5 - Enforcing the orders

Summary

There were dangers to common pasture and the common stock that orders alone could not avert. Mere rules could be ignored, and it may have been in the interest of some commoners that they should be. Encroachment, half-year land, piecemeal enclosure and approvement could spark local conflict. Higher fines put on new stinting agreements for the first few years suggest that not everyone wanted to abate their commons. In these instances orders needed the strength of effective enforcement. If they were broken, the appropriate fines had to be imposed and collected. Enforcement was crucial.

To some extent the very constancy of regulation – the regular meetings of courts, the introduction and progressive lowering of stints, the adoption of ways to improve pasture – suggests a live system, not a dead one. This impression is strengthened when we look at the structure of enforcement. Field orders were made effective in two ways. First: by organizing common grazing to make orders difficult to break. With this in mind juries ordered drifts, brands, common herds, cowkeepers, shepherds, and tether-grazing. Second: by ensuring detection, if, despite the organization of grazing, by-laws were broken. So juries appointed field officers, tried offenders and imposed fines.

ORGANIZATION

Of all the threats to the value of pasture, overstocking and trespass were probably the worst. They were most difficult to detect in fen and forest pastures. In the manor of Peterborough, for example, the agistment of out-parish stock was the major cause of trespass.