The Commons in Italian and Spanish Historiography

In Italy, the medieval commons were first studied by legal historians, who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century asked whether such forms of land use developed in continuity with the Roman model or via contact with the Germanic world, through the arrival of the Lombards in Italy. In the second half of the twentieth century, the topic of the commons was addressed more episodically. While in the legal sphere the question continued to attract the sustained interest of leading specialists, the social and institutional history of the Middle Ages long overlooked collective lands, which were relegated from the years after the Second World War to a secondary topic, complementary to the development of landscapes and communities.Footnote ⁹

Apart from a few pioneering works, it was only from the late 1980s that a turn occurred, in conjunction with the increasing integration of Italian historiography into the international debate.Footnote ¹⁰ In particular, the renewed field of Italian medieval studies drew attention to a strand of research that had until then been practically absent from European studies on the commons: their place in urban areas and their role in the polarization of social conflict within the communes.Footnote ¹¹ Over the past fifteen years, the historiography on Italian communes has extended its focus to the immaterial dimension of the commons, in other words to the “discourse” on the common good, understood as an ideal principle expressing the fundamental and shared rights of a community.Footnote ¹² This has been explored in relation to political and economic thought, but also in regard to material evidence and public buildings in Italian cities.Footnote ¹³ Many of these studies point to the need for a comprehensive interpretation that connects the ideal dimension of the public good to the material ways that the commons were represented and used.Footnote ¹⁴

Yet recent historiography’s focus on the commons in cities between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries has meant that other possible avenues of research have been explored in a far more asymmetrical and episodic way. The commons of the early Middle Ages, for instance, which provided the starting point for the debate in the early twentieth century, have been almost entirely neglected.Footnote ¹⁵ Likewise, despite the wealth of legal sources on usi civici (civic usages) in the early modern period, the management of the commons in the medieval southern Italian countryside remains practically unexplored, not least because of the paucity of documents produced by local rural communities, which were far more fragile than the urban communities of the north. The work of Sandro Carocci nevertheless suggests the presence of original forms of commons management in the south, based on the rotation of fields collectively used for the cultivation of cereal crops.Footnote ¹⁶ Finally, the transformation of the commons between the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the rise of new forms of statehood, has been studied only slightly more, and much work remains to be done.

In more general terms, the resurgence of interest in Italian history since the 1980s has also concerned the medieval countryside, with the commons seen as a central factor in the rural economic system.Footnote ¹⁷ Researchers have thus far struggled to find, however, a broader key to interpret the development of rural commons as a whole, despite having several possible historiographical models available—though these once again have chiefly been confined to the early modern period. In particular, original historical-ecological and microhistorical interpretations, primarily based on the examination of territorial practices, form part of an influential current that found its first concrete expression with the 1992 special issue of Quaderni storici edited by Diego Moreno and Osvaldo Raggio.Footnote ¹⁸ Focused on rural areas in the early modern period, these studies have highlighted, on the one hand, local conflicts around the commons (notably disputes over borders and tensions between local and state authorities), and, on the other, environmental practices involving the commons, for example temporary cultivations and forms of arboriculture. These productive approaches have not, however, been adapted for studies of the medieval period. Even the resurgence in studies on the commons sparked by Ostrom’s research and its application to economic history, which has helped better define the relationship between institutions and the commons, has overwhelmingly concerned the early modern period.

There is a similarly long, though likewise uneven, tradition of studies on the role of commons in the Iberian Peninsula. Coinciding with the definitive loss of the last Spanish colonies, Joaquín Costa’s 1898 volume Colectivismo agrario en España achieved unquestionable success.Footnote ¹⁹ This work vindicated the commons against liberal economic ideas and was part of the “regenerationist” movement that sought to reform a Spain divested of its imperial aspirations. Costa’s works had a considerable impact on the nascent ethnography of the rural world.Footnote ²⁰ However, this field had a weak historical basis and barely considered the Middle Ages. Spanish historians, on the other hand, seem to have had little interest in the commons and long skirted around issues such as their origins or their medieval uses.

The renewal of Spanish historiography in the 1960s and 1970s changed this situation. Scholars such as Abilio Barbero and Marcelo Vigil saw collective property as a central feature of the tribal societies that had survived in northern Iberia throughout the early medieval period, arguing that the gradual transition to a feudal model took place through the creation of village communities and the gradual privatization of communal property.Footnote ²¹ The impact of these studies led most medievalists to accept an ancestral origin for commons in northern Spain. In the 1980s, however, analysis of eleventh- and twelfth-century texts showed that these resources did not completely disappear with the establishment of the lordship system.Footnote ²² This led scholars to suggest that the agricultural interests of the lords triggered a policy of aggression against commons used as pastures, which gave rise to conflicts but also led to common lands being more clearly defined. The importance and density of rural commons decreased in the territories located between the Cantabrian Mountains and the Duero. Conversely, studies of the northernmost regions argued that their commons were more resilient, even though the written sources often proved equivocal.Footnote ²³ Such research often cited the example of sernas (discussed further below), which were regarded as areas collectively plowed in the early Middle Ages and thus subjected to an equally collective ownership.Footnote ²⁴

From this perspective, commons, defined in the historiography as communal property, were a key terrain for the formation and evolution of communities, with developments driven by the lords’ attempts to erode such uses.Footnote ²⁵ Nevertheless, other analyses showed that common lands remained an important element in the organization of rural communities from the tenth to the twelfth century. The picture that emerges is thus not one of total collapse but of local power adapting to existing conditions without feeling the need to eradicate prior systems.Footnote ²⁶ The contributions of archaeology also support the conception of communal spaces in the north of the Duero plateau as complex and resilient elements, with their origins rooted in the early Middle Ages.Footnote ²⁷

