CORRESPONDENCE.
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH COMMONS.
[To THE EDITOR OR THE CCATOR,"J SIR,—There is probably no question of public interest on which public opinion has more definitely formed itself during the last thirty years than that of the fate of our English commons and open spaces. The apathy which during the previous two hundred years had allowed Englishmen to look on while, by means legal or by means illegal, by means forbidden by law or by means afforded by defective law, the common lands were reduced to •less than half their original acreage, has been succeeded by a period of keen appreciation of the value of the fragments that remain. Societies, national and local, have sprung up in all directions for the purpose of safeguarding that which is now recognised as a great though neglected national heritage. Encroachments by private individuals, rich or poor—for it must not be forgotten that the small squatter had shown himself in the past as ready to poach a little croft as the rich owner to enclose a few hundred acres—have, owing to the watchfulness of 'these volunteer police, become very difficult, though not in all parts of England quite unknown. No sooner is the attempt discovered than the intending aggressor finds himself at bay. Enclosure by a private individual, no matter how influential, has become almost impossible, unless his position at law is unassailable. The attack of late years has begun to show itself from a different and unexpected quarter—from public bodies, Muni- cipal Councils, Parish Councils, who, acting in the supposed interest of the ratepayers, the most sacred cause known to the average human being—are tolerably secure from opposition from within. It is found as a rule in these cases that the immediate ratepayers vote almost solid for the sacred cause, and support an enclosure which diminishes the rates. It is also found that persons outside the ratepaying area are apt to vote equally solid against the enclosure. If the latter persons, who have legally no locus standi, can find some one holding common rights over the portion which it is proposed to enclose to make objection, a Government inquiry may follow. The present condition of the law allows a lord of the manor (who, by the way, may be a native of the Falkland Islands, China, 'Germany, Russia, or anywhere else if he has purchased the rights) to sell not more than five acres for certain public pur- poses, such as a cemetery, with the consent of the Board of Agriculture. It is to be wished that in view of the future needs of the country, which will within fifty years require every inch of open breathing-space, even this concession should be withdrawn. It is, indeed, to be questioned whether there can be any y kind of useful purpose which in the long run will better serve the true interests of the population than the preserving of every foot of open land as a guarantee to an overcrowded country of health and enjoyment for its posterity. Agri- cultural Boards are but mortal, as mortal as the Governments which man these Departments ; their policies are variable. A short-lived Government may do in a year or two that which no number of years can undo. And the question is one which should stand outside of all changes of Government. The Department itself would probably view with no reluctance the loss of a power which may at any moment subject it to pressure from political supporters in any given locality. And the enforcing of the principle that each area must provide for its own needs, be it cemetery, isolation hospital, or allotment ground, by land purchased out of the rates without touching a common, would in the end confer a far greater benefit even upon that area itself than the immediate saving to the rates could possibly bestow upon it.
It is evident, too, that the question of the barter and sale of their rights by lords of the manor is closely involved in the previous question. It is not possible to view this practice, which has of late years become very general, as other than an abuse of the original intention with which these rights came into existence. That a lord of the manor should be able to sell his rights over immense tracts of country, just as be can sell his cattle, his pigs, his crops, to any purchaser, resident or non-resident, to native or foreigner, to an enterprising syndicate, or to an American millionaire desirous of forming an estate, is merely a proof that the duties and responsibilities to the land which underlay the privileges when both were first created have in many cases become wholly obsolete. It is true that there are still lords of the manor who conscientiously recognise their duties, who hold Leet Courts, who summon commoners' meetings, and who, making due allowances for the altered conditions of the centuries, still endeavour to recognise the same responsibilities as their ancestors. On the other hand, I know of one most important common (of which the rights were transferred at a large sum to a stranger) where no Leet Court has been held for over thirty years. It is obviously to the advantage of a lord of the manor that they should not be held, and that the commoners' rights should be neglected or forgotten.
