Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Grimley Main ·
The Ledger of Two Commons
A parish survey finds the same common leaving and rejoining the boundary record on a cycle, with hedgerows that do not come back the same.
- filed: "before the boundary court"
- reference: "GM/CN/11"
1. This survey of the commons of Grimley Main was compiled for the boundary court at the parish council's direction, under reference GM/CN/11, and it supersedes the compilations of 1959 and 1971, both said at filing to be complete and both shown here not to have been. The parish holds two registered commons, Weeping Ash Green and the larger Halteredocks. This paper is concerned with a third.
2. The parish keeps its commons in a working book — claims, rights of turbary and estovers, encroachments, offsets — and the working books survive for every quarter-century since enumeration, in the parish chest or, after 1951, the district store. The officer's task was to reconcile them against the register and this survey's measurements. The discrepancy arises in that referral, and it is a schedule, not a detail.
3. The commons are listed numberless in the register of 1888, numbered in 1923, in 1951, in 1971, and in the draft register now before the court. Between the registers of 1888 and 1923 the working books show the parish's list with one difference. The books of 1893 and 1908 record a third common, Wandlesforth, some forty-one acres by the 1908 measure, bounded "by the twelves, the ditch, and the old hedge upon the ridge". The register of 1888 does not carry Wandlesforth. Nor does 1923. Nor any register since.
4. The alternation is not a clerical slip, because it is found twice. The working books of 1951 and 1964 again record a third common, again as Wandlesforth, again bounded by the twelves, the ditch, and the old hedge upon the ridge, and again the registers of those years and every register since know only two. The dropping-out is therefore not once but twice in the ancestry of the record, and, which is the matter put before the court, it is periodic.
5. Periodic in this precise sense. Taking the working books in sequence from 1888: the third common is present in the books of 1893, 1908, 1951, and 1964; absent from the books of 1932, 1971, and this compilation; and present again — this officer must record the date — in the preliminary sheet of this survey only. The appearances are decades apart, the absences run the other way, and the books, laid side by side, close the arithmetic for no interval; it obeys something the books do not date.
6. The hedgerows are the harder finding. In the periods the common is in the books, the bounds are as above: twelves, ditch, ridge hedge. In the preliminary sheet of this survey, the grounds between the twelves and the ditch carry hedges the ordinance maps do not show and the parish's own maps at every period fail to match. The hedges were walked on the 9th, mapped on the 10th. By the re-walk on the 11th, the field notebook has it: two lengths shown on the map of the 10th are not standing on the 11th, one length standing is not on the map, and no cutting, clearance, or weather is recorded in the interval.
7. The parish's position, taken by the chairman at the pre-court hearing and confirmed in writing, is that Wandlesforth is a mistake which entered the working books from an older correspondence and was propagated by copying, twice, at intervals of some sixty years, and that the hedges described in 6 are encroachment and recent growth, unmapped for want of the surveyor's time. The chairman is a careful man and this is the careful man's position. Against it stands every working book the parish has held, which it has not proposed to withdraw.
8. It remains to record, without resolution, two figures. The acreage set down for Wandlesforth in 1908 is forty-one acres and twelve perches. The acreage set down in 1951, in the hand of a different clerk who cannot have copied the 1908 book, it being in the other store, is forty-one acres and eleven perches. The hedges walked on the 9th enclose, by the step-chain, a figure set down in the space for area; the two do not agree, and the hedges hold the smaller.
9. The court is asked to determine whether the parish holds two commons or between two and three, and the survey closes on the question the record cannot settle: the common that returns every other generation with bounds mere yards shy of the bounds it left with — is the interval a failure of the record, or is the record, each time it resumes, the only thing holding the yardage still.