The data available for the areas located in the southern part of the Duero Plateau, on the other hand, suggest the significant presence of common lands, mostly associated with livestock rearing. Since the 1970s, scholars have drawn attention to a crucial difference between this region and the northernmost territories: the prominence of urban concejos (councils), political structures under royal lordship that dominated a landscape marked by a scarcity of lay or ecclesiastical lords. From their creation in the twelfth century, these concejos controlled large expanses of territory with a wealth of areas devoted to community usage, a model that reflected factors including the local elite’s interests in livestock, the demographic weakness of the mountainous territories, and geological limitations posed by the abundance of granitic soils.Footnote ²⁸ Research on the plateau to the south of the Duero has thus seen communal lands, understood as properties of the concejos, as central to the region’s sociopolitical and economic dynamics. However, this is once again an evolutionist approach that regards commons as an ancestral tradition gradually eroded by the actions of the powerful. There is also a certain determinism implicit in the centrality given in these studies to demographic and geographical factors.

Studies on the upper valleys of the Pyrenees have portrayed them as the custodians of a stronger tradition of collective spaces due to the solidity of their community ties,Footnote ²⁹ often explained by the particular conditions of a mountainous habitat where livestock was one of the main economic activities. Yet during the late Middle Ages, the formation of transhumance routes shifted the dynamics inherent to such spaces and led to the segregation of certain inhabitants from areas where livestock belonging to a few larger-scale owners was given priority.Footnote ³⁰ Historiography has made similar assumptions about the areas conquered by Christian armies, such as the Guadalquivir valley in Andalusia. Here, the development of a system based on large concejos and their extensive properties has generally been understood as a consequence of the massive expulsion of the Muslim population in the mid-thirteenth century.Footnote ³¹ Once again, a lack of population is assigned the role of deus ex machina in the creation of commons, disregarding how, from the conquerors’ point of view, these areas were an integral part of the agricultural system they were seeking to establish. Similarly, the numerous appropriations or “usurpations” of concejo properties that took place during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries have been seen as a result of a trend towards privatization, provoked by population increase.Footnote ³²

Different perspectives thus seem to have guided the way in which the topic of the medieval commons has developed in Italy and Spain. In Italy, historians have chiefly focused on city-states, particularly within the context of urban political conflicts. In Spain, much attention has been devoted to rural areas in the central Middle Ages: in particular, on the basis of the Marxism-inspired approaches of the 1960s, greater emphasis has been placed on the role of the commons in relation to the establishment of feudal modes of production and lordships. However, certain points of convergence are also to be found. In each case, the topic seems to have attracted interest in late nineteenth-century legal history, before undergoing something of a resurgence after a period of neglect in the mid-twentieth century. Italian city-states aside, both scholarly traditions also share a particular geographical focus on mountainous areas. Most importantly, however, both foreground a tendency to understand the commons as a traditional feature of local societies, often in connection with a rather stereotypical idea of peasant egalitarianism and communitarianism. The commons have thus long been interpreted as the expression of a marginal and residual economy, developed by rural communities and contrasted with a drive towards privatization promoted either by lords or by urban authorities. What follows draws, of course, on these historiographical traditions, but is also part of a project to revisit the primary sources and trace larger patterns in new ways.Footnote ³³

The Early Middle Ages

In Italy, the use of fallow land by peasants was largely unregulated in the early centuries of the Middle Ages. The Edictum Rothari of 643, the legal corpus of the Lombard Kingdom, only established sanctions against certain practices in royal forests, such as the catching of goshawks and the gathering of honey, suggesting that there were no restrictions on grazing or the collection of wood, including on private estates.Footnote ³⁴ Throughout the eighth century, the Lombard kings extended their rights over the use of public properties, which made peasants’ access to royal fallow land contingent upon the payment of a levy. The Carolingian conquest of Italy strengthened the royal hold over fallow lands, which, in certain cases—for instance in Istria—gave rise to disputes with the local inhabitants who made use of such areas. An additional source of conflict emerged in the ninth and tenth centuries, when kings and emperors granted monasteries and ecclesiastical institutions concessions over royal forests and the related rights regarding the use of fallows.

From the last decades of the eighth century, the collective use of land is attested in terms that evoke the ownership of certain goods by local settlements and their communities, for instance, vicanalia and paganica, respectively from vicus and pagus (village), or comunalia and comunia. These expressions are sometimes included in legal formulae concerning alienated properties; the use of the commons thus emerged as a right connected to land ownership in Italian documents issued between the eighth and tenth centuries.Footnote ³⁵ What kind of goods did these terms actually describe? The documentary evidence suggests that they were more than just open fields or collective practices involving fallow lands belonging to large landowners, lords, and the Crown.Footnote ³⁶ They also included lands that the local inhabitants had specifically reserved for the gathering of wood or grazing, or which were distributed among local landowners, large and small, on an annual basis, possibly also for cultivation.Footnote ³⁷ Moreover, in a few cases, the term interconcilia is used in the sources, apparently to describe less territorially defined goods or commons, possibly shared by several owners or villages.Footnote ³⁸

Overall, these collective practices may be interpreted as the first sign of bonds of solidarity, however weak, between the inhabitants of local areas—or vici, as these localities are termed in the Italian documents.Footnote ³⁹ However, throughout the early medieval period, the prerogatives that these embryonic communities exercised over the commons appear to have been rather limited. They did not entail the exercise of any power to dispose of the land, which is to say to alienate it or change its use: we have no deeds of sale for the commons by local communities, or even evidence suggesting that common forests were converted into fields through deforestation and tillage. Ultimately, the fragile communities of the early Middle Ages could not fully manage their commons, which were affected by the interplay between the extensive powers of both public authorities, particularly from the Carolingian period onwards, and large landowners.

