INTRODUCTION
Comparative historical research on common land has increased our understanding of how common-property regimes regulated access to and management of their resources. Throughout Europe there are clear similarities in the ways commoners tried to restrict access and use of those resources, and researchers have found much evidence that regulating mechanisms were sufficiently dynamic to cope with severe external stresses. We also know that commoners were usually very involved in setting up and changing the regulations and keeping an eye on the implementation of the rules. One of the issues that has been overlooked, however, in understanding why the rules of such bottom-up organizations were changed is the internal composition of the group of commoners. Although historical researchers have generally assumed that commoners were a homogeneous group, with enclosures having had similar effects on each of the group members, evidence from non-historical research suggests that the size of these groups, and their internal heterogeneity, influenced their functioning, and potentially also their vulnerability to external attempts to dissolve their common-property regime.Footnote 1
In historical research on commons, groups are usually considered to have behaved as homogeneous entities, and little attention is paid to the motives and backgrounds of the individual commoner. Given that enclosure was mainly a government-orchestrated procedure, with little attention given to the effect it would have on the powerless individual farmers who lost their rights, this emphasis is quite understandable.Footnote 2 If we consider the composition of these groups of commoners, however, we can assume that each individual must have experienced the demographic, economic and social changes in a different way. Very likely each individual commoner's interests in the use of the resources – and his behaviour as a member of the group – must have varied greatly, and changes in individual behaviour may have had considerable consequences for the resource use of the entire common. Experimental research has shown that studying this behaviour is absolutely necessary to understand the processes involved in environmental degradation, processes which might have been going on before the privatization of the commons from above.Footnote 3 Moreover, the ways in which commoners realized the potential of the common in their daily life and the changes therein, may have affected their willingness to defend their rights and thus may have influenced the speed of the privatization process.
In order to link changes in behaviour with the consequences they may have had for the way resources were used, we need to focus on the types of interaction that are found, and find ways to distinguish between different types of behaviour, in terms of both the types of usage and the intensity with which the common resources were used. For most of the European commons, grazing was probably the most frequently offered ‘facility’. Despite the fact that many commoners would have had some animals, grazing was often restricted to cows and horses, excluding those commoners who had only smaller animals, such as pigs, geese or goats. Other commons resources – such as woods – or the possibility of earning some money on the common by performing odd jobs could enable users of the common to become members of it and (sometimes) pay a membership fee.Footnote 4 Commoners could thus have a variety of profiles, from active users and managers to members who hardly ever showed up at meetings, and from users whose main interest was grazing cattle on the common or performing jobs for it, to those who saw the common as a way to increase their prestige within the village by fulfilling functions on the board.
Apart from such potential differences in terms of use, there might also have been considerable variety in the degree to which commoners needed, or had the means, to use the common's resources. Strangely enough, in commons literature the possibility that members were not actively involved in using or managing their common land is not even considered. It seems to be viewed as a given that those who obtained the right to use the common would also graze cattle on it, or at least try to obtain benefits in another way, for example by becoming a member of the commons board, thus gaining social status. These assumptions derive from two frequently expressed assumptions, which are part of the enclosure debate. First, much of the literature assumes that commoners were by definition poor, and that they would seize any opportunity for extra sources of income.Footnote 5 Yet if the main advantage of a common was in having cattle on it, many poor commoners would be automatically excluded from its benefits, and even those with cattle may have had reasons not to become active users of the common. Distinguishing participants on the basis of their occupation (as has been done by, for example, Leigh Shaw Taylor) is a first step towards understanding differences in their participation,Footnote 6 but – as will be shown in this article – other issues, such as the use of the common in various stages of a commoner's life cycle, might even tell us more about the reasons to use or not to use the common.
Second, central to a different debate on the use of the common and its effect on natural resources is the idea that common land could be easily over-exploited because individual commoners tried to maximize their incomes. Many scholars involved in this debate are defeatist and view this maximization as having eventually led to a tragedy of the commons.Footnote 7 This ‘tragedy’ refers to a long-standing debate on the use of collective resources, that was started by the American biologist Garett Hardin. In his seminal article on ‘the tragedy of the commons’, Hardin claimed that all individuals who were allowed access to a collective resource would react in the same way: they would think of their own benefits in the short run, not of the collective benefits in the long run.Footnote 8 His main concern hereby was that population growth in the future – from his 1968 perspective – would lead to over-harvesting of the world's resources and would eventually lead to tragedy. He illustrated this with an example, and indirectly also referred to a historical situation. He pictured a common pasture that could be used by everyone. As long as natural and demographic disasters decimated the cattle and the farmers once in a while, the pressure on the pasture's resources would remain below the critical level. However, as soon as there was prosperity, population growth and sufficient cattle, there would be over-exploitation. He therefore assumed that individuals are unable to communicate and organize themselves in such a way that they can actually prevent themselves and others from over-harvesting the resources and, secondly, he assumed that the nature of man is such that greed and selfishness will always lead to free-riding and subsequently over-exploitation. Although the metaphor of ‘the tragedy of the commons’ has been extremely popular both in different scientific disciplines and among policy-makers, since its publication many researchers have given proof of the opposite: individuals – commoners and others – are capable of preventing free-riding, by institution-building amongst other things. In many examples of the collective use of resources today and in the past, commoners devise rules, sanctions and instruments to restrict their own behaviour, to a level that allows long-term use without significant over-use.Footnote 9 One of the issues that is hardly acknowledged, however, is the possibility that some commoners may not have used the common at all, even though they had the right to do so. This seems to run counter to the idea of the way a homo economicus (the average commoner) is supposed to act, namely to use more than one would even need for oneself so that a profit can be made out of the surplus harvest. It even seems to run counter to the idea of those who believe in the capabilities of commoners to avoid tragedies, as the literature does not study this phenomenon. The analysis of the commoners' individual behaviour in our case-study proves, however, that the influence of those who do not participate can be of significant influence on the group as a whole.