In such a case the value of the rights as a matter of barter is at once enhanced for a reason which is now to follow, and which will perhaps be as new as it is alarming to a great many readers of the Spectator, who have been happy in the belief that enclosure of our commons is a possibility belonging only to the past. So far from that comfortable belief being justified, it is, briefly, the case that as the law stands there is nothing to prevent ninety per cent. of all the common land of England from being enclosed and built over. Enclosure on a 'huge scale is not a mere thing of the past; it may be a thing of the future unless legislation shall come to the rescue, and that speedily. For the law stands thus. If any single indi- vidual can, by weight of money, buy up all the common rights of any common, thereby extinguishing all save one single right—his own—that common becomes his freehold property and ceases to be a common. In such a case, since it has ceased to be a common, no permission to enclose is needed from the Board of Agriculture. The owner may sell it to-morrow to a speculating builder or to an American syndicate. The process is by no means so difficult as it may seem. On many of the commons where the land is poor the holdings are few to the acreage. They can be bought as they fall vacant, if the purchaser, often the lord of the manor himself, waits long enough, is secret enough, and has money enough. The holdings themselves in these days of week-end cottages are no bad investment, but when they carry with them common rights, the acquirement of each one brings the purchaser sensibly nearer to the realisation of an unearned increment which has no exact parallel in England. To take an example which, with due allowance for uncertainty of figures, describes an actual case. A landowner in a long lifetime has bought up all the holdings which carried common rights on a common of some fifteen hundred acres, paying probably at the outside for these holdings, many of them labourers' cottages on crofts, some of which are now week-end cottages, not more than three or four thousand pounds. And by this judicious outlay he stands to-day as the private owner of the fifteen hundred acres, and the land could be sold to-morrow for building purposes for at least one hundred and fifty thousand pounds. Within ten miles of the common in question another great landowner claims to have performed a similar feat with a very large tract of beautiful country. And no one will have forgotten that a few years ago the process was commenced on a huge scale by a great financier, and had already made great progress when disaster followed. All the three cases here given occur within one single county, and the lands can all be seen together from one single vantage-point. Here we are brought face to face with a possibility, which in this case has passed beyond the stage of probability, and has reached the region of accom- plished fact. And there is nothing whatever—since im- probability can no longer be with confidence appealed to—to prevent a similar absorption of every inch of what is now common land in Engltuid, except in the cases where the rights have already been vested in the National Trust, or in similar societies. Weight of money can accomplish it and the law permits it. Land which to-day is not worth two pounds an acre, which belongs to no one, and which to-morrow may become by the completion of a few more purchases private property worth two hundred pounds an acre, is a fish worth angling for with. costly bait. One of the cases which have been quoted shows how it can be done, how nearly it was done. The other cases show bow, by a different and less expensive but more lengthy process, it has already been done. In the latter instances, tracts of country which are amongst the most beautiful in England are merely awaiting the day, far off or near, when a spendthrift heir, or one who has lost his taste for his ancestral surroundings, shall hand over to the builder what a few years back seemed to belong to no one, and to be a piece of open England which should gladden the eyes of those who are to come after us. An owner has been found for it. In the creating of that owner the small holdings have been extinguished on that common, much as the rabbits are extinguished by one of its own heath fires. It is the law of England. And here follows a chief anomaly. That same law of England which provides for this strange process of annihilation whereby one man becomes an owner of land whereof since the days of the Conquest neither he nor any other had ever owned a foot, to the extinction of all rights of pasturage together with the holdings that claimed them, is at the very same moment trying to provide by expensive machinery for the creation of small holdings, without the hope of the pasturage rights which might have formed so strong an element of success if they had survived. There is room for a legislator here. By all means let the man who has purchased himself into the position of the single holder of the rights over a common retain those rights, with the holdings which brought them. They are valuable enough, and they are his by right of purchase (we are not here speaking of manorial rights, but of commoners' rights). But it should not be possible for any individual to extinguish for ever these rights, which in the give and take of transfer might again hereafter be of inestimable importance in the national life. In other words, it is surely time that it should be made impossible for any common in England to become private property. The induce- ment to make it so is at present enormous, and the power to
make it so is, by law, considerable.—I am, Sir, &c., Z.
The case is not, we think, quite as bad as our correspondent suggests, though there is no doubt reason for vigilance, which should make the public grateful for his warning. There are very few commons not crossed by several rights-of-way, and these public rights practically, though not theoretically, make enclosure well-nigh impossible, even when the lord has merged the common rights in himself. For ourselves, we favour legis- lation declaring the existence of public rights-of-way across a common and the habit of the public to resort to a common for health and recreation, whether now legally enforceable or not, to be an absolute bar to future enclosure.—En., Spectator.]
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