 Well, thank you for inviting me to give this lecture. This is the Finland. It's an exciting landscape. It's an archaeological commonplace that, in many periods and often over extended lengths of time, grazing across extensive periods, extensive pastures was shared by kin-based communities who assembled there seasonally. As such explanations are richly implicit with models of social relations, there were large communities, they were made up of one or more kin groups, they share pasture and they had regular assemblies. So what was the interplay between social structure, social relations and land management in that model? This paper explores that question through the practicalities of rights of common, illustrated in the example of the English Fenlands before 970. The Anglo-Saxon Finland is generally characterised as barely populated or exploited between the end of Roman administration in about 400 AD and the refoundation of the monastery circa 970. Such judgments are concerned with descriptions in the lives of the early saints of a frighteningly wild and isolating landscape. In 731, Bede described Ely surrounded on all sides by sea and fens. St Gwthlach is said to have founded his hermitage in Crolund just a few decades earlier in a most dismal fen of immense size, remote, untilled and uninhabited apart from an infestation by demonic spirits. That view, it might be said, persisted into the mid 20th century when a young researcher for the Victoria County history plaintively described the fens north and east of Little Port as one of the loneliest parts of the country within 100 miles of London. That was RB Pugh who taught me when I was an undergraduate. It was hard to imagine him being that intimidated when I knew him. This paper offers an alternative view. It begins with an outline of the geography of the study area, of the premises underlying the argument and of aspects of early medieval territorial organisation in the region. It moves on to practical aspects of the management of pastoral resources across the Anglo-Saxon period, suggesting that they reveal stable managed landscapes occupied by equally stable societies. So starting with the study area, here is the Finland. It's divided into two parts. Geology and height above sea level determined the specialised ecologies that characterised the 4,000 square kilometres of the undrained East Anglian basin. By the end of the Roman period, the southern part of the basin, this bit, this bit here, the dark bit, was almost entirely filled with peat-based wetlands which continued to deepen and expand until the mid 17th century. It was framed by Clay Uplins, which is all this white bit here, around the western, southern and eastern margins, and by a wide band of marine silt, which is the speckledy area at the top, that formed a barrier against the North Sea. And it was interrupted by islands of higher ground, which are these white bits in the middle here, these ones like that. Shallow water filled the basin in winter and occasionally in summer from ground water, from rainfall, and from the major river systems that flowed through it. By about 800, the maximum height of the floods, the floodline, had stabilised at about three and a half metres above sea level. The four dominant ecologies of the region reflected responses to those seasonal variations. Land below sea level, the blue, was permanently inundated. The shallower verges supported reed beds and slightly higher up sedge. Most significant for this paper were the intermediate fins coloured in green, lying between ordnance datum and the floodline that supported extensive rich natural water meadows and pastures. Settlements lay on land that rose above the floodline, creating permanently dry islands in the fin. So that's the brief introduction to the study area. So to move to the premises. The argument that follows is based on the following three premises. The first is that far from being deserted, the drier areas of the fin basin were well settled throughout the early and middle Anglo-Saxon periods. This map is taken from data sorted from the H.E.R. The second premise is that is based on palynological and etymological evidence that indicates continuity of occupation from the Roman period mirrored by continuity of exploitation. Polynevidence demonstrates long-term stability in the region's predominantly grassland character across the four millennia that separated late Bronze Age pastoralists from the 19th century commoners who grazed 1,200 cattle on their commons at Cotonin. Similarly, like the dog that didn't bark, the elements that are significant by their almost complete absence from minor late Anglo-Saxon and medieval field names are those that describe a scrubby overgrown or woodland landscape. Both suggest that natural succession from wetland to woodland was prevented across the long duree by consistent deliberate management in support of grazing. Terry O'Connor has suggested that maybe in at least some cases that constancy was deliberate and what we're detecting and largely ignoring is quite deliberate management of the landscape to maintain the landscape as it ought to be, that is to achieve a desired object. The third premise is that those abandoned grasslands supported a pastoral economy. About 35% of the larger animals on middle-anglo Saxon fin farms, so that's where it says MAS, were cattle, mostly cows. By the later Anglo-Saxon period that proportion had increased to between 40% and 50%. Kill patterns indicate a focus on dairying. Cows generally lived into their fourth