Taken together, this article starts from the assumption that commoners formed a far more heterogeneous group than is usually supposed, and that the individual motivations and power to make decisions within the group may have changed the overall management over time more than has been previously assumed. Distinguishing such profiles according to the kind of interaction that took place between the members and the common will help us to distinguish groups of users of the commons, as well as to summarize the individual changes in behaviour of these members into more general trends. Because a large part of the decision-making on the commons was conducted in a democratic way, through general and ad hoc meetings, it can be assumed that differences in individual profiles may have affected not only their own use of the resources, but also their decisions about access to the commons and the use and management of such resources in general. The board of the common – usually elected – was responsible for the daily management but it was usually the commoners who decided upon the long-term management strategy. To summarize, the effect of the individual user on the collective management is what we are trying to unravel in this article. Rather than analysing how regulation affected the commoners, both as a group and as individuals, I will concentrate on the opposite question: how did (changes in) the commoners' daily life affect the regulation and functioning of the common? And can we explain why certain decisions were taken?
The article continues with a brief explanation of how relationships between group size and heterogeneity and the functioning of a common were perceived in my research, thus offering a framework for understanding how we can study such factors in a historical context. Second, a case study that offers sufficient material to study such relationships will be introduced. On the basis of highly detailed nominative analyses, it has been possible to evaluate the behaviour of a large group of commoners over nearly two centuries in terms of the type and intensity of their participation. By scrutinizing the intensity and diversity of their participation in activities on the common, we can explain certain changes in their behaviour as a group with respect to the use of resources, the involvement of non-members in commons management and their willingness to engage in charity towards poor members and other needy persons of the same village community. Because no similar analysis of group behaviour for this group has been done, it is difficult to compare it to other case-studies.Footnote 10 In the conclusion I will provide some suggestions for further comparative research on this topic.
CASE-STUDY: THE GEMENE AND LOWEIDEN COMMON, IN THE VILLAGES OF ASSEBROEK AND OEDELEM, FLANDERS
Determining the impact of individuals on group decisions and the effect of the heterogeneity of a group on common resources is in many cases very difficult or impossible, as records of the activities on the common have generally not been preserved.Footnote 11 Nevertheless, for some commons there is sufficient archival material to reconstruct the day-to-day activities on the common that involved both commoners and outsiders. For the common meadow of Gemene and Loweiden – which extended over two villages just outside the city of Bruges: Assebroek and Oedelem – we have almost the complete financial records (accounts) for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 12 In combination with the preserved lists of commoners – including the dates of their first membership in the common and information about the relatives who served as proof for their claims – and biographical information retrieved from other archival sources such as marriage registers,Footnote 13 we have sufficient data to see how commoners behaved as individuals, such as, for instance, the timing within their life course of their use of the common and how many cattle they had on the common, whether they participated in general meetings, and so on. The data will also allow us to reconstruct how their behaviour influenced use and management. I especially examined the effect of socio-economic heterogeneity, measured mainly by individuals' occupations (whether they were independent farmers or wage-earners) and the possession of cattle, which could be retrieved from various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agricultural censuses linked to the archival records of the case-study. Once a ‘profile’ of the commoners has been made, group heterogeneity is compared with the involvement of individuals in the activities of the common by looking at their type of activity and activity rate; this information is then linked, on the one hand, to information on the management decisions taken by the commoners and, on the other hand, to evidence for more general demographic and socio-economic changes. However, before analysing and explaining the behaviour of the commoners, I will provide more details on how access to and use and management of the common were regulated in this particular case, as well as making some further reference to the range of available sources.Footnote 14
Membership in the Gemene and Loweiden common was strictly regulated and limited by inheritance.Footnote 15 Only those able to prove that their own or their wife's ancestors had been registered as users of the common could claim membership. The oldest charter concerning the rules of the common, dating from 1514, indicates that initially women were not excluded from membership and indeed, until the middle of the seventeenth century, a few female names can be found in the membership registers (the hoofdboeken).Footnote 16 Those who obtained the right of membership via their wife (‘by causen van huwelike alleenlick’) could only use this right as long as she lived. Although the partner could thereafter no longer claim use rights, each of the children born from this marriage would be entitled to claim use right.Footnote 17 Members were referred to as aanborgers (or amburger, amborchteghe, ambuerdeghe), which can be explained as a corruption of the words aenboordig, aenbortig or aenborchtig, meaning ‘being in the possession of a good or a right’.Footnote 18 The procedure to obtain that right consisted of a visit to the parish priest in the company of two witnesses who would confirm the applicant's descent from the entitled ancestors. After payment of the sum of one Flemish pound, the priest noted the name of the new aanborger in his impressive membership register, which he also consulted to assure himself of the rights of the claimant's ancestors. This was a sum equal to a week's wage and in the case of the Gemene and Looweiden it served as the only way to restrict the total number of entitled members. Elsewhere only village inhabitants were allowed or the poor of the village got specific advantages, but here no such restrictions could have been found.Footnote 19 This means that in principle inhabitants from far-away villages could claim use rights. Before the end of the nineteenth century – when the managers of the common considered a high number of registration as a way to prevent the government from claiming the land (see below) – this was hardly the case, however.Footnote 20 As we will see further on, the commoners also came up with other ways to limit the total number of cattle on the common, in their attempts to prevent over-exploitation of the pasture.