The Duero Plateau is an extensive area of 90,000 square kilometers in the middle of the Iberian Peninsula (map 1). The diversity among its subregions means that it can in fact be seen as a series of microcosms, each with its own similarities to and differences from other Iberian regions: as a case study, this makes it possible to avoid the construction of closed models while at the same time suggesting a general evolution. The information available on the commons in the sixth and seventh centuries is extremely sparse. Visigothic law, covering a vast area without regional specification, was not concerned with a matter that, by definition, was beyond its field of action.Footnote ⁴⁰ However, paleopalynological (pollen) analysis has proved the importance of deforestation in mountainous areas such as the Central System during the post-Roman period,Footnote ⁴¹ a phenomenon evidently related to collective action but not necessarily to the creation of shared-use resources.Footnote ⁴² Some partial studies have noted the connection between certain mid-altitude pastures in common use and the presence of rock-cut graves, which worked as physical landmarks for the claiming of collective rights by different communities.Footnote ⁴³

After the extremely scarce charters from the eighth and ninth centuries, the tenth-century evidence is more extensive and offers better information. This increase in the documentary record coincides with the consolidation of Asturian dominance over the plateau and with the sociopolitical regeneration of the entire region. The role of sernas under royal control is particularly interesting. Though their precise definition is elusive, sernas were plots of land in collective use whose “ownership” was arranged into two different levels: a lower one based on everyday use by the families of a community, possibly subjected to periodic redistributions and shared duties, and an upper one that reflected the safeguarding of such use from external threats.Footnote ⁴⁴ In León, to the northeast of the plateau, sernas are evidenced for the most part among royal property, although the kings were not the only ones to own them.Footnote ⁴⁵ Many of these sernas were associated with “central places” or important settlements that may well have preceded the integration of the Duero Plateau into the Asturian kingdom.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the second half of the tenth century, the number of royal sernas decreased considerably, while that of sernas in other hands remained steady. One explanation for this development could be a shift in the way that the kings exerted control over the power mechanisms associated with local rule. In the eighth and ninth centuries they assumed direct control over the mostly small territories, many with a stronghold at their center, within which the sernas played a key role in the exercise of local authority. As time went on, transferring control over these lands became a means to guarantee the support of other groups, so that they became part of the flow of properties donated by kings.

In the northeastern part of the Plateau, a new polity emerged from the local lordships at the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries: the County of Castile.Footnote ⁴⁷ Here, the number of sernas documented over the tenth century is much larger than in León, despite the smaller number of texts preserved. Yet the Castilian counts had no monopoly, not even a partial one, over these sernas. It was during this century that the counts began to gain control over the collective use of spaces associated with certain territories.Footnote ⁴⁸ One of the ways they exercised their authority was their hold over those territories’ commons, as a jurisdiction positioned above the local elites.Footnote ⁴⁹ In Castile, the preservation of such common areas was thus a key factor in the construction of central power. As their power expanded, the counts of Castile did not relinquish this control in return for support, as León’s kings had done, but instead kept a close hold on it. This different evolution is perhaps explained by the fact that in Castile these spaces continued to serve as a crucial connection between central authority and local power.

Apart from sernas, the archives from this period also contain occasional references to shared common areas—as in the well-known case of Pardomino—and especially to lands belonging to the inhabitants of particular villages, perhaps reflecting the communal condition of such spaces.Footnote ⁵⁰ But the inalienable nature of these commons necessarily made them less visible in written documentation than the sernas, whose upper level of control could be transferred, especially to a higher regional or royal power. This, along with the fact that the management of these lands may well have involved the payment of dues, favored their circulation as properties and, therefore, their visibility in the archives.

Documentary Revelation: Rural Communities and Commons (1000–1300)

In northern Italy, from the early eleventh century and in parallel to the establishment of rural lordships, the emergence of politically organized rural communities led to an increase in conflicts over the commons and intense negotiations between the vicini (inhabitants of local villages) and lords and large landowners, who claimed legal ownership of the commons as an attribute of their iurisdictio. Until the end of the century, however, local communities did not have any power to dispose of the commons. The agreements that were struck generally acknowledged the community’s right to use the commons, while formalizing the lords’ existing dominion over them.

A transformation is only attested from the last years of the eleventh century and over the course of the twelfth, when the system of consuls was put in place and local communities began to gain a clearer institutional profile.Footnote ⁵¹ At the same time, they started acquiring full rights over the commons—including the right to sell them. Even the increasingly frequent conflicts between lords and local communities for the most part ended with the partition of the commons or their concession to the community as a fee, enabling it to dispose of such resources without any restriction. These dynamics led to the formalization of rights over the commons, which was nonetheless associated with a profound reappraisal of such resources compared to the previous centuries. The commons became a right that was no longer associated with property but rather with residence, a distinction clearly drawn in several court cases decided in Piedmont and Lombardy in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, which limited access to inhabitants of local villages.Footnote ⁵² This kind of process went hand in hand with an increase in conflicts over the commons, leading to frequent disputes. Woods and pastures regarded as resources broadly available to local communities became increasingly territorially defined and sometimes even circumscribed by linear boundaries (termini).Footnote ⁵³ It seems reasonable, therefore, to speak of a profound spatialization of social relations in this period, including when it came to the commons.