or fifth years while their calves rarely survived as long as 18 months. Finally, the organisation of the commons. Nielson demonstrated in 1920 that the focused geography of each group of vells on the uplands and their rights are common in specific pastures in the Fenn, together with the powers of the courts that govern the Fenn commons, preserved the territories of polities so ancient that they predated the earliest seventh century documents. So, let's see if I can show you with this thing. Each of these groups of pins represents one of Nielson's territories. The head of the pin is the location of the medieval settlement. The sharp end of the pin is where those vells intercommon, they're shared, a piece of common pasture, and you can see how each one forms a discreet territorial unit. This is the one in the north, there's another one here, another one here and so on. You could, well rather speculatively if you wished, draw the boundaries between these groupings. Nielson's conclusions, still accepted today, were based on the invisibility of menorial holdings among intercommoning vells, the precedence of Fenn courts over menorial courts, the equity of status between commoners and lords, and the attachment of rights of common and archaic public dues due to free holdings in early folk groups. Finally, the fulfilment of two criteria for access to those land holdings, membership of the polity and free status. Subsequent research combining place name etymology and early documents has identified some of Nielson's territories with existing seventh century polities. So, for example, that of the Spaldingers, the community living along the drain, most likely the Welland, are listed in the probably late seventh century tribal hideage, and their territory is acknowledged or generally believed to be preserved in the Lincolnshire Wapentech of Elo, whose medieval fields commoned in great postland and South Holland fins. Similarly, the two Northamptonshire hundreds of Nassaburra, whose vills held exclusive rights to common in Borough Fenn, which you can see in the top right of the inset, almost certainly preserved the province of the North Hirwe, named from the Fenn or the Marsh, documented both in the tribal hideage and feeds ecclesiastical history. The most significant economic asset of each of those territories was its large share of shared wetland grazing, collectively managed and exploited under rights of common. The natural water meadows on which that rich summer pastureage depended produced a species-rich white-seed grass called Fenhay. It was described by Camden as plenteous and rank of a certain fat-gross, which is sort of a phrase I hope nobody ever applies to me, and grew so abundantly that it could be mown twice or more each year. In the 19th century, the Fenhay was said to fatten the leanest bullock in six weeks, and the richness of its cheeses, said Vancouver, could be ascribed solely to the nature of the herbage on the commons. Medieval documents show what archaeology cannot, that the prosperity of Fenman was bound up in the quality of that grassland. Men with little or no arable land, but who held rights of common in the Fen, could live very well, often better than an upland peasant with a standard arable holding. Every Ramsey peasant in 1291, for example, owned at least one cow, most owned between four and five, but only about half owned any sheep. Those patterns remained unchanged three, four and five hundred years later as the landscape that they exploited remained relatively unchanged. And there is no reason to think that they were any less true in the four or six hundred years before 1200, when again, there is relatively little change in the character of the landscape. Well, so far, so well known. What then does an investigation of the practical implications of rights of common reveal about the management of shared resources across the landscape? I'd like to start with saying something about the significance of common rights. The Fen wetlands were, of course, vast, where they're so plentiful that they could supply more grazing and other resources than any early medieval community might need, where then Anglo-Saxon Arcadia that they just open their doors in the morning and send the cattle out into the Fen. The distinctive structure and characteristics of rights of common suggests that this was not the case. The proposition explored below is that if common rights over a natural resource can be shown, as they demonstrably are in the early medieval Finland, the regulation and collective management of that resource must be implied since without it there would be no point in having rights of common. The Nobel Prize winning work of the economist Eleanor Ostrom demonstrated that common rights have three defining characteristics. They restrict access to a resource to an exclusive group whose members equitably share its output. These are not open or public resources available to all, but represent a system that depends on the restricted allocation and exploitation of a resource. Secondly, common rights are rights of property defensible in law, a status that requires the formal definition of their practical physical limits, the limits of the entitlements to exploit it and enforcement of those entitlements. That legal status predicates governance within an equally predictable framework. Shared rights of property are governed equitably and collectively by all right holders. There is an expectation of all right holders participation in all aspects of governance, management and