Several membership registers have been preserved, the oldest dating from 1515.Footnote 21 These lists are an important source for reconstructing the behaviour of the commoners, in combination with a number of other sources, such as the resolution books containing all the day-to-day decisions taken by the managers of the common that complemented the more general regulations written down in charters and referred to in the book-keeping accounts. In these last sources, all incoming and outgoing amounts were usually accompanied by the names of those involved.Footnote 22 This information allowed me to develop ‘participation profiles’ of all the members and of those who were involved in the common without being members. Some names are listed in the accounts of the common who were not real members. In addition to suppliers of beer, bread or other commodities, who usually were not members, a frequent name mentioned is that of the Lord of Sijsele – a seignory that included amongst others the pasture of the ‘Gemene en Loweiden’ – who, according to the earliest regulations, had the right to approve or disapprove of changes to the regulations and the triannual book-keeping. As for the rest of the activities on the common, the lord or his bailiff were hardly ever involved or allowed to interfere. We can therefore assume that the common functioned autonomously and that the commoners' actions (or lack of them) were hardly ever hindered by local or other governments until the end of the old regime (1796). Thereafter, as we will see, the common went through a process of reorganization that would eventually allow the local authorities to encroach on the common's resources and assets, although only temporarily.
This common did not differ significantly from others in the sandy area around Bruges (in Dutch: de Brugse Veldzone), which was covered mostly with woodland and waste, much of which was used in common. Most of these commons were referred to as veld (to name just two, Beverhoutsveld and Bulskampveld); the term refers to poor pastureland, often overgrown with heath and bracken. The case-study in this article is different in the sense that it was for the greater part a pasture, with good grass for the cattle and horses of the commoners. The downside of it was that regular floodings – caused by the small river Sint-Trudoledeken that bordered the common on the south – made the common pasture at times unfit for grazing. In years when there was serious flooding, the period during which the common was put to pasture had to be shortened by a few weeks.Footnote 23
Apart from the vast stretches of heathland in the Campine area north of Antwerp and in the province of Limburg, this area around Bruges was the last area of Flanders where large plots of common land could still be found by the middle of the nineteenth century. Access to the commons in the east of Flanders was often less strictly regulated, however: usually all the villagers could benefit from the resources on the common, whereas in the area around Bruges access was based on a number of conditions, of which being descended from a number of ‘original’ families could be one.Footnote 24 The way in which commons were organized in Flanders was not fundamentally different from elsewhere in Europe, notwithstanding the usual local differences.Footnote 25 As elsewhere in north-western Europe, the Flemish commons came under fierce attack around the middle of the nineteenth century and nearly completely disappeared. In 1847 a national law initiated the massive sale and privatization of most commons in the areas mentioned.Footnote 26 The common which is the subject of this study was, however, one of the very few that managed to survive the privatization process, though not without difficulties. The local government repeatedly tried to encroach upon its property, as we also see in what follows.
My nominative analysis of the book-keeping and resolution books was linked to data about the life course of individual commoners. In particular, parish and population registers of birth/baptism, marriage or death/burial and the remaining individual files of population and economic censuses and tax registers contain large amounts of data that could be linked to the names of commoners. In many cases the linking of names was not very straightforward, but it nevertheless added up to a sample of 589 aanborgers for whom I have found sufficient biographical information. Still this does not mean that we have all significant biographic information (about birth, marriage and death) for all of these people. Depending on the kind of analyses, a selection was made of these 589 persons that contained values for the variables needed. This dataset, combined with the more general data derived from censuses and population registers, gives us information about the way the common was run, as well as more general socio-economic data such as changes in the number of potential users, the price of cattle, changes in the type of agriculture and the like. It provides a wealth of information on the effects of the commoners' behaviour on the common. For many individual commoners I have been able to identify the period in their lives when they actively used the facilities of the common, and for a significant number I could also retrieve details about their professional lives and whether they had any cattle that might have been put on the common. In my analysis the commoners' cattle and horses that were mentioned in the book-keeping accounts as grazing on the common was compared to the overall number of cattle and horses mentioned in, for instance, agricultural censuses. Usually these corresponded, or the number of cattle on the common was smaller than that mentioned in the censuses, meaning that the commoner put only part of his animals on the common. All of this information gives us a clearer picture of the economic importance of the common. It could be expected that the economic importance of the services and resources the common had to offer was especially important for understanding the participation behaviour of commoners, as the main advantage offered by membership in the common was that the common was a place to pasture cattle.Footnote 27
In the rest of this article I will make a distinction between the different ‘types’ of commoners that can be found. Such categorization will help to distinguish certain trends in the participation. Overall, there is a distinction between ‘members’ and ‘non-members’: those with rightful claims on the common, and those without. Elsewhere in this article the conditions for membership have already been explained. Nevertheless individuals who were officially not entitled to use the resources because they could not fulfil the conditions were sometimes allowed (see below). These are often referred to in this article as ‘non-members’. I also refer to the members as ‘participants’. The actual fact of registration is considered as an act of participation but amongst the participants there are both ‘active’ and ‘passive’ members, the latter being those commoners who did have the right to participate but did not use that right. Active participants can again be split into two groups: those who remained simple users by putting cattle on the common or harvesting wood, but also those who received payments for their work on the common, doing such small jobs as repairing fencing. For this article no distinction has been made between those two groups, since in the end their relationship to the common was the same: they both benefited from being members, albeit in different ways. A second group to be distinguished is that of those active participants who chose to move up the social hierarchy within the common and become a manager. These managers were elected from amongst the regular members and would remain in power for several years. They made sure that the daily functioning of the common was secured, including fulfilling jobs such as sanctioning wrongdoers, reporting to the bailiff, organizing the meetings and the like. I have chosen to make a distinction between these groups as it seems already clear on the basis of the reports on the common, that some development in terms of power-delegation and balance was under way from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. Precisely what, and how this can be explained, will follow hereafter.