The new institutional balances surrounding the commons led to both their management and their physical form being differentiated depending on geography. Following consistent demographic expansion, communities in the lowlands cleared forests and converted extensive areas of the land available to them into fields, sometimes selling substantial portions in the process. Once turned into fields, the commons were mostly leased to private individuals. They did not therefore disappear, but were rather transformed. While retaining their central importance for local economies, they became patrimonial assets that were managed indirectly and placed on the property market, their collective nature retained only in terms of their legal ownership. The new forms of management often caused rifts within communities, particularly between poorer families deprived of fallow lands for collective use and rural elites eager to increase the profits from leasing such properties. Pastures and woodland for collective use endured most often along river courses and on floodplains, where drainage work was regularly undertaken—and sometimes included tillage and the planting of vineyards on river islands available for common use.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the Po Valley in particular, commons in fluvial areas displayed a degree of resilience that enabled the survival of a “marginal” economy based not so much on agriculture as on pastoral and woodland activities. The exploitation of winter pastures for livestock from the Alps acquired central importance: transhumance is once again attested in late medieval documentary sources, and its itinerary largely overlapped with river courses.Footnote ⁵⁵

In mountain areas, larger swathes of common lands were preserved. However, the exploitation of fallows became far more intense and entailed a “vertical” use of the mountain landscape, progressively specialized according to altitude: pasture lands were increased, whereas forest resources were exploited through coppicing. The exploitation of commons in mountainous areas translated into the establishment of detailed regulations, traces of which survive in the significant presence of rural charters from the thirteenth century onwards.Footnote ⁵⁶ Most of these rural charters were issued by village communities, but at times they involved several villages jointly managing shared resources such as forests and pastures.Footnote ⁵⁷ Another peculiar case is that of lagoon areas, the foremost being that along the Adriatic coast between the Veneto and Emilia. Starting in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, local communities developed largely mixed forms of management in these regions, entailing an extensive use of resources that enabled local communities to collect small amounts of fish, while at the same time leasing areas to entrepreneurs who, not least through infrastructural investments, made intensive use of local resources, chiefly directed towards large urban markets often located quite a distance away.Footnote ⁵⁸ Above all, the growing visibility of commons in the sources reflects both the evolving political structure of communities and their increasing textual production. Their progressively well-defined management of the commons in turn encouraged the fixing of written regulations governing access to these goods.

On the Duero Plateau, too, the visibility of the commons in written sources increased throughout the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The changes that took place during this period were the product of greater formalization of a sort of commons that should be understood as usage rights managed via customary rules. This may have been due to the increasing prevalence of lordship and an interest in legal arrangements that ensured those lords’ overarching control over local commons. Nonetheless, the information remains very vague: actual descriptions of the commons are rare, and accounts of their day-to-day management nonexistent, generally because these dimensions were not the prerogative of lordship but related to the communities themselves. Most of the references are once again to sernas. In some texts it is possible to observe the twofold structure of rights that characterized these resources, notably in cases where plots of land within a serna were handed over to its owner. Here, the superior level can be easily identified with lordship and this dominance seems to have involved the payment of dues.Footnote ⁵⁹ It is harder to establish who had the right to use the sernas; there was probably a broad range of configurations, though some texts support identification with a rural community.Footnote ⁶⁰ Such plots were devoted to different crops (cereal growing, vineyards, flax fields) and even to the gathering of firewood.

Areas shared by several communities (mancomunales), also defined as montes, or “uplands,” are likewise frequently cited in the documentation.Footnote ⁶¹ These were used as pastures and for collecting fuel, as well as to grow seasonal crops: as households survived through a combination of agriculture and livestock breeding, they needed pastures to graze their cattle and access to basic necessities like firewood. A large proportion of these montes related to territories that included few settlements. Scholarship has suggested that, though later appropriated by royal power, these spaces may have emerged in the early Middle Ages through a “bottom-up” process,Footnote ⁶² and that their communal management was originally part of early medieval models of local political organization.Footnote ⁶³ It was therefore not by chance that the kings laid claim to superior power over such commons. Although it has been argued that this was a consequence of the royal prerogative to bona vacantia (ownerless goods),Footnote ⁶⁴ the montes definitely belonged to someone: communities had usage rights over them and their management provided a framework for political action at the local scale that, despite its weak level of formalization, was effective. Control of such critical resources was not a question of legal principle, but a way to implement royal authority over local territories.

Most of the references to montes concern disputes caused by the exclusion of one of the communities for becoming part of a lordship’s estate while the rest remained under royal control (realengo), or by the appropriation of part of a monte by a lord. The first case seems to have been perceived as a threat to the status quo. The involvement of a new actor meant that in cases of conflict, a powerful protector could tip the scales in favor of one party or the other. Lords generally sought to defend their vassals and preserve their participation in communal land use, and the resolution of some of these disputes shows that their appeals to the king were listened to. In the second case, the king would have granted the lord control over a common area, so that he exerted superior authority as the guarantor of such use. However, this authority was defined in terms of property and was often confused with it, meaning that the beneficiary sometimes claimed the right to graze his livestock—usually more numerous—in these areas or imposed some type of levy for using them. Such appropriation naturally triggered a response from the other users, and the solution frequently consisted in separating off part of the community space, which became the exclusive property of the lord.Footnote ⁶⁵ Above all, then, lordship and the actions of those who benefitted from it served to make visible potential tensions over common use, which had once been resolved in local and informal ways. When disputes arose, they were now settled in legal settings regulated by an authority external to the community of users. Even those agreements that were not based on property rights but on custom and the use of ordeals thus created and consolidated a framework for action that was conditioned by lords.Footnote ⁶⁶

References to commons linked to villages are so remarkably scarce as to be statistically insignificant. This is because lordship was fundamentally based on overarching control of communities as a whole, whereas the practical management of commons was left to the communities themselves. Where it does occur, the mention of such lands in the documents is thus limited to a lord’s allocation of control over such collective areas to the rural communities concerned, never intervening in their management.Footnote ⁶⁷ In a sense, the few surviving sources can be understood simply as evidence of a textual custom related to local lordship; in practice, these commons had always been in the hands of rural communities.

