This was at issue in 1889 when the lord of the manor and owner of Banstead Downs and Heath, a Mr Hartopp, excavated gravel and threatened to reduce the available pasture.

In the uplands, they are largely moorland, on the coast they may be salt marsh, sand dunes or cliffs, and on inland lowlands they may be downland, grassland, heathland or wood pasture, depending on the soil and history.

These habitats are often of very high nature conservation value, because of their very long continuity of management extending in some cases over many hundreds of years.

In English social and economic history, enclosure or inclosure is the process which ends traditional rights such as mowing meadows for hay, or grazing livestock on common land formerly held in the open field system.

In England and Wales the term is also used for the process that ended the ancient system of arable farming in open fields.

The latter process of enclosure was sometimes accompanied by force, resistance, and bloodshed, and remains among the most controversial areas of agricultural and economic history in England.

In some cases rights to graze goats, geese and ducks are registered, whilst in others the type of livestock is not specified.

[15] Today, despite the diverse legal and historical origins of commons, they are managed through a community of users, comprising those who hold rights together with the owner(s) of the soil.

Such communities generally require joint working to integrate all interests, with formal or informal controls and collaborative understandings, often coupled with strong social traditions and local identity.

[15] When such open habitats are no longer grazed they revert to scrub and then dense woodland, losing the grassy or heathland vegetation which may have occupied the land continuously for many centuries.

The conservators wished to restore the forest's landscape to one that predominantly consisted of heathland—its defining characteristic until the mid-twentieth century, but something that was in danger of being lost after the Second World War as a result of the advance of woodland into traditional heathland areas when, as one commentator stated: ...returning soldiers gave up trying to scratch a living out of the forest.

Whereas once hundreds of commoners used the wood and heath—their livestock obliging by chewing down young tree shoots—today there is only one commercial grazer.

This is not a problem restricted to this common, but according to Jonathan Brown writing in the Independent on 21 April 2007 "similar debates are raging between locals and the authorities at other heathland areas in the New Forest and Surrey".

The exact usufruct rights which apply to individual commons were in some cases documented, but more often were based on long-held traditions.

[20] The belief—sometimes called "keyhole tenure", and which persisted as recently as the early 20th century—was actually a fallacy, but to stop landless peasants unlawfully squatting on commons, the Erection of Cottages Act 1588 (31 Eliz.

However, the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000 (c. 37) gave the public the freedom to roam freely on all registered common land in England and Wales.

[30] Commons are included in the public access land now shown on the Ordnance Survey Explorer maps.

[35] The act of transferring resources from the commons to purely private ownership is known as enclosure, or (especially in formal use, and in place names) Inclosure.

In this case, the land is not state-owned or in joint-ownership under a trust, but is owned by a definite partition unit, a legal partnership whose partners are the participating individual landowners.

For the most part, this was due to the Great Partition (Swedish: storskiftet, Finnish: isojako), which started in 1757 and was largely complete by the 1800s.

In many areas access unenclosed land (the "hill") was vital as it allowed the tenant to keep livestock and gain a cash income.

[47] 4,260 square kilometres (1,640 sq mi; 1,050,000 acres) of commonage is currently grazed, mostly in counties Mayo, Galway, Sligo, Donegal, Kerry and Wicklow.

This was generally low-quality land, used for grazing pigs and cattle, and was leased to tribe members for a year at a time.

The overwhelming majority of areas of common land in lowland Scotland and the Highland fringes were commonties.

A commonty is an area of land where the rights of property or use are shared by two or more neighbouring (though not necessarily adjacent) landowners.

Common mosses were areas of bog where the right to dig peat for fuel were shared by neighbouring landowners.

However the difficulties of dividing such wet areas meant that they were left out of many commonty divisions and many common mosses may still survive, un-noticed because of the decline of peat-cutting.

Unlike commonties, the rights to use crown commons (for example for grazing livestock) were available to anyone, not just the neighbouring landowners.

Greens were small areas of common land near a settlement where livestock could be kept overnight, markets held and other communal activities carried out.

Common land, an English development, was used in many former British colonies, for example in Ireland and the United States.