Eleanor Straughton has written an engaging and original book which should be read by anyone with an interest in the history of common property. The work is unusual in that it bridges the long span of time from the eighteenth century, when commons are generally considered to have been an essential part of the socioeconomic and environmental order, until the near present, when British commons are predominantly viewed as an amenity for leisure and landscape management, rather than as an input into farming. This book is also unusual in its focus on the upland commons. Whilst many local studies have incorporated the fate of commons over the enclosure period, those histories that situate themselves in a broader narrative of economic change have largely been concerned with lowland enclosure and its impact on the social order. This is part of a long story of the rise of commercial and capitalist agriculture, and the proletarianisation of the workforce. Upland commons, combining extensive stock-raising and grazing, and more localised rights of turbary, are rather different cases; and as this book demonstrates, at least in functional terms they have remained an important part of the modern landscape. Straughton's study develops an approach pioneered by her doctoral supervisor, Angus Winchester, in The Harvest of the Hills, extending the analysis of upland commons both chronologically towards the present, and delving further into case studies of individual institutions.

The work is methodologically indebted to the tradition established by Elinor Ostrom in Governing the Commons, focusing analysis on the institutional framework of common property or common resource pool management, rather than on the context of social or environmental change, although these inevitably remain vital aspects of the story. Her work is not limited to isolated case studies, but links these local stories into a wider narrative of response to economic change and national legislation, seeking to understand the rich variety of institutional responses that emerged with the demise of manorial regulation.

The first part of the book provides an overview of the traditional upland economy; the rise of interest in ‘preservation’, often driven by urban perspectives; and the parallel twentieth-century histories of expanding hill sheep farming, and the increasing statutory definition and regulation of commons. The second part examines local developments and responses to these trends. Chapter four offers a particularly interesting analysis of the range of institutions, associations, parishes and committees that arose in some places in the space previously inhabited by manorial regulation. One wonders whether similar organisations may have actually managed many commons in previous periods. The variable capacity for self organisation, ‘the highly individual life-course of manor courts in northern uplands’, and the challenges that voluntary initiatives faced, provide rich perspectives for other hidden histories that the bland record of bye-law and manorial paines may obscure. The enduring efforts by commoners to regulate their own practice, Straughton effectively argues, equally suggests that the fall into desuetude of manorial institutions may have as much to do with attitudes to the manor as the allegedly declining economic benefits of commoning.

This long period saw the gradual centralisation of authority over who determined the legal position of the commons, from the nineteenth-century enclosure acts, to preservationist acts passed from 1876, to the Commons Registration Act of 1965. These at times granted regulatory powers to district councils, and granted Whitehall the power to authorise bye-laws, which even if made by and enforced by commoners, could only be made within the narrow remit defined by statutory Acts. The survival of commons has thus come to depend on an appeal to bureaucratic procedures and forms of monitoring that are far distant from their origins, and that to some degree serve to further undermine the corporate autonomy that in many analyses is key for effective common-pool resource management.

But Straughton also notes that much land has remained collectively managed, often as ‘regulated pasture’, even if no longer formally recognised as a common in law. From the point of view of the active commoners, the economic imperative for commoning never fell away. If it looks like a common and works like a common, does it matter that it has no such status under law? The manner in which local institutions were embedded in other systems of constraints of course matters, but the focus on institutional rather than purely legal status offers a highly productive approach to the great range of collectively managed properties found across Europe.