Finally, several texts point to the existence of local churches managed by what are referred to as community assemblies (conceios)—that is, groups of individuals defined by their place of residence or simply a number of household heads with no family ties among them. The existence of these community-controlled churches is especially notable in the records from the second half of the eleventh century in the context of their transformation into parishes, sometimes at the initiative of the bishops or under the authority of one of the main monasteries. Generally, agreements with ecclesiastical power are well recorded, so we know that part of the tithes paid and the appointment of the priest in charge of the church remained in the communities’ hands.Footnote ⁶⁸ Archaeological surveys have shown that many local churches were built from the eighth and ninth centuries onwards, a striking contrast with the preceding centuries.Footnote ⁶⁹ Though many of these foundations were, of course, linked to elite activity, on other occasions the initiative is likely to have come from communities themselves.

Urban Communes and Communal Goods (1100–1300)

It is not until the end of the eleventh century, with the emergence of Italian communes and their government by consul, that we find traces of a form of commons management independent of the episcopal authorities that had ruled Italian cities in the early Middle Ages, along with the first instances of their sale and alienation. The formalization of the commons thus occurred from this period onwards, increasing in frequency from the late twelfth century with the establishment of a better-defined institutional order. A significant turn occurred around 1190–1220, when many communes launched inquiries (inquisitiones) with the purpose of retrieving the commons from external control, whether episcopal, aristocratic, or private.Footnote ⁷⁰ This innovation, associated with the production of registers and the spread of records in the form of lists, took place in parallel with the establishment of podestà; these officials, foreign to the city and appointed annually, enabled the circulation of such documents as they moved from one Italian commune to another.Footnote ⁷¹ The inquiries were directed against local urban milites (knights) or bishops who continued to exercise jurisdictional rights over lands in common use. They were justified, as in Vercelli in 1192, by the need to respond to acts of “usurpation” by private individuals. Based on the study of cases chiefly concerning central Italy, Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur has repeatedly emphasized the local urban milites’ monopoly over the commons, a prerogative deriving from their willingness to go to war to defend the city’s interests. The commons certainly constituted a significant source of conflict between the people and the aristocracy, although we should not assume that the latter exercised exclusive control over all commons in all cities.Footnote ⁷²

It was nevertheless the ruling classes of the communes, including the popular ones that emerged from around the mid-thirteenth century, that benefited most from their allotment of land. The “documentary revolution” carried out by popular communes reinforced the tendency to bureaucratize these resources, a movement in which the inquiries fully participated.Footnote ⁷³ These investigations did not seek the re-establishment of the common use of fallow lands, which for the most part had been brought under cultivation and leased out. They did, however, extend to goods that until then had never been reserved for collective uses, counting at least three different kinds of goods as comunia alongside collective pastures and forests. First, they included arcades, streets, and bodies of water, which jurists had started to treat as public rights (regaliae) pertaining to urban authorities. They also took in buildings owned by the communes, such as mills, houses, and public palaces. Finally, the Italian communes seized vast areas beyond their city walls, in the contados (extended territories that were politically dependent on them and had largely the same borders as dioceses). These were acquired either by expropriating episcopal properties or through purchases and confiscations to the detriment of local lords and even rural communities: the comunia of the countryside became crucial to feeding the growing urban population. The collective fallow lands available to rural communities were thus drastically reduced as—reflecting rhetoric about the need to convert sterilitas into fertilitas—the comunia of the contados were turned into cultivated lands and put on the property market via leases.Footnote ⁷⁴

Over the thirteenth century, the commons—converted into large patrimonies under the communes’ authority and managed through leases and sales—were integrated into a complex administrative system that featured officials in charge of such resources, periodic inquiries, and extensive record-keeping. The comunia’s management was increasingly bureaucratized, in keeping with a new understanding of their public utility (publica utilitas): the commons were no longer conceived of as a means to benefit the population directly, but rather as a way to contribute indirectly to public revenues. In other words, urban communes helped give the commons a new consistency, both in terms of their overall area and in their very definition, as they increasingly came to be envisaged as goods belonging to the communes and managed as part of their overall assets.

Urban development in the Duero Plateau took place at a far slower pace than in northern Italy. However, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the formation of towns (villas) was a very active process in the Christian areas of the Iberian Peninsula.Footnote ⁷⁵ Villas were political communities defined by residence in a place that had received a charter of township (fueros) granting them a particular political and legal status—in the Duero Plateau, these fueros were generally, though not exclusively, granted by the king. Over this period, the political power of the Crown of Castile came to be expressed in new ways, establishing a “superior” level of royal control over local territories. The Crown thus ceded direct control of the royal estate (realengo) to the newly created villas, on the condition that the new political institution, the concejo, recognized the supreme authority of the monarch, who demanded dues and maintained partial—though never intensive—jurisdiction over the political systems of the villas.Footnote ⁷⁶

As a result of this reorganization, villas assumed the control that the king had previously exerted over the commons. Some twelfth-century fueros attest to the participation of concejos in the commons.Footnote ⁷⁷ On other occasions, villas managed fallow lands and held control over access rights.Footnote ⁷⁸ The emergence of these new actors naturally modified the way commons were handled. Though relations were sometimes strained due to a lack of clearly defined boundaries, villas sought to reach agreements with one another so that such rights could be clearly formalized, including through the use of boundary markers.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, the main result of towns’ participation in the commons was their transformation into property belonging to the concejos. Access rights became a part of the condition of being a “neighbor” (vecino) of the town and the proper management of these resources became essential for the defense of “common property.”