THE COMMONERS' CHANGING SOCIO-ECONOMIC BACKGROUNDS AND THEIR PARTICIPATION IN THE MANAGEMENT OF THE COMMON
A comparison of the names of members with the names that appear in the book-keeping and resolution books yields a striking and unexpected result. While it is reasonable to suppose that members were also those who actually used the common, that seems not necessarily to have been the case. It was not at all unusual to become a member and then never to appear again in the written documents of the common: some commoners simply never used their right to pasture cattle or to participate in any other way. Given the large amount of sources the data are based on and their high quality, we can assume that the absence of some members in the sources is not a coincidence. In most cases the names of commoners with a cow to graze could be found year after year, or they were commons officials who reported regularly about their activities. But, as mentioned, there were a number of registered commoners who do not appear at all, not in the book-keeping accounts, nor in the resolution books or any other sources, and that number increased during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There was an evolution in the numbers of new members who never again appeared in the sources after their first registration. Of the commoners who were registered in the period 1680–1790, about 65 per cent were involved in the common (on the basis of activities in the period 1700–1790). From the last decade of the eighteenth century onwards, however, this percentage started to decline considerably. By the middle of the nineteenth century, less than half of the new members were involved in the common, one way or another. The absence of so many commoners from the records can only result to a very limited extent from gaps in the series of sources. Clearly, something was happening on the common: the proportion of active participants among the total number of members became smaller and smaller.Footnote 28 It also meant, as will be demonstrated further on in this article, that the proportion of passive members (those who gained no concrete benefits from the common) was becoming a greater burden over time on the more active participants.
Some individual examples can illustrate the ‘passive’ behaviour of some of the members. Bernardus Mulle became an aanborger in 1804 through his wife Rosa De Schepper, and is a typical example of a passive member.Footnote 29 In the population censuses of 1796 and 1814 he was described as a wage-labourer. From other censuses that registered the number of cattle during the 1820s, we know that he owned at least two cows.Footnote 30 Nonetheless, I have not been able to find any traces of Mulle being active on the common. Distance can hardly have been an argument in this decision, since during the entire period he lived in Assebroek, and the largest part of the pastures was located in that village. The same was true of Franciscus Van den Berghe.Footnote 31 According to the censuses of 1794 and 1814, he was a wage labourer. The marriage acts record him as a servant. Both contain the same essential information: he worked for wages. He never appeared in the censuses as a cattle-owner. In the case of Franciscus this may have been the main reason for his never having been active in Gemene and Loweiden.
According to my information, another rather passive commoner, Laurentius Van Belleghem, was a wage labourer in 1811 and in 1835.Footnote 32 The records show that he was born in 1778 and was a commons member from 1802 onwards. When he was 34, in 1812, he did use the common. In the book-keeping record of July of that year, we find that he had a lease on turf.Footnote 33 But after that he simply disappears from the book-keeping record. Nor does he appear in the village's cattle censuses, which means that it was not likely he used the common. It is not a coincidence that the three early-nineteenth-century examples I chose were all aanborgers who lived primarily from wages. The increasing wage-dependence of commoners and other villagers influenced their participation in important ways.
A detailed analysis of the exploitation level and the resolution books of Gemene and Loweiden illustrates that the commoners themselves were aware of the potentially negative effects of both over- and under-exploitation. In the first half of the eighteenth century commoners did not own enough cattle to prevent under-grazing on the common. Eventually, this could lead to under-exploitation and a lack of social control over the use and management of the common. To achieve a constant grazing level of about 150 cattle units, the number that could be held in a sustainable way on this size of a meadow, the common's managers temporarily allowed others to graze their cattle on the common. For this privilege they asked considerable sums, often amounting to more than 20 times the price commoners had to pay to let their cattle graze on the common (on which see also below). Apart from the fact that they simply wanted to seize the opportunity to get some extra income in this way, this decision can be seen as part of the overall management strategy of the commoners to avoid a ‘tragedy of the commons’. Elsewhere I have described how the commoners of this particular common effectively supplemented their regulations with a price mechanism to gain control over the level of exploitation of the common, and hence were able to prevent the common from the dreaded ‘tragedy’.Footnote 34
That commoners who were entitled to use the common's resources chose not to do so, whether deliberately or because they did not have the means, may have threatened the smooth functioning and even the future of the institution in different ways. Apart from the potential threat that insufficient cattle were grazing on the common (see above), passivity could also lead to a lesser involvement of the commoners, and the weakening of social control. This was especially true for an institution like that in our case study which was self-governed and where most decisions were taken by the members themselves. The effect of having a large group of passive members cannot be underestimated: it can be assumed that those who did not receive substantial benefits from the commons would not care about the common either, and thus might refrain from reporting abuses or problems on it.
