Common Rights
On the subject of preservation, an official request reached me this week for information on the right of the Lord of the Manor or the local councils to make a road across a certain common. On the same day, as it happened, I read the plea of the Commons and Footpaths Preservation Society for a complete survey of commons. Common rights are continually being lost, and I could wish that the plea of the Society (which does and has done yeoman work) had included what is known as " Lammas " or " half-year " land. I have myself seen public rights in Lammas land clean extinguished within the last few years, chiefly through the ignorance and carelessness of the people on the subject of their own rights. This careless ignorance, this absence of local watch-dogs, rightly jealous of their own territory, makes it harder and harder to acquire legal evidence about the status of common land and Lammas land. It is high time—and past it—that such a register and survey were undertaken nationally.
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