The southern Duero valley was characterized by the existence of powerful concejos in control of large hinterlands, some of which enjoyed great political agency in the absence of secular or ecclesiastical lords.Footnote ⁸⁰ The commons were central to the functioning of these concejos, especially in the mountainous areas of the Central System, sparsely inhabited lands where livestock farming was the main activity.Footnote ⁸¹ The evolution of the southern part of the Duero Plateau, which did not have a strong tradition of lordship and was integrated relatively late into the Christian kingdoms, favored a local organization in which shared commons became the cornerstone of political practice. The earliest written documents concerning this area show that there were already commonly used areas under the control of certain towns in the first half of the twelfth century,Footnote ⁸² though it is reasonable to believe that there were other resources in the hands of rural groups that were initially beyond the authority of the villas.Footnote ⁸³ In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the villas’ commons, devoted specifically to livestock grazing, were subject to a particular system of rights: they could be accessed by both the inhabitants of the small villages located nearby and livestock owners living in the villa.Footnote ⁸⁴ It is highly probable that the concejos’ power over the countryside was built through the progressive establishment of control over preexisting collective resources. Once again, the key to that process was the definition of such rights and spaces by the authorities that controlled them. If lands once in common use became concejo properties and the participation of the villas’ inhabitants was allowed, in practice only those who owned enough cattle and the means to transport their herds to these sites were able to access them.Footnote ⁸⁵

Resilient Commons: The Reorganization of Collective Property (1300–1500)

The period 1300–1500 has received significant attention in anglophone scholarship due to the centrality of enclosures in late medieval England.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, it is arguably the least studied era in Italian historiography on the commons. Though the reduction of the commons and the restriction of access by certain social classes can also be observed in Italy, here these shifts were marked by more open forms of social interplay. It would therefore be misleading to present this simply as a process of the commons being eroded at the hands of large landowners and urban elites to the detriment of powerless communities.

Generally speaking, the idea of a process of expropriation and proletarization of the rural masses, whereby—particularly in the fourteenth century—these groups were transformed into hired workers and sharecroppers with limited access to the commons, still holds true.Footnote ⁸⁷ However, this interpretation must recognize the overall endurance of rural communities in northern Italy, particularly in mountain areas and wetlands,Footnote ⁸⁸ and integrate an economic framework in which commercialization processes enabled wider access to consumer goods.Footnote ⁸⁹ The most dramatic impact on the commons can be observed in the lowlands and hilly areas, where the phenomenon of “lost” villages was particularly prominent in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Processes of abandonment brought village community structures into crisis, undermining their capacity to manage either their commons or their tax burden. Even the temporary abandonment of villages could lead to the disappearance of the commons, which would be appropriated by private individuals or alienated. In other circumstances, purchases made by large landowners interested in increasing their pastures could lead to the depopulation of villages and mark the end of the commons.Footnote ⁹⁰

As far as the management of the commons is concerned, it is possible to identify at least three major innovations in this period. First, we must consider the role played by the state: from the late thirteenth century, Anjou, followed by Venice and Siena, all famously witnessed the transfer of the commons to increasingly powerful states and their subsequent reduction.Footnote ⁹¹ The second was legal in nature: in the face of growing pressure on the commons, communities tended to reinforce the system of laws ensuring access to them by creating extensive written regulations governing their use. The third was a question of organization: in certain regions, particularly in Trentino, the Veneto, and Emilia, this period witnessed the establishment of partecipanze, a particular way of managing access to the commons by limiting it to the descendants of a community’s original inhabitants and excluding recent immigrants. In other words, these regulations created a community within a community that laid claim to the use of the commons on a hereditary, and usually patrilineal, basis—a configuration that has prompted some of the most interesting studies of commons and gender in Italy.Footnote ⁹²

Finally, whereas in the Alpine and Apennine regions the commons continued to cover broad areas, in the flatlands communities began to reorganize the management of their commons in reaction to the reduction of such resources. Many of their collectively used lands were sold off to invest in ovens and mills, which combined the pursuit of public interest with a logic of profit. This new way of structuring the commons was no doubt driven by the growing pressure on communities, not least in terms of taxation. However, it also reflected the imperative to provide essential services to local inhabitants, insofar as those managing this infrastructure on behalf of the community were required to provide bread and flour for the population. Ovens and mills became the keystones of collective resources and were jealously guarded; they only began to be eroded once the last common land had been leased out. These operations also struck a balance between the need to exploit the commons as a source of revenue and the necessity of preventing the community from falling too deeply into debt, met via the auctioning of contracts to exploit them. The commons were thus gradually transformed into public utilities of sorts. While collectively used fallow lands, pastures, and forests did endure in the flatlands, they became increasingly limited in extension and thus used in an intensive and carefully regulated way.

This communitarian reorganization went hand-in-hand with a growing number of lawsuits over the usurpation of common resources in the fifteenth century.Footnote ⁹³ Contrary to what studies on similar phenomena in different parts of Europe suggest, this dramatic increase should not be interpreted simply as a sign of the pressure exerted on collective resources by the ruling classes, but rather as a reflection of broader social conflicts triggered by the new forms of commons management introduced by local communities.Footnote ⁹⁴ The legal proceedings that urban and rural communities brought against such usurpations primarily attest to their desire to reorganize the management of the commons. Paradoxically, several of these trials saw large landowners who had significantly contributed to the impoverishment of collective resources opposing community attempts to lease out or even sell the commons in order to invest in ovens and mills. They found themselves defending free and unrestricted access to such resources because they had the most to gain from being able to pasture considerable amounts of livestock.

