Common Rights Made Medieval Forests Work
by Lloyd C. Irland
(This is the fourth in a series of articles by Lloyd C. Irland, and was initially published in the December issue of Maine Woodlands).
So far this series has noted the obsession of medieval lords with the deer, boar, and game birds of the forest. We’ve paid less attention to how the common folk of the villages used the forest for food. I was tempted to call this, “Forest and Kitchen,” but then realized the people we speak of had no kitchens. They lived in miserable little unheated huts, and were lucky to have a few pots, dishes and utensils. They made do with their “rights of common” which allowed them to harvest fuels and forest products for household use.
A key forest product was honey. Rights to gather honey were carefully allocated and managed. The first that many Europeans knew of an alternative to honey was when the New England Indians showed them how to make maple syrup – score one for the Native Americans.
A family lucky enough to have a goat or cow for milk needed grazing in summer and fodder for winter. Clearly defined common rights provided for these. As populations increased, more arable land was needed. This cut into the common grazing. As more and more people pushed thin, poor breeds of stock into the woods, pressures grew. This has been termed the medieval “tragedy of the commons.” The analogy is misleading, though. The commons was not in fact an open access free-for all, but instead was heavily regulated. One treatise on England devotes considerable space to grazing rights and enforcement.
The right of pannage – the right to graze pigs in the forest – was also prized. In many medieval documents, wooded areas are described by the number of pigs they can graze. The right of pannage was free to many commoners, but most had to pay a toll in the form of a pig now and then. Today’s Food Channel mavens know that pork from pigs grazed on acorns is considered the best of the best. Areas of woods that yielded no mast for grazing were termed “barrens,” but we moderns don’t understand why a wood would be termed barren. The term came to this side of the Atlantic and you see it in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, among other places. Forest scientists – really, their grad students – have counted up the yields of acorns per acre in oak woods.
The medieval agricultural system could not devote land to pasturage. Instead, the woods were the pastures, and highly valued as such. Bechmann devotes a long chapter to stock breeding in the forest in medieval France. Some historians believe it was a biologically sustainable system, when well managed, and at low population densities.
Most foods need cooking. Rights to fuel were complicated, but the basic right was “firebote,” the right to gather your fuelwood in the common woods. Inefficient cookfires consumed a lot of wood, and required much labor to gather it. As cities grew, they reached out into the country for fuel. Paris imported firewood by water over long distances. The market was intruding into the old self-sufficient village.
The grain had to be milled. As populations grew, the woods began to fill with small mills. Mill privileges were controlled by the lords; commoners were banned from competing. The mill monopoly was money in the bank. Records testify to the abbeys and barons seeking out unauthorized small mills, and smashing their millstones. Once milled, the village baker would let you use his oven – for a fee.
Anywhere near waterways, fish were important to everyone’s diet. Fish culture made major strides in the Middle Ages. Kings issued decrees to protect salmon and other fisheries from despoliation by dams, bad land use, or overfishing. Monasteries, notably the Cistercians, built fish ponds. In France, the Capetians created the offices of “maitre des eaux et forets,” with ranks of officials. It was no accident that the “eaux” came first. The concern was for the fishery as well as navigation. This writer once spent a summer at the Ecole des Eaux et Forets (ENGREF) in Nancy, a national school of forestry. You may have heard of one of its illustrious alumni – Gifford Pinchot.
Wild mushrooms were carefully harvested, much as fiddlehead grounds are today. Today, farmers bring wild mushrooms to the town markets. Many people of Central European extraction preserve the custom in the form of “mushroom walks.”
These rights, and many more, made the medieval village economy work. But they were customary rights, rarely written down and even then imprecise. Population pressures stressed the system, and generated constant dispute among villagers themselves and especially with the lords, who had other ideas about land use. The lords, spiritual or temporal, had the only people who could write – so whose version of the rights do you think got preserved? Around the world, similar customs exist. Tropical villages make use of as many as 200 species of plants and their parts, for food, spices, medicinals, and spiritual uses. Some are gathered for local use, some for sale. Conflicts over these issues in the Third World, happening every day now, mirror what Europe went through centuries ago.