From the fifteenth century to the nineteenth, evaluations of common right were inseparable from the larger question of enclosure and the engrossment of small farms. For enclosure meant the extinction of common right and the extinction of common right meant the decline of small farms: ‘Strip the small farms of the benefit of the commons’, wrote one observer, ‘and they are all at one stroke levelled to the ground.’ Disagreement about the value of common right has always been a debate within this debate. In our own century it is as part of the same argument that the quarrel continues between historians. If I begin with them it is not because they have the most to say about common right but because increasingly they have chosen to say the least and in so choosing they have misunderstood the full meaning, the real value, of common right.