Against ownership as exclusive dominion, medieval European custom held land as a bundle of shared use-rights: pasture for a stinted number of beasts, turbary for peat, estovers for wood, piscary for fish, and gleaning - all exercised over ground someone else formally owned. The Charter of the Forest (1217) restated such rights for commoners against royal forest law, and manorial by-laws set the stints that prevented over-use. Towns held their own commons too: moors, meadows, lammas lands and burgess grazing, treated as collective assets rather than development land. Enclosure extinguished most of them in England, but the form survived in the Spanish ejido, the Swiss Allmend and the Dutch meent, and was rehabilitated analytically by Ostrom.
The commons is the counter-idea to private property in land: it holds that access, subsistence and stinted use can be genuine legal interests without ownership, and that some ground should never be subdividable. Urban open space, public parks, rights of way and today's arguments about the urban commons all trade on this older legal grammar.
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