To identify the reasons for the changes in the commoners' participation level and the growing number of passive members, we need to add another, more qualitative, dimension to our analysis. Those commoners who did participate could do so in many different ways. A more detailed analysis of the book-keeping records allowed me to distinguish between various types of economic and functional participation. ‘Economic participation’ refers to any activity noted in the books that involved some sort of economic exchange: from grazing cattle on the common, buying firewood or peat at ‘members-only’ prices or using the small river along the common for retting flax to performing jobs such as digging or making fences on the common. Such activities contributed to the commoners' well-being: they could benefit from using the inexpensive pasture or they received wages from the common's treasurer. The discrepancy between the price commoners paid to be allowed to graze their cattle on the common and the price non-members were asked (and willing!) to pay for the same benefit gives us a clear indication of the benefits to be reaped as a member. It shows that the benefits must have been substantial, at least in the case where one had cattle to graze on the common. At the same time the eagerness of non-commoners to use the facilities also provided a significant income for the common as a whole. In the first half of the eighteenth century, to secure a constant level of grazing on the common, non-members' cattle were admitted, but only after the non-members paid as much as 22 times what commoners paid. Commoners who did not graze cattle on the common thus probably missed out on a substantial benefit. By analysing the commoners' ways of economic participation, it becomes possible to determine what their main interests were.
A variety of ‘official’ functions for the commons have been included as ‘functional participation’, and some of these were remunerated. Every three years some members of the board were entrusted with daily management of the common; these usually included five hoofdmannen, who were elected by the commoners. Those elected to one of the offices not only received wages but were also accorded higher social status, which was probably an extra incentive for being actively involved. The hoofdmannen were assisted by a treasurer, who performed the lowest-paid function. In addition to the official appointment, simple attendance at the annual meetings was also included in my analysis as a form of functional participation. Although commoners were in principle obliged to be present, the accounts show that in most instances some members abstained. Increasingly, the commoners lived further away from the common and found it difficult to appear at the annual meetings. At first the hoofdmannen tried to invite distant commoners by announcing the meetings after Mass in most of the surrounding villages.Footnote 35 In the nineteenth century, however, only churchgoers from neighbouring villages were informed about the meetings and decisions. This change in communication strategy probably also influenced commoners' attendance at meetings, and their participation level in general. In addition to the quantitative analysis of the internal balance in the group between passive and active members, such changes can give us an idea of the concentration of power within the group of active members. This contributes to our understanding of the decision-making process on the commons.
Joannes De Schepper, whose family was involved in the common from the second half of the seventeenth century, is a good example of the diversity of participation among the commoners.Footnote 36 Of all the aanborgers his family ever included, he was the most active: even before he officially became a member of the common in 1752, he had been involved as a labourer to help with drainage work on it. He must have had a good reputation in the village, since he became the treasurer of the common soon after becoming a member and fulfilled this function almost continuously until 1782. No doubt Joannes had a network of people who elected him to the job because of his main occupation: in the population census of 1748, he was registered as an innkeeper (and carpenter), which was probably one of the best functions to have in terms of formation of social capital. The fact that he managed to obtain the job of treasurer year after year by demanding the lowest remuneration for it was probably also related to the benefits he could obtain by providing food and drink at the meetings of the commoners. Combining the job of innkeeper with being the treasurer of the local common was clearly a smart way of using your membership. Joannes saw his participation as a source of income, either through his inn or his work for the common, and did not see the need to take advantage of the other facilities the common offered him: in all the time he was involved with the common he never grazed any cattle on it.