regulation of a resource and an emphasis on decision making by consensus. That governance was undertaken by regular assemblies, courts, composed of all those with rights of common in the resource, and where, as in Finland, that resource was shared across an entire polity, the courts framed the governance of whole territories. The court of the Lietam Intergram de Marisco, for example, governed marshland on the right. The 400s of the Isle of Ely met at Modic, a location now lost in the deep common fin to the north-west of the Isle of Ely. This is Ely down here. In fleet in Lincolnshire, it was called the Court de Borra, the Court of the Bar. The courts maintained the custom of the marsh, formulating and amending bylaws and regulations aimed at the equitable exploitation and long-term sustainability and productivity of fin resources. At a minimum, such bylaws articulate rights of access, they regulate and enforce equity in the exploitation of a resource and they stipulate and enforce a management regime that maintains the long-term health of both stock and pasture. Together, these characteristics support the proposition that the presence of shared property rights implies formal management of a resource. That is, the existence of common rights indicates the careful governance of allocation, outputs and sustainability. And since the origins of common rights, including those in the fin basin, are accepted to lie in the fifth and sixth centuries, the structured collective management of those resources in the same period can be inferred. It's particularly telling in this context that the most valuable common rights were those that provided access for cattle to the intermediate fin, drier in summer and flooded in winter. The intersection of territory, governance, locality, status and livelihood in the fin basin, dominated by pastoral resources accessed under rights of common, explains Darby's conclusion that in no part of England were common rights more important. Common rights in the early medieval fins and elsewhere contribute to the livelihoods of individuals and extended households. The exclusivity of their allocation provided a signal of free status expressed too in distinctive public responsibilities that survived from the earliest post-Roman period into the mid-thirteenth century and beyond. So now those are the premises. What I want to do now is say something about how that pasture was managed in practice so that you can see how this is a system that doesn't just stand in theory, but has practical implications. The proposition of early medieval management of the fin seems counter-intuitive. How could there have been so much competition at such an early date for such an immense area of resource that its management was necessary? The answer lies in the character of the environment. It was not a uniform landscape, but a mosaic of different ecologies, each made up of a rich combination of species and whose successful exploitation depended on quite small changes in water levels that rose and fell across the year. Their successful sustainable management in any period depended on a range of cropping regimes tailored to particular micro ecologies. And you can see here, this is natural England, study was done for natural England, they talk about how quickly the environment can change from one sort of plant cover to another, depending on these really quite small changes in water level. Different kinds of pasture were restricted to specialist habitats, so too, were reed, rush, sedge, oesios, wood and peat. Each required water logging within a specific range of depths could be found at specific heights above sea level on specific types of underlying geology, and each depended for its sustainability on tailored regular cycles of cropping. So here you can see that if you don't, those are the cropping cycles that one needs in order to maintain those crops in good health. If you crop, reed or sedge, for example, more or less often they will be supplanted by other forms of grassland. If you want health, if you want to have sedge this year and next year, and in 20 years' time, you really do have to cut it every four or five years. You cut it every three years, the plant will eventually weaken and die. If you cut it every six or seven years, the land will dry out and it will turn to grass. If you want sedge now, and you want it for your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren, you have to cut it every four or five years. And that is because control of the intervals between mowing, as Ravensvale's wonderful quote, determines which crop develops at the expense of others. That is, the immensity of the wetlands masked the limitations that the environment imposed on that wide range of products all were accessed and managed under rites of common. Though then is now successful pastoral husbandry, required a deep knowledge of those limitations in order to maintain the character and density of grassland plants that contributed around 50 species per square metre to the fenn hay. It involved timetabled rotational access to different areas of pasture in such a way as to meet both the needs of the stock and maintain the quality of the land. So considerations included, but were not restricted to because if I told you them, all we would be here all afternoon, a detailed knowledge of how minute variations and combinations of underlying geology, water logging, ground cover, carrying capacity of different breeds, season and history of management contributed to the quality of grazing on different