaceted nature of the town common. There are eight chapters. The first deals with the prehistory of these lands, before they were managed and farmed in common. The second and third deal with the economic functions of commons, in both arable and pastoral agriculture, and as sources of stone, clay, gravel, metal, lime, coal, grazing, turf, game, flowers, and water, and sites for industrial activity, or such mundane activities as getting the washing dry. Chapter Five considers an important, and perhaps less obvious, use of urban green spaces in the last 500 years – military training and defence, from early Tudor archery practice to military airfields, tank testing grounds, anti-aircraft gun emplacements and nuclear bomber bases in the twentieth century. The next two chapters reflect upon the social, recreational and political uses of urban commons, as sites of fairs, ‘polite’ urban parades, agricultural shows, sports, religious revivals and Chartist demonstrations. The final chapter looks at the present and future of these lands, particularly their value, and their fragility as ecological and archaeological preserves. There is also an extensive gazetteer of towns thought to have once possessed common lands, and a detailed and helpful bibliography.

The work reveals urban commons as a palimpsest, where all these different layers of activity have been inscribed on top of one another. This is revealed most strikingly in Figure 2.7, of Lincoln’s South Common, which appears, to the untrained historian’s eye, as an incomprehensible jumble of Roman Road, medieval field boundaries, and twentieth-century trenches and tank traps. The thematic range of this work also indicates the importance of viewing urban commons (and, perhaps, their rural counterparts, too) as spaces in which a variety of activities could be undertaken sequentially and as neither wholly ‘rural’ nor exclusively ‘urban’ in function. This is an important recognition, comparable with the recent historical interest in field sports as a rural land-use. It also offers the prospect of agrarian and urban histories that begin to talk to each other and also to illustrate the relationship between these two research foci.

Inevitably, this broad-ranging 100-page study leaves the agricultural historian wanting to know more, whether about the mysterious origins of many town commons, stocking rates and management regimes, processes of improvement, extraction of wood, lime, clay and game, and the chronology of their decline as functional agrarian resources. However, these are the stuff of local studies rather than general surveys, and are often very difficult to undertake using urban records that tell us less than manorial sources about entitlements, customs, stints and trespasses. In this respect, then, while there is probably more to say about the agrarian history of urban commons than is presented here, any such study would be a drier and less well-balanced affair than the current study.

This book is a well-produced, and modestly-priced, addition to the shelves of those interested either in urban or in rural history (and the ecumenical who dabble in both), from the early medieval to the late twentieth centuries. Ironically, in fact, the book is likely to be used rather like the lands it surveys, with practitioners of agrarian, economic, military, social, cultural and political history all jostling together to extract their rightful share of its resources, mine nuggets of information from its reserves and advance their competing, often incompatible interests!