Definition
The mutual right enjoyed by the inhabitants or tenants of two or more adjoining manors or townships to pasture their cattle promiscuously on each other's common land. Intercommoning arises where the commons of neighboring manors are contiguous and the inhabitants have exercised this reciprocal grazing right from time immemorial. It is not a right granted by any single instrument but one established by long usage — a prescriptive liberty running in both directions simultaneously.
Common Confusion
Intercommoning and common because of vicinage are treated as equivalent by Burrill and are closely related, but the terms emphasize different aspects of the same arrangement. Common because of vicinage stresses the geographic proximity of the lands as the legal basis for the right; intercommoning stresses the mutuality and promiscuous exercise of grazing across both manors. In most historical sources the terms are interchangeable, but a researcher should not assume that every reference to vicinage common necessarily implies full reciprocal intercommoning — a vicinage right could historically be unilateral in practice even if bilateral in theory.
Why It Matters in Research
This term appears almost exclusively in sources treating English feudal land law. Researchers working in pre-twentieth-century English property materials or early American colonial land records may encounter it, but it is absent from modern statutory and case law in virtually all common law jurisdictions. Its significance is largely historical.
The critical research trap is conflation with common of pasture generally. Intercommoning is specifically reciprocal: both manors benefit, and the right belongs to the inhabitants of each over the lands of the other. A right of common of pasture running in only one direction is not intercommoning. Researchers should note that Burrill explicitly equates intercommoning with common because of vicinage — a doctrinally distinct but functionally overlapping concept. Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence track each other closely (both citing Termes de la Ley as the authority), while Burrill adds Cowell and supplies the more precise analytical gloss linking it to vicinage doctrine.
For corpus researchers, the term may surface in early American land disputes involving adjacent townships in New England or the mid-Atlantic colonies, where manorial structures had partial analogues in common-field arrangements. The word "promiscuously" in the historical definitions is a term of art meaning without separation or distinction by ownership — not a behavioral description — and should be read accordingly in primary sources.
Historical Dictionary Support
All three shelf sources agree on the core definition and share a common chain of authority: Termes de la Ley, the medieval French legal glossary compiled into English editions through the seventeenth century, is the originating citation for all of them. This convergence signals that intercommoning never developed a robust body of reported case law independently defining the term; it remained a lexicographic fixture more than a litigated concept.
Burrill's formulation is the most analytically useful. By specifying "townships, or manors" rather than manors alone, Burrill broadens the definition to accommodate non-manorial common-field systems — a meaningful expansion for American research contexts where English manorial tenure did not transplant intact. His identification of the term with common because of vicinage provides a useful doctrinal anchor for researchers needing to trace the concept into treatise literature.
Black's and Rapalje & Lawrence are substantively identical, reproducing the Termes de la Ley language without elaboration. Neither source explains the legal consequences when intercommoning rights are disputed, stinted, or extinguished — gaps that require consulting enclosure literature and treatises on rights of common (Gale on Easements, or the relevant portions of Coke upon Littleton) for fuller treatment.
No source identifies a leading case for intercommoning as such, which is itself informative: the right was largely settled by custom before the period of systematic law reporting.
Jurisdictional Note
Intercommoning is a concept rooted in English feudal land tenure and has no meaningful survival in modern American, Canadian, or Australian property law. It may appear in historical English and Welsh land records, tithe commutation documents, and enclosure award materials through the nineteenth century. Researchers working in those archives should be alert to the term; practitioners in modern common law jurisdictions will not encounter it in operative legal instruments.