Definition
In old English law, the body of commoners — that is, the tenants and inhabitants collectively entitled to exercise the right of common over open fields, woods, or waste lands belonging to or associated with a manor. The term refers not to the right of common itself, but to the class of persons who held that right, understood as a collective unit.
Communance is a term of historical English land law and has no active modern legal meaning in either English or American practice.
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Why It Matters in Research
Researchers working in medieval and early modern English land tenure, manorial records, or enclosure history will encounter this term in its original context. Several navigational points deserve attention.
First, the term is easily confused with related but distinct concepts: the right of common (the entitlement itself), common land or common fields (the physical subject matter), and commoners (the individual holders). Communance denotes the collective body, not the right, the land, or any single person.
Second, the term's primary surviving use is in sources mediated through Cowell's Interpreter — an Elizabethan-era legal dictionary — and its successors. Burrill cites Cowell directly. Researchers tracing the term back further than Burrill should consult Cowell's Interpreter (1607) as the proximate source. Law dictionaries from Blount, Jacob, and Termes de la Ley may use adjacent vocabulary (commoners, commonalty, right of common) without deploying this specific term, so searches should cast wide nets across the semantic cluster.
Third, in manorial court records, enclosure proceedings, and Parliamentary enclosure acts, the collective body of commoners appears under several names. Communance is the more archaic form; later documents may refer to the same group as "the commoners," "the inhabitants entitled to common," or simply "the tenantry." A researcher who finds communance in one document should expect related documents to use these substitute forms rather than the same word.
Fourth, this term has no meaningful American legal history. It did not travel to colonial American law in active form, and researchers in American property history will find no native doctrine under this label. The underlying concept — shared grazing and use rights over undivided land — did influence early American common-field and open-field arrangements in some New England communities, but the vocabulary differs entirely.
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Historical Dictionary Support
Burrill's Law Dictionary is the primary English-language legal dictionary source for this term and traces directly to Cowell. The entry is minimal: a single-sentence definition identifying communance as the collective body of commoners entitled to common rights in open fields or woods. No case law or statute is cited beyond the Cowell reference, which is consistent with the term's character as vocabulary of description rather than a term of legal art with its own doctrinal development.
Broader historical legal dictionaries — Jacob's Law Dictionary, Tomlin's Law Dictionary, Bouvier's Law Dictionary — do not appear to carry a dedicated entry for communance. This absence is itself informative: the term occupied a descriptive rather than operative role in legal writing and was not a term courts or draftsmen needed to define with precision. Its appearance in Burrill reflects the encyclopedic ambition of nineteenth-century legal lexicography rather than active contemporary usage.
Cowell's Interpreter, as the apparent origin of the term's legal dictionary life, was itself a glossary of archaic and technical terms, many drawn from Norman French and medieval Latin roots. Researchers should be aware that Cowell's definitions were occasionally contested or criticized in his own era and should not be treated as authoritative expositions of doctrine without corroboration.
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Jurisdictional Note
Communance is a term of English manorial and common-field law with no recognized American legal counterpart. It is relevant only to English legal history research, particularly for the period preceding Parliamentary enclosure of common lands in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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