In 1831 another Johannes, of the Claeys family, became aanborger, and he became treasurer of the common in 1842. After that we lose track of him in the sources. His father, Ignatius, had followed a very different strategy.Footnote 37 For ten years he grazed cattle on the common but he never held any office. Another example was Frans Tanghe, also from a family with a long tradition in the Gemene and Loweiden, via both his father, Jan, and his mother, Isabelle van Laethem. He became a member in 1843, and thereafter combined functional and economic participation. A quarter of his registered activities related to leasing out land for cattle-rearing and crops. His other activities were related to performing jobs on the common.Footnote 38 From 1868 to 1879 he worked as overseer for the common and as treasurer. In total, his name is mentioned in the records over 36 years, and he was one of the most active commoners of the entire period.Footnote 39
Notwithstanding the potential risks that categorizing commoners in this way involves, such an attempt does help us to identify an evolution in the participatory behaviour of commoners. One of the most interesting trends is that from the middle of the eighteenth century on there was a growing polarization between economic participants and functional participants. At that time nearly half of the active commoners combined economic participation with some sort of functional involvement; a century later this was only true for one out of every ten commoners. By the middle of the nineteenth century, most commoners (eight out of ten) had become economic participants only, and were no longer involved in the management of the common.Footnote 40
The evolution in types of commoners' participation described above and the declining amount of active participation can be combined with another indicator to show the importance commoners attached to their membership. Combining the participation data with the marriage registers for Assebroek, Oedelem and surrounding villages enables us to estimate the age at subscription of new members. This age is an indicator of the importance that a new member (or, if he was very young, his parents) attributed to belonging to the common and the community of commoners. It can be assumed that joining the group when a person was very young – in early childhood to early teens – indicates the parents' high expectations: becoming a member could offer a son the guarantee of more social security, or at least a source of income and a network that could be called upon in times of trouble. Late subscriptions were more likely if a man became a member via his wife, but they could also mean lower expectations for professional life. The reference point used here is the time when a son began to live his life independent of his parents. In a rural society such a marker would be marriage, which in areas with neo-locality such as West-Flanders was the same as setting up an independent business, usually a farm.Footnote 41
Since it was not possible to retrieve for all commoners both their age at subscription and their age at marriage, I used a sample of nearly 600 commoners to calculate the average age at subscription and compared this with the average age at marriage for the region. The sample was selected on the basis of availability of data: for some commoners I simply had more information than for others, and for some the date of birth simply could not be found. Nevertheless, the sample that was used is clearly sufficiently substantial.
The sample shows that the average age at which commoners became members gradually increased over the course of the nineteenth century. Around the end of the eighteenth century a new commoner was on average 20 years old; by the first decade of the nineteenth century the age at subscription averaged nearly 30. The average age of subscription remained under 30 until the middle of the nineteenth century, but thereafter it rose again, and around 1880 the average age was 40. In the course of time, potential aanborgers postponed their actual subscription to later in life. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, young men usually joined the commons after marriage, and the average age at first marriage (for men) at that time was around 30. By the end of the nineteenth century, the average marriage age had decreased by a few years, but the age at subscription remained as high as before. This evolution indicates that commoners started to become members of the common at a different point in their life course: if commoners did not find it necessary to claim their right before they were 40, we can assume that they did not consider the common's resources and facilities vital for their professional activities, or it means that they did not have the means to participate, perhaps because they did not have cattle to graze.
I have now provided several indications that something was happening that deeply influenced the commoners' behavioural strategy: an increasing number of commoners did not use their rights actively; there was a growing gap between users and managers; and the average age of subscription of new members rose over time. By linking the available information in the sources on Gemene and Loweiden to other information, such as population and economic censuses, we can conclude that the above changes may have been related to the changing occupational background of the commoners. One very relevant occupational indicator was the extent to which commoners were bound to agriculture as a source of income. Independent, self-sustaining small farmers especially benefited from the common. They would have primarily focused on mixed farming and needed the grazing facilities offered by the common. Maintaining cattle was an essential part of the mixed-farming chain, as it provided the manure necessary to fertilize the arable land. It was not until the mid nineteenth century that fertilizers such as guano would be imported in large quantities and that chalk deposits would be developed, solving part of the fertilization bottleneck of mixed farming. Thus, in seeking to explain the changes in the commoners' behavioural strategy, we should concentrate on the farmers among the commoners.
The analysis shows that just over 50 per cent of the commoners who became members in the first half of the eighteenth century were registered as farmers and nearly 19 per cent as agricultural wage-labourers, and about 14 per cent worked as wage-labourers outside agriculture.Footnote 42 Thereafter, the number of commoners registered as farmers dropped significantly. In the second half of the eighteenth century, this group accounted for only 24 per cent; among the commoners registered in the first half of the nineteenth century, only one out of five was a farmer but nearly four out of ten were registered as agricultural labourers. Together with the other wage-labouring commoners, they accounted for two-thirds of all commoners. In the second half of the nineteenth century, those engaged in wage labour dropped to 44 per cent (including agricultural labourers), but the proportion of farmers did not increase to more than a quarter of the group.Footnote 43 Although sometimes confusing statements in the sources made categorizing the commoners' occupational status difficult, there was a clear evolution in the socio-economic background of the commoners: wage-dependent commoners increasingly replaced farmers among the commoners.Footnote 44 This evolution is not different from the general trend towards more wage-dependency in this period elsewhere in Flanders.
