No Tragedy on the Commons
A historical answer to Hardin (1968), arguing that the tragedy of the commons, as commonly told of the common lands of medieval and post-medieval England, did not regularly occur there. Cox calls it Tonypandy, Josephine Tey's term for an event reported inaccurately but consistently until the fiction is believed. Hardin's 1968 essay, she notes, kept clear of such history, but later writers placed the tragedy on English common grazing, and Hardin himself, in 1977, alluded to the Enclosure Acts to explain how it might be cured. In English law a right of common, to take part of what another's soil produced, was held by particular people who inherited it or were granted it; the common was not available to the general public. The earliest records of communal farming rules are manor court rolls of the mid-thirteenth century, and from then the evidence, in Joan Thirsk's words, points to village communities setting the rules of their field systems. One control was the stint, a formal allocation of the number and type of beasts that could be grazed.
Where commons deteriorated, Cox finds the cause most often in lawbreaking and in oppression of poorer tenants, who were denied a remedy at law, rather than in egoistic abuse of a common resource, though in the sixteenth century unstinted commons were almost invariably overburdened. The decline she puts down to the industrial revolution, agrarian reform and improved agricultural practice; the land reform was frequently no more than a land-grab sponsored by wealthy landowners, though she accepts that enclosure raised productivity. Perhaps, she concludes, what existed was not a tragedy of the commons but a triumph: land managed successfully by communities for hundreds of years. The evidence is English and drawn largely from published histories; she grants that the tragedy may occur and that records are too incomplete to say it never did there. Her quarrel is chiefly with the history attached to the tragedy and with the picture of a commons open to all; she allows that tragedy would quite likely have followed had economic man been managing the commons, and asks whether someone else was running them. Nothing here concerns teams; the bridge is ours: we read her poorer tenants, denied a remedy against the powerful, as a matter of power and voice as much as of a shared resource.
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