When it comes to the Duero Plateau, documentary sources from the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries show that the notion of commons relating to villages endured even in areas south of the river. Community-controlled churches also survived, and became the backbone of resistance against the parochial interests of the great monasteries.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, studies on the late Middle Ages have highlighted the growing pressure from those who sought to privatize the commons. Many of these “usurpers” belonged to the elite of the concejos, creating an apparently paradoxical situation in which the highest officials of the villas led the (often violent) actions against concejos’ rights. This must nonetheless be interpreted in the context of the internal conflicts of urban oligarchies. As different families sought to secure their position in local politics, forming small rural lordships or claiming control over pasture areas and other resources could serve to strengthen their status.Footnote ⁹⁶ Eventually, these practices led to the formulation of a political discourse among the non-elite (pecheros) that defended the commons as “common property” against the ambitions of the urban oligarchy.Footnote ⁹⁷

It is interesting to note, however, that local peasants also took part in such “usurpations,” which cannot be entirely attributed to the oligarchy’s greed. Common use probably benefited the main owners of livestock over families that preferred other forms of exploitation, such as flax growing or vineyards.Footnote ⁹⁸ One possible explanation for these conflicts is thus that the emerging idea of town property had altered traditional forms of usage, and that what were considered “usurpations” from the perspective of villas actually represented legitimate uses for many peasants. Commons in the hands of the urban municipalities were not always managed in favor of rural populations, who could not afford to establish the private lands that would enable them to pay taxes or participate fully in the booming market economy.

The pressure on the commons did not cause them to disappear but rather proved their resilience, especially in the concejos south of the Duero. Examples of regulations imposing collective use from above have been taken as evidence of the need to face threats against the commons.Footnote ⁹⁹ If this was so, the goal was achieved, since the commons survived. Still, the possibility that such regulations could have also served to consolidate the concejos’ political power over these resources should not be overlooked. At the same time, the success of the royal fisc also played a role in their transformation into concejo properties that could be leased in exchange for a fee (bienes de proprios). This process involved an increasing agrarianization of common lands in order to maximize the income derived from them. The so-called tierras sernas of Medina del Campo, for instance, were plots of land that could be cultivated by members of the community, but that were also partly exploited in exchange for a fee. This combination must have been quite frequent, making it possible to maintain a notion of identity and belonging to a community while simultaneously collecting the revenues required for the local treasury.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Despite the frequent trading of uncultivated land in sixteenth-century Castile,Footnote ¹⁰¹ the commons continued to be an essential component of agrosystems in the northern Iberian Peninsula into the modern era.

Shared but Different Experiences

This double itinerary through the evolution of the commons in northern Italy and the Duero Plateau points to certain shared experiences that we will attempt to draw out in this final section. For both regions, a careful reading of disparate documentation and archaeological evidence provides a glimpse of the existence of commons from the early Middle Ages on. Commons in this period were poorly defined and had an informal governance system, probably as a result of the weak institutional definition of rural communities. Moreover, since they were in collective use and not defined in terms of property, their presence in written documentation is elusive, and it is not easy to establish a timeline for their emergence. One hypothesis is that the early Middle Ages, when peasants potentially enjoyed greater social agency, was a time of expansion for such collective resources. In this context, commons may have been one of the main axes structuring local political praxis. An effective means of integrating higher levels of power into local arenas was thus the participation of central authorities in their management, generally from an overarching position unconcerned with everyday activity. For this reason, properties in collective use were often mistaken for public property or property belonging to the king—as both our case studies show in different ways.

In the eleventh century, there was a gradual formalization of the rights associated with spaces in common usage. In both regions, the manner and form of use were codified and a type of management where communities enjoyed a wide scope for action took shape. Far from posing a threat to the commons, local lords sought to establish a status quo that allowed them to play the role of protectors of such spaces and their use by the peasants under their lordship. This resulted not in the creation of the commons—which already existed—but in their adjustment to the conditions of a local and “spatialized” power characterized by the crystallization of social spaces, both physical and conceptual.Footnote ¹⁰² This process was accompanied by a greater territorialization of the commons, which came to be increasingly well defined, including through material boundaries. Their formalization was thus a performative act that gave new meaning and shape to collective use, but did not entail an ex nihilo creation. The commons gradually became community property, which implied a different conception of those spaces by those who managed and used them.

Over the centuries that followed, this community property was also integrated into urban political structures. Though this process was evidently quite different in each of the regions studied, during the High Middle Ages cities and villas acquired a growing role in the structuring of such communal property. Key to this was their transformation into an essential component of the “common good,” understood as an ideal as well as concrete practice. This conceptualization facilitated their survival in the hands of cities, princes, and kings in the late medieval period. At the same time, it allowed these authorities to adopt various forms of commons management, including leasing or clearances. All this involved another process of transformation and adaptation of the commons, which once again acquired new meaning. Nevertheless, there is also evidence of attacks and usurpations. In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, the commons were subject to appropriation, sometimes legal but more often not, by different social groups. There is no question as to the prominent role played by urban elites in their eagerness to build small lordships and consolidate their position within the urban political system. However, members of these elites were also among the most strident defenders of spaces in communal use, quite possibly because they afforded easy access to pastures at a time when livestock farming was highly profitable. And usurpations of the commons were also carried out by peasants, perhaps with the aim of creating private lands that could be used for cultivation to meet the demands of urban markets.

As the commons became a “common good,” the growth of state power in the later Middle Ages ensured that the control, appropriation, and surveillance of communal property increasingly fell to state institutions. Overall, the commons were an important element in the construction of the royal demesne in the High and late Middle Ages, although they have not featured prominently in even in-depth studies on the issue—including those focusing on France.Footnote ¹⁰³ More generally, it could be argued that in both northern Italy and the Duero Plateau the medieval commons cannot be viewed in isolation from public goods. Over the longue durée, they should thus be considered to exist in a sort of unsteady balance between communities and the rights of states, a cycle of continual transformation of commons into public goods and vice versa.

