Public Access: What We Left Behind in Europe
by Lloyd C. Irland
(This article is the third in a series by Lloyd C. Irland, and was originally published in the November issue of Maine Woodlands).
In the Middle Ages, most farms consisted of scattered patches with rights to plow, graze pigs, cut wood, or harvest honey. A manor held by a minor lord might include several villages, each with a few dozen farms, tilled by villeins bound to the land, and a few freeholders who owned tiny parcels outright. If you were granted a “farm,” it would be a set of patches, designed to give you a bit of tillage, some mowing, some grazing rights in the woods, and “estovers” – rights to wood needed for household uses. Your rights usually included “common”– specific, defined rights to use common woods, meadows, and marsh. A manor encompassed all the lands used by these villages, whose tenants would owe a share of the yield to the lord, plus labor services. A great lord or large abbey might hold manors in several locations.
Plowland was managed under the so-called “three field” system, with crop rotations depending on soils and climate. Following the harvest, stubble on plowlands was grazed in common, so fencing tiny patches made no sense. Few farms were independent, marked out rectangles where all of the tenant’s needs could be met. To manage your farm, you had to be able to walk over the neighborhood to get your pigs to the wood, to till your field, and to get firewood.
So, why tell you this? Because the medieval need for ordinary tenant farmers to go to and fro was no luxury. It was business. Agriculture of the time could not accommodate a 100-acre rectangle with a fence around it. Without the ability to move across the landscape, farming would not work, nor could it provide the in-kind share rentals due landlords. Without those incomes, landlords would have to work! Beyond daily work, people moved around very little. They had no time for walking in the woods, birdwatching, or jogging.
Look what these economic necessities have left behind. Across Europe, the British Isles, and Scandinavia, the details differ, but we see a rural landscape now mostly in small- to medium-sized farms, in private tenure similar to ours, where people can still move around the landscape. The mobility rights that underpinned the medieval rural economy did not die out. Instead, they have evolved but survived. Today, the farmers do not need them. Centuries ago, people on footpaths were your neighbors. Today, they are more likely to be urbanites and tourists.
In Norway and Sweden, constitutional guarantees give you rights to go walking and berry-picking on wild rural lands. Visitors may even camp a night or two without permission, so long as they set up 150 meters from any houses. In many rural and forested parts of Sweden, cooperation seems to work. One may not walk freely over cultivated land or near houses. But in winter fields can be crossed. Courtesy and care are expected.
An anecdote: At Lake Bled in former Yugoslavia (now Slovenia), a castle overlooks an alpine lake so gorgeous that it appears on posters promoting tourism. The castle was once held by the bishops of Brixen, a small city in northern Italy. On the lake’s east end stand several resort hotels. On the western end is a park set up for the ubiquitous caravanners. A trail from town brings you to the castle, and along the shore to the caravan park. Then comes the best part. The late Marshal Tito, ruler of Yugoslavia, had a villa overlooking Lake Bled, with the best view of the castle. But until evening, the gate in the walls was open, so that anyone and everybody could walk along the shore – through the front yard of the nation’s head of state! Did anyone plan it that way? But the Middle Ages did not just leave behind a picturesque castle – they left behind public access.
Here’s a question: Name one Maine lake not on public land where one can walk around the lakeshore on a footpath. In Britain, the medieval system left behind the “public footpaths” which enable a visitor to move about the rural landscape without disturbing farmers. Understandably, people like my grandparents who left these conditions had no wish to reproduce them in America. Further, with abundant and fertile land, and developing transportation systems, such an approach to farming wasn’t needed. Nearby there were always ponds, creeks, lakes, woods for fishing hunting, and wandering. The old rights to move about freely were a memory. Still, remnants persisted. Under the Massachusetts Colonial Ordinances, individuals could walk across undeveloped land to reach Great Ponds for “fishing and fowling.” Maine historian Richard Judd points out in his book Common Ground, early settlers maintained customs of open range grazing and moved about freely for generations. Legislation wasn’t needed. In many Maine rural areas, trespassing signs were rare until recent decades.
Northern Maine is a prominent exception; its extensive road system and campsites are available to anyone, though often with a fee. Freedom of movement by vehicle and foot is the general rule. At any distance from settlements, however, even tiny ponds are already privatized and gated off. In Southern Maine, the only shorelines left to the loons are marshes. Now in the name of “freedom,” we have privatized ocean shorelines, and many rivers and lakes. We must pay immense sums to buy back beach, trail, riverfront, or shoreline. Belatedly, Maine began to pursue this key quality of life issue. Sadly, two leading public programs are now under threat – the state Land for Maine’s Future and federal Land and Water Conservation Fund.
In school we hear that the Middle Ages were a time of tyranny, darkness, and ignorance. Yet who owned the lakes, the seas? Not the adjacent landowners. Across our American landscape, what’s done is done. We can’t legislate our way back to public access by importing customs from the Old Country. But didn’t our ancestors inadvertently leave a few good ideas behind when they came here?