Definition
Commonable means entitled to, or subject to, a right of common — the traditional English land right allowing certain persons to use another's land for specified purposes such as pasture, estovers, or piscary.
The term operates in two distinct but related directions:
1. Commonable beasts: Animals that may lawfully be put to pasture on common land. Beasts of the plow (horses, oxen) and beasts that manure the land (cattle, sheep) are commonable. Swine, goats, and similar animals are not commonable, as they were considered destructive to common land and not within the customary scope of the right.
2. Commonable land: Land that is subject to a right of common — that is, land over which commoners may lawfully exercise their rights. Under a grant of common of pasture, only pasture land qualifies as commonable; arable or woodland would not fall within the right unless expressly included.
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Common Language
Modern common usage (Wiktionary): Owned, managed, or used in common; of an animal, one that may be pastured on common land.
Historical common usage (Webster's 1913): Held in common; allowed to pasture on public commons. "Forests and other commonable places." — Bacon.
The common and legal definitions are unusually close here, but the legal usage is more precise in a way that matters for research: the legal term does not merely describe shared or communal use in the abstract. It describes a defined legal status — either an animal's eligibility under a specific property right, or land's susceptibility to that right. A researcher who reads "commonable" in a historical source as simply meaning "shared" or "public" risks missing the structured legal framework of common rights that underlies the term.
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Why It Matters in Research
COMMONABLE is a term of English land law with deep roots in the common-law system of rights of common. Researchers encountering it in historical sources — particularly English sources before the enclosure movement reshaped common land rights — must understand it within that system, not in isolation.
Several research traps apply:
First, the beast-side versus land-side distinction matters enormously. Historical documents may use "commonable" to describe animals or land, and the legal consequences differ. A dispute over whether an animal is commonable is a question about the scope of an existing right; a dispute over whether land is commonable is a question about whether the right attaches at all.
Second, the lists of commonable and non-commonable beasts (drawn from Coke on Littleton and Blackstone's Commentaries) were not merely illustrative — they reflected customary agricultural logic about which animals benefited the common without degrading it. Researchers working with enclosure disputes, manorial records, or agrarian litigation will find these distinctions invoked as operative legal criteria.
Third, American researchers should note that rights of common were largely not transplanted into U.S. property law as a functional system. The term COMMONABLE will almost exclusively appear in American legal dictionaries as historical inheritance from English sources, not as a live term in American cases or statutes. Encountering it in an American legal context likely signals either a historical treatise, an English law comparison, or an antiquarian dictionary source.
Fourth, the term has no meaningful role in modern property law outside of jurisdictions (primarily England and Wales) where common land rights survive in modified statutory form. Researchers should not extrapolate from historical definitions to contemporary land disputes without checking the current statutory framework.
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Historical Dictionary Support
The historical dictionaries are in strong agreement on the core definition. Black's (1st and 2nd editions) and Burrill's are nearly verbatim, all drawing directly on Coke's Institutes (Co. Litt. 122a) and Blackstone's Commentaries (2 Bl. Comm. 33). This convergence reflects the term's stable, narrow technical meaning within English land law — it was not a contested or evolving concept by the time these dictionaries were compiled.
Rapalje & Lawrence adds the most substantive analytical content of the four sources, explicitly distinguishing the land-side meaning (commonable land as land subject to a right of common) and noting the limiting effect on grants: under a grant of common of pasture, only pasture land is commonable. This distinction, drawn from Perkins' Profitable Book, is not developed in Black's or Burrill's and represents the most research-useful formulation across the shelf.
What the historical sources collectively omit is any treatment of the enclosure movement's effect on these categories — by the time these dictionaries were published, enclosure had substantially eroded the practical importance of the beast-distinction rules, and none of the sources flag that context.
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Jurisdictional Note
COMMONABLE as a live legal term is essentially confined to English legal history and surviving English common land law. In the United States, rights of common were not systematically adopted, and the term does not appear in American statutes or modern case law in any operative sense. Researchers working in English law should consult the Commons Act 2006 and the Commons Registration Act 1965 for the modern statutory framework governing common land and rights of common.
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Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia: Concurrent Ownership — Tenancy in Common
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