Definition
A common chase was a tract of land in old English law over which all persons held an equal right to hunt wild animals. Unlike a private chase — which was an exclusive hunting franchise granted by the Crown to a particular lord — a common chase was open to the community at large, with no single person holding superior hunting rights over others. The term captures a form of shared use right in land that was not individual property in the modern sense but a collectively held liberty to pursue game.
Common Confusion
Common chase is easily confused with two neighboring terms:
CHASE (private): A franchise granted by Crown grant allowing a named individual exclusive hunting rights over a defined territory. The key distinction is exclusivity — a private chase shut others out; a common chase admitted all.
COMMON OF HUNTING: A right held by a specific person (or class of persons) to hunt over another's land, typically by grant or prescription. Common of hunting is a servitude-type right burdening a particular owner's land for the benefit of a particular grantee. Common chase, by contrast, was not a right held by specific grantees against a specific landowner but a general open right of the community over a particular place.
Researchers should also distinguish common chase from the commons of pasture, estovers, piscary, and turbary, which are the more frequently litigated and better-documented forms of common right in both English and early American law.
Why It Matters in Research
This is a historical term of art, extinct as a living legal concept. Researchers encounter it almost exclusively in:
1. Medieval English year books and early common law records, particularly those touching on hunting rights, game law, and the law of warrens and chases.
2. Comparative property history, where common chase illustrates the spectrum of medieval land-use rights — ranging from fully private to fully common — that preceded modern property frameworks.
3. Research into the historical roots of public access doctrines or commons theory. Common chase sits alongside terms like common of pasture, common of piscary, and common of estovers as evidence that shared use rights over land formed a coherent legal category in English law, not a mere absence of private right.
The principal research trap is conflation with related but distinct terms. A "chase" alone was typically a private franchise. A "forest" was Crown-reserved hunting ground subject to forest law. A "common" was a shared right over another's land for specific purposes. Common chase merges the shared-use character of a common with the hunting-specific scope of a chase. Historical sources do not always keep these boundaries crisp, and year book passages may require close reading to determine which regime applies.
Burrill's reference to Year Book Pasch. 10 Edw. III (1336) anchors the term in primary sources. Researchers working with medieval land records or game law history should consult that year book passage for period usage.
Historical Dictionary Support
The three source dictionaries are in close agreement, all treating common chase as a purely historical English law term defined by the right of all persons equally to hunt wild animals over the affected land. There is no meaningful divergence on substance.
Burrill adds the most texture: he supplies the Law French form (comon chace), the Latin-French gloss on who held the right (à toutz gents — to all persons) and what animals were covered (touts beasts chaceables — all beasts of the chase), and the Year Book citation. This makes Burrill the most useful of the three for a researcher seeking primary-source grounding.
Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence offer identical summary definitions, suggesting mutual reliance on a common ancestor source. Neither adds to Burrill's treatment.
What all three sources omit is equally notable: none situates common chase within the broader taxonomy of English game law, none distinguishes it from the private chase or from the forest franchise, and none traces whether the concept had any practical survival into later periods or any colonial American reception. For those questions, researchers must look beyond the dictionary shelf — to Manwood's Treatise of the Forest Laws (1598) or Coke's commentary on game and hunting rights — bearing in mind that common chase as a living institution had substantially dissolved by the time those works were written.