As well as similarities, our ongoing comparative analysis of these regions has revealed significant differences, especially concerning forms of management, the role of cities, and the structure of communities. First of all, there is the more markedly agrarian character of the Italian commons, particularly in the lowlands. Whereas extensive and undivided forms of use by local communities were predominant in Iberia, in Italy the commons were often turned into cultivated lands and leased out. Overall, it seems to have been typical for commons to be shared by several villages in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, where they were likely one of the main ways of organizing collective property during the High Middle Ages. In Italy, by contrast, commons shared by several villages were only occasionally found in Alpine and fluvial areas. The drawing of definitive boundaries was a particularly lengthy process, which continued throughout the early modern period. We also know of cases in which alternative solutions were adopted, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, via the creation of laws governing access to fallow lands by two neighboring communities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Nevertheless, the attempt by communities to establish exclusive control over such resources is especially noticeable in this period.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the whole, there seems to have been a sharper tendency towards the geometrization and linear delimitation of the commons at the village level in Italy.

The particular relevance acquired by river commons, especially in the Po Valley, was also specific to Italy. In contrast to the Duero Plateau, a substantial number of Italian commons were located along river courses and shaped crucial economic activities such as transhumance. The commons in river areas emerged as peculiar ecological niches compared to the surrounding territory, and were often framed in particular juridical terms through the laws concerning bodies of water, with commons located near rivers often being defined as public rights, or regaliae. Another crucial difference is the role played by cities in the organization of the commons in Italy, where the communes acted as genuine driving forces for their transformation in both urban and rural contexts. The communes developed innovative practices for the appropriation and management of the commons, such as the inquiries into usurpations discussed above; they also promoted the transformation of fallows into cultivated lands to meet the dietary requirements of their growing urban populations. In northern Iberia, the influence of cities extended over far more limited areas and had much less impact on the collective and extensive use of common resources.

Finally, there are also differences with respect to the institutions that exercised control over the commons. In the case of Italy, communities enjoyed greater institutional prominence. In the Duero Plateau, communities appeared very early on, already revolving around the commons in the tenth century, but their degree of institutionalization was relatively poor: with the odd exception, there was no formalization of usages and rights concerning the commons, though these mechanisms were occasionally evoked when disputes arose. Community-controlled churches and the resulting prominence of local groups may well have been due to the lack of solid central authorities in the eighth and ninth centuries, when local churches began to be established in the region. While the implementation of the Gregorian Reform over the eleventh and twelfth centuries made this situation visible, it did not eradicate the peculiar presence of churches in the hands of rural communities, which in certain bishoprics endured into the fourteenth century. Nothing of the sort seems to have occurred in northern Italy, where a powerful process of internal community organization took place, often stimulated by the presence of rural lords who sought to gain control over the commons. This also led to the creation of detailed regulations governing access to such resources, laid down in writing as rural charters. In contrast, in the Duero Plateau the system of lordship had to adapt to the presence of extremely strong, preexisting community solidarities. As the customs and practices of lordship were established they therefore tended to disregard the commons, whose daily management thus remained in the hands of communities that did not need to formally define their rights.

At the beginning of this article, we evoked the historiographical tableau that compares northern European societies, more cohesive and less unequal because of the strength of their commons, with those of southern Europe and the Mediterranean world, where lordship and the weakness of more volatile commons may have shaped more unequal societies. It is certainly possible to identify some significant differences between the southern regions studied here and northern Europe. Overall, collective agricultural practices like open fields were less widespread in southern Europe, particularly during the High and late Middle Ages. The southern European commons were also marked by a higher proportion of cultivated lands, which became the main focus of agrarianization and privatization processes. While similar cases may be found in northern Europe—not least enclosures in England—the greater presence of pastures not suitable for cultivation probably favored the long-term endurance of the commons. However, the extensive presence of farmland and agrarianized commons managed via leases in southern Europe should not lead us to underestimate their structuring role: in many cases, common farmland remained under the control of local communities and played a crucial role in the collective economy. In the Mediterranean world, the very creation of enclosures often reflected a communitarian drive in opposition to the interests of large landowners engaged in intensive animal husbandry, who had the most to gain from open pastures. From this perspective, the analysis of the commons in Iberia and Italy suggests we should make more cautious use of the categories of public and private. This challenges the approach of even the most recent historiography on the subject, where the former category is usually associated with the communitarian defense of the commons and the latter with the tendency to usurp and privatize them. The picture that emerges from our comparative, longue-durée study is in fact far more nuanced. It was often local communities themselves that limited the collective use of fallow land to promote more complex forms of commons management.

These two cases, which reflect a more general dynamic with regional variations, underline that the commons were by no means marginal in southern Europe. The power of lordships, cities, or states did not ultimately lead to the dilution of collective use. To the contrary, these authorities consistently sought to establish themselves in a safeguarding role over the commons, as a means of legitimizing their power on a local scale. Over time, substantial changes took place in the arrangement and conceptualization of such common resources, but they did not disappear. One of their most characteristic features was their resilience, meaning their capacity to adapt to changing conditions and the presence of new social actors. The fact that the commons became more visible in the sources from the middle centuries of the medieval period on did not reflect a new creation, but was rather another step in a long sequence of adaptations. Though this is never evoked in the primary sources, one explanation could be that the commons were related to a “moral economy,” an ethics of subsistence which considered that all of a given community’s households should be able to support themselves (but by no means entailed equality between them). This social logic would have favored internal cohesion, although it must have varied from one locality to another. It would also better explain the interest of superior powers in defending, albeit in different forms, the commons.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Lordship and its system of power, whether at the urban or the state level, did not necessarily imply overturning this “moral economy” regarding collective action. On the contrary, it benefitted from the social stability and financial advantages that it offered.