parts of the fenn. People had to know that in order to manage the land properly. The browsing habits and dietary needs of different groups of beasts and the purposes for which each group was being kept, whether for dairying, meat production, traction, sale at market and so on was equally important. You had to know what that particular animal needed at that particular stage in its cycle in order to get the product from it that you were planning to get. And the impact of stock and stocking capacity on different kinds of pasture and the imperative to rest pastures at discrete intervals after about six weeks of grazing and for about six weeks to allow them to recover their health and nutritional value was as important. If you don't allow the pasture to rest in the end, the animals will second because the pasture itself will second. It will lose its nutritional value. The surviving fenn bylaws for fenn commons speak to fennman's detailed knowledge of the needs of their stock, the condition and potential of every inch of their pastures and the requirements for maximising both their exploitation and their long-term sustainability. Now, I'm sure you're all familiar with this sort of thing. You can see these in huge quantities across early modern England. When one looks at them like this, they're a jumble of dates and localities. And so I hope that you won't mind that what I've done is just to make you a little animated example because I think it's more interesting and I also think it's more clear. So here is Rampton. The area on the right of the slide below the blue line is the fenn. The further you go towards the right-hand side, the deeper the fenn becomes. So where it says old meadow, there the grassland is relatively high and doesn't get very flooded in winter. Once you're done in the Hemsall, you're up to your knees in water in January. So if we start at the beginning of the grazing year in February, coming up to mid-March, the animals are allowed on the upper fenn pastures. I suspect that that is more a statement of wish than actuality. Those pastures may well have been flooded in February and only dried by the time you got to middle of March, but the Hemsall is closed for growing hay. Between March and mid-April, so three-year period, then they close the further irons, the animals move up into the village to calf. In mid-April, when the calves are still very young and they're looking after them, then all the commons are closed for about two weeks and then they open again and the animals are allowed down into the middle part of the fenn, but the meadow where they've been grazing while they've been carving, that is closed to grow hay and the Hemsall remains closed. You can see they're just moving around the fenn. They close the further irons to recover, they keep the animals on the near the irons, and then in mid-September, when their cows are pregnant again, when they're deciding which animals are going to go to the butcher, which are going to be kept over winter, then they're fattened everything up on the fenns ready to do what they're going to take into the market, kill them, or put them in the buyer by the time you get into midwinter, and this cycle just goes round and round and round. The dates vary from year to year depending on what the weather is doing, but it's likely wetter this year. You might move everything along a bit. If it's slightly dry, you might allow things to happen earlier, but this is the logic underlying rights of common. The same management regimes are also recognisable not only in the judgments of early modern commissioners of sewers, but also in modern conservation advice for floodplain meadows to include an annual hay cut, to use livestock from August to keep the grass from re-growing. See what they're doing there? To keep hedgerows and other boundaries in good repair, to control weeds and to maintain ditches and other watercourses, managed and timed closures of meadows for hay, and managed and timed access to specific areas of the fenn not only by dairy herds, but also by other beasts, whereas essential to peasant livelihoods in the Anglo-Saxon period as they are today. The presence of rights of common indicates that formal management of this kind was undertaken by the communities that exploited them. Now we get on to managing water. Fundamentally where we have got to is that there were a number of people living in the fenn. They were dairying. With the dairying, they needed good grass to produce cheese, butter, meat, whatever they were getting from their herds. We've seen that they had to look after the grass in order to achieve that object. They had to do more than that. They also had to manage the water. So the explanation for that regime is straightforward. Fennmen were better off than their upland counterparts because they could exploit a wide range of economic opportunities in the wetlands. The dairying economy dominated their solid, if modest livelihoods, complemented by the wide range of other fenn products. The quality and volume of its output depended on the superiority of the grassland that supported large herds of dairy cattle. And seasoningly, seasoningly, seasonally, varied levels of water were the critical factor in maintaining the excellence and productivity of those fenn pastures. So now winter floods were generally welcome because the basin floor is relatively flat, as you can see here. It could, before drainage, carry a large volume of flood water at relatively shallow depths. The water brought nutrients and protected