The example of Andreas De Rijcker, born in 1763 and registered as a commoner in 1786, illustrates the evolution from farmer to wage-labourer that many commoners experienced in this period.Footnote 45 Andreas came from a family that had had four ancestors registered as commoners in the sixteenth century.Footnote 46 In the nineteenth century, after Andreas, there were Bruno, Henri, Louis, Bernard, Félix, and others of the same lineage.Footnote 47 The De Rijcker family was among the most active group on the common, which makes them a good ‘barometer’ for revealing how the changes came about. The family had a clear interest in the economic advantages of the common, but were less concerned about being elected to an office (except for Adriaen De Rijckere,Footnote 48 who in 1843 would become one of the hoofdmannen). Three years after his registration, Andreas began to use his rights to the common:Footnote 49 between 1789 and 1827 he usually grazed one cow there, sometimes also a pig. In 1813 and 1814 he had two cows and one horse on the common. According to the censuses, he already had a horse at the end of the eighteenth century, but by the 1820s he was back to one single cow, which he placed on the common. And after that he lost even more: in 1827, when he was 64 years old, Andreas is last mentioned in the book-keeping record as a debtor. His worsening situation can also be shown from the occupational category mentioned for him in the censuses: while he was still listed as a farmer in 1796, in 1814 and 1826 he was registered as a labourer. The other members of the family for whom I could retrieve occupations were nearly all registered as working for wages.Footnote 50
Thus we see that the social and economic background of many commoners changed dramatically from the late eighteenth century onwards. The decrease in the number of farmers – among both active and passive commoners – was part of a more general proletarization of the Flemish countryside in this period. This process influenced commoners' participation and the ways they participated. Yet, when we consider the commoners' behaviour, the possible reasons why that behaviour changed over time and the possibility that their individual advantage to be gained from the common had become limited, why did they still register as members and pay the significant subscription of a pound in order to do so? One possible reason is that those commoners whose membership rights were derived from in-laws may have been especially eager to register. The percentage of those who became members in that way increased over time, from 21 per cent of all new members in the period 1775–1799 to 38 per cent in the period 1875–1900. The total number of new members increased from 31 in the earlier period to 217 in the later one, which indicates that within the village communities the need for the common was still very great, although it may have been less directly linked to the family farm, which was still very important. Many, it seems, became members to secure use rights for future generations.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF CHANGING BALANCES OF POWER ON THE COMMON
This analysis has so far shown that commoners followed different strategies, that their choices were influenced by social and economic changes and that their individual strategies represented a considerable change in the extent and ways in which commoners were active on the common. Another consequence of the shift in participant profiles was a growing polarization amongst the group of active participants, between the simple ‘users’ and the ‘managers’. The internal power balances changed over time, from a fairly democratic regime to a system in which decisions were increasingly taken by an administrative elite, without much interference by those who actually used the common, the small and medium farmers. The growing passivity of the commoners, combined with the increasing polarization between ‘economic users’ and administrators, led to an imbalance in resource use and in the way the resources were managed.
First, the data I have found for Gemene and Loweiden show that imbalances in power relations may have had serious consequences for the use of the common's natural resources. Commoners could use the meadows for grazing their cattle by paying per head. Through this system it became possible for the managers of the common to control the total number of cattle units on it, which was very useful in preventing over-exploitation of the resources: if use of the common became too great, the prices per head of cattle were raised. Conversely, if commoners did not have sufficient cattle to graze on the common, prices were reduced. Moreover, in periods when there was a serious lack of cattle to maintain the necessary level of grazing, people who were not commoners were sometimes allowed to graze cattle on the common. In the 1840s, however, this highly efficient system was threatened. On the one hand, there was increasing pressure from passive members, among whom many were too poor to make good use of their membership. It is quite likely that they used their precarious economic position as an argument to move the other commoners towards freeing more pasture land for other means. On the other hand, a small number of commoners had the power to change the system entirely. As a result, this is what happened. In the 1840s the system that had long been used to regulate the number of cattle on the common was replaced by a lease system. Commoners could apply to lease a plot of land, and use it according to their needs. In the 1820s, part of the land had also been turned into arable, which should have made it more attractive for non-cattle owners as well. Restrictions on how the land was used became less strict from the 1840s onwards, making it more likely that the former restrictions on the number of cattle to be allowed on the common were no longer applied. It is possible to speculate about why in such times of hardship the commoners did not decide to abolish the communal system altogether. Apart from a desire to maintain their rights to the common as social security, there may have been other issues at stake. One of the advantages a commoner may have found was a certain type of transaction cost. Elaine Tan claims that common fields reduced the transaction costs for a commoner to maintain a cow by lowering the cost of insemination.Footnote 51 After enclosure, the cost of maintaining a cow increased amongst small owners who, unlike large farmers, could neither jointly own the bull and the cow nor lease the male easily. The minimum acreage required to restore cattle-keepers to their pre-enclosure economic position indicates that many commoners who were given some land in settlement were inadequately compensated for the change in property rights. Thus, if the number of small cattle-owners among the commoners of the Flemish common discussed in this article increased, the advantage of keeping some of the land in common could have been relatively important.
In the 1840s and 1850s the common also came under increasing pressure from the local and national governments, leading to the forced abdication of the management board in 1862. The control over the common was taken out of the hands of the commoners until 1882, when the commoners won a court case against the municipalities of Assebroek and Oedelem. The Gemene and Loweiden is one of the very few commons in Flanders that survived this period. The only reason for this survival may have been the legal support it received from a local priest, Canon Andries, who was able to trace back to the sixteenth century all the documents that proved the commoners' rights, even in the new legal system of the nineteenth century. In 1847 the government passed a new law, ostensibly to encourage reclamation of the remaining waste lands in Flanders, but which actually provided the local governments with an instrument to dissolve all common property in their territory and sell the land for their own benefit. Long before 1847, eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century laws had tried to dissolve the commons on Belgian territory, but to little avail.Footnote 52 This forced dissolution of land held in common became legally possible with the introduction of the new civil code, which (under article 542) held that all common property was communal property. Local governments referred to this article and had the support of the national and provincial governments in trying to seize commoners' land. With the crisis of 1846 that drove many Belgians into poverty, the government saw a new opportunity to dissolve the commons, under the excuse that it would be beneficial for agricultural output. Great pressure was placed on local governments to sell all common property on their territory. If no action was taken, the government could even proceed to a forced selling of the common. In areas with vast stretches of common land, such as in the Campine area (Kempen in Dutch), a sandy area north of Antwerp, the commoners saw no chance of participating in the bidding for the common land that was being auctioned, except when they joined forces to buy a plot of land collectively. Usually the land was bought by the urban bourgeoisie who speculated on the projected profits to be gained from its future cultivation.Footnote 53 Although the price of land did rise, as a result of investment in infrastructure by the government (including digging canals through the Kempen), it never became the agricultural miracle that had been hoped for.
The fact that decisions about how to use the resources of the Gemeinde and Loweiden common were now largely made by leaseholders must have led to reduced social control by the commoners themselves. In general, sociologists assume that a low participation level can have serious consequences for the functioning of an institution such as a common. When less active participants reduce already suboptimal social control, it can mean that such ‘free-riding’ is less easily spotted by others. The commoners were aware of this potential risk; nevertheless, it was not unusual to find common-property arrangements where those who saw an infraction of the regulation but did not report it to the management of the common that sanctioned.Footnote 54 To make the control system water-tight, young cow-herds were often recruited to keep an eye on the common and its users while working, as a form of extra control.
It is logical that the commoners' reduced participation must have also led to less strict social controls among the active participants. The commoners of the Gemene and Loweiden tried to solve this problem by calling in external controllers. From the late eighteenth century onwards they paid the local constable to inspect the common.Footnote 55 Increased involvement of external controllers may have also reflected the increasing attempts of local government to interfere in the management of the common. In the period when the common was put under supervision of a sekwester (sequesterer) (1862–1882), any extra expenditure to control the common was considered completely superfluous.Footnote 56 When the common was leased out, the new management was convinced that, just as with ‘normal’ private-property arrangements, every leaseholder should be responsible for managing his own plot of land, which was completely in line with the liberal ideas of nineteenth-century anti-commons legislation.
CONCLUSION
This article has demonstrated the potential benefits of a detailed analysis of the behaviour of commoners as users of the common, and also of precisely when and why they ceased to use it: it can help us to explain the deeper motivations of commoners to use the common's facilities, and this again can explain why the use and importance of commons changed over time. This article is based on a specific case-study to describe several changes in commoners' behaviour during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The case-study is based on records from the Gemene and Loweiden, not far from the eastern city gates of Bruges. First, we saw a growing number of passive members, who, by the nineteenth century, probably had a significant influence on the decision-making about the common. Second, among the users of the common a clear polarization between those who were involved in the common for economic reasons and those who acted as ‘managers’ was found. While originally managers were also usually users, the two groups became increasingly distinct from one another. Moreover, by the middle of the nineteenth century, the age at which commoners were registered as members was considerably higher than in the eighteenth century, suggesting that the immediate need to use the common had become less important. These three developments – activity rate, type of participation, and age of subscription – can be considered indicators of change in the use of resources, the internal power balance, and the social control on use. As the common became less used by cattle-owners there were more possibilities for users without cattle; this process also included the abolition of the efficient system of payment per head of cattle. This change in management system may have weakened the commoners' ability to oppose the interference of local government. The local-government constable had already been asked to control the use of the common. It is likely that such control was needed to compensate for reduced social control, a function of the less regular use of the common by the commoners and thus also their reduced physical presence there. The main cause I have identified for the commoners' changing behaviour was their proletarization, which was apparent in their increasing wage-dependence. Commoners were independent farmers to a lesser extent than before, and the numbers of cattle per farmer had diminished greatly over time.
This particular case-study provides a unique insight into the workings of a pre-industrial common, thanks to the availability of a large set of account books for an impressively long period, during which major changes took place among the commoners and in society as a whole. Although book-keeping records are available for other commons that were managed more independently, it might not be possible to develop a similar dataset and conduct similar analyses for these other commons. To be sure, there are other forms of institution for collective action, such as guilds, for studying group heterogeneity and size in similar detail. Elsewhere, I have argued that the commons can be considered the rural counterparts of guilds, in view of their many similar objectives, organization, rise and decline.Footnote 57 Our understanding of internal regulation by cooperating individuals, whether living in the countryside or in urban environments, could benefit from similar analyses in the future.
THE SOURCES
Note: It is impossible to mention here all the sources used for this article. A great deal of information was also derived from agricultural, population and professional censuses and demographic sources such as marriage registers. For a complete overview of all the sources used, see M. De Moor, ‘Tot proffijt van de ghemeensaemheijt: gebruik, gebruikers en beheer van gemene gronden in Zandig Vlaanderen, 18de en 19de eeuw’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Ghent University, 2003).
CAB: City Archives of Bruges (Stadsarchief Brugge), Archives of the Gemene en Looweiden (AGL)
National Archive Bruges (Rijksarchief Brugge)
Aanwinsten 1984, 68, ‘Bouck van de geslachten van de Gemeene weede: register van inschrijvingen als aanborger van 1515 tot 1703’.
Provinciearchief West-Vlaanderen, Modern Archief 2de reeks (TBO7), Nos. 701–708, ‘Numerieke staten van het belastbaar vee (hoornvee, schapen en paarden)’, 1823.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Maarten Prak, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Bas van Bavel and Rene van Weeren for their useful comments on the first draft of this article.
