Definition
Commonance refers collectively to the commoners — the tenants and inhabitants of a manor or open-field community who hold the right of common, meaning the right to use shared land for grazing, gathering, or other traditional purposes. The term denotes the body of persons entitled to exercise rights of common in open fields, as distinguished from the lord of the manor or other landholders who did not share in those communal use rights.
The word is a collective noun of medieval land law, naming the class of people rather than the right itself. The right they hold is a "right of common" or "common of pasture"; commonance is who they are as a group.
Why It Matters in Research
Commonance is a term a researcher is far more likely to encounter in a historical source than in modern litigation or legislation. It appears almost exclusively in treatises and dictionaries dealing with English feudal and agrarian land law — particularly sources organized around open-field systems that were progressively dismantled by enclosure acts from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. By the time modern common law jurisdictions codified property rights, the open-field system that gave commonance its practical meaning had largely ceased to exist.
Researchers working with pre-enclosure English land records, manorial court rolls, or treatises on rights of common should recognize commonance as a term of art identifying the constituency of commoners — the group whose collective entitlement determined whether a given right of common could be exercised and by whom. Confusion between the right (common of pasture, estovers, piscary, turbary) and the persons entitled to exercise it (the commonance) can produce misreadings of historical documents.
The term does not appear to have migrated meaningfully into American property law. Researchers working in U.S. jurisdictions will find no operative legal significance to commonance as such, though analogous questions about who constitutes the entitled class in communal land arrangements (e.g., community land trusts, pueblo land grants, or tribal commons) may require consulting older English sources where the concept originated.
Corpus navigation note: Both editions of Black's cite Cowell — that is John Cowell's Interpreter (1607), an early English legal dictionary. Researchers tracing the intellectual lineage of this term back through primary sources should locate Cowell's definition as the apparent origin point in the dictionary tradition. Black's reproduces it without elaboration across both editions, suggesting the term carried no independent American doctrinal development.
Historical Dictionary Support
Black's Law Dictionary (1st and 2nd editions) are in complete agreement: both reproduce the same single-sentence definition, word for word, citing Cowell. There is no elaboration, no case law support, and no development between editions. This uniformity signals that the term was included as a historical completeness matter — a term a practitioner might encounter in old English sources — rather than as a live doctrinal concept requiring explanation.
What the historical dictionaries do not address is the broader system of open-field agriculture within which commonance was meaningful. Understanding who the commonance were requires background on how open-field manors operated: strips of arable land, shared meadow, and common waste over which various classes of tenants held use rights that varied by tenure, custom, and manor. Black's definition, while accurate as far as it goes, is opaque without that context.
Jurisdictional Note
Commonance as a legal term is essentially confined to English common law history. It has no recognized equivalent in American, Canadian, or Australian statutory law. Researchers in any common law jurisdiction outside England will encounter this term only in historical or comparative sources.
Encyclopedia Cross-Reference
The Law Mind Property Law Encyclopedia: Concurrent Ownership — Tenancy in Common (property_10) — for background on shared ownership and use rights in common law property systems.