underlying grasses from crust. And its constant movement across the basin, however slight, produced a high level of oxygenation that protected the underlying grasses against anaerobic conditions. Those relatively shallow temporary floods were best for the commons and hence for the dairy cattle. So here this is Ravensdale's sighting an early 17th century course source. Soon as drained, soon as drown, soon as drained, and the best soil, receiving, refreshing, manured by the overflowing water. They like the water, they like it to go as well. Water also offered the greatest risk to farmers' livelihoods in the unpredictability of its volume, season of arrival and length of inundation. The floods might stay too long, come too early or too late or not at all, restricting the period and or the area of grazing available to the dairy herd and threatening the production of hay. The timing and volume of exceptional floods were beyond prediction or management and it seems likely that they simply had to be endured as they generally still are today. But most risks could be managed by, for example, controlling the volume of water coming into the fence from the uplands and the general degree of wetness required to maintain pastures across the year. And so Gooch, for example, described in the early 19th century how the land is purposely inundated till the crop, such as the grass, appears above the water and then where it can be affected, he says, the water is let off. That management is implicit in the complaints of earlier fenmen across the centuries. They didn't complain about flooding on their pastures but about problems with their ability to manage the water off the land. So, for example, in Rampton in 1742, the emphasis of the petitioners was that the lands remain drowned. It was not the flooding itself that they objected to but the persistence of the water after it could have been expected to have receded. Precisely the same complaint was made in 1330. The problem was that the waters could not pass away as they had used to do. So that the lords of those fens and their tenants as also the commoners in them did totally lose the benefit which had belonged to them thereby. They're not worried about the water being there. They like it to be there. What they want to be able to is get rid of it when they need it to go. There was this system of management already happening in the Agnus Axon period. To answer that question, I need to say something first about how water management works in practice. So this is how it works. By the 11th century, water management across the fens was being undertaken by gravity drain systems made up of a hierarchy of components. Canals, locally called loads, so that's reach load going out from the fhen edge towards the cam. They were fed by catch water drains at the floodline and the drains were fed in turn by a restricted number of intermediate ditches below the floodline. So it should be emphasised that this is not a system aimed at drainage. Honest, if you ask me what's this drainage, I'm going to take you behind the bike sheds after. This is not about drainage. It was focused on managing seasonal volumes of water in order to maximise the productivity of grasses of different qualities in different seasons. That is, to maintain particular ecologies at different points in their growing cycles. Ditches that help to maintain the depth and length of winter inundation, for example, might become closed reservoirs in summer to keep the meadows down. So now, to take you through the system, at the head of the system was the load. So I coloured it in in dark blue. This is Wiccan load. It's a canal whose purpose was to take water directly from the fhen edge, which you can see up towards this end of the load. There's the fhen edge. And it takes it long and long and long to the nearest river, which is the River Cam. And the word load embodies its objective. It's derived from the old English galed to lead just as water is still lead in channels today. So the loads were fed by catchwater drains. So these are the two catchwaters in Wiccan, one there and one there. And they lie just slightly below the floodline, which I've coloured in there, the floodline at three and a half metres, roughly speaking, above ordnance data. So the catchwaters run along the fhen edge and they divert minor upland water courses into the load. So they catch the upland water and they send it down the load so that upland water doesn't go into the fhen. Right. So now many loads were cut across the small winding creeks and streams that had previously naturally drained the wetland. And so Wiccan load that we've been looking at is this one here. And this is a system of loads, somewhat to its south-west. And you can see how they cut across the little natural creeks and streams that used to drain the fhen before the loads were constructed. Those areas in between the loads that's here continued to receive water from rainfall and from groundwater. Without management, the fhen pastures would flood, threatening peasant livelihoods. So you can take the water, the upland water out, straight to the river, that's all fine. But if you don't manage the water between the loads and below the floodline, the bit that I've coloured blue, then you're going to be in trouble. So you could deal with that problem by linking the surviving segments of creeks with the loads and all by digging a restricted number of ditches, which I've cut it in in purple here. Within each area of fhen, water flowed from the highest ditch to the lowest