Who Owns Common Land?

Before I went down the rabbit hole of common land, if you had asked me who owned common land, I might have answered the king (or queen back then), maybe the council, or possibly no one? I had never really given it much thought. Despite living in Cambridge and crossing Midsummer Common most days, who actually owned the land was never something I really thought about.

The answer is sort of all of the above, plus some. Common land can actually be owned by anyone. Public or private, business or organisation. It’s the rights over the land that make it common, not its ownership. 

First of all, the royal family does indeed own many commons. The Crown Estate owns about 66,500 acres of common land, including huge swaths of Eryri (Snowdonia National Park). The Duchy of Cornwall also owns a lot of common land, particularly on Dartmoor, where they own a third of the national park.

District councils and national park authorities also own and manage commons in the public interest. There are various pieces of legislation which enables them to do that, including the Commons Act 1876 and  the Commons Act 1899. They can either be a part of a board of conservators (such as for the famous Ashdown Forest commons) or take direct management ( such as Bucklebury Common in Berkshire).

It’s not quite true that ‘no one’ can own a common. However we still have a concept of waste land as ‘manorial waste’, which is ‘ the open, uncultivated and unoccupied lands parcel of the manor’. Essentially wild places on a lord’s estate, even if they do not have common rights over them, are still considered to be commons. 

The National Trust also owns a lot of common land, so much so that it is included in legislation, the National Trust Act 1907. They are allowed to drain,  and improve and plant turf and trees. They have a huge portfolio of various commons, now inalienable (cannot be sold or developed), including a part of the incredible New Forest Commons.

But there are also a huge amount of private landowners that own commons. Some of them have their own associations, like the Dartmoor Commons Owners Association, but many just have private landowners. Some of them buy commons believing that they can make changes, without reckoning on the power of common rights!

If you want to find out more about specific commons, I highly recommend common-land.com, a searchable database based on DEFRA records. You can then check against the Association for Commons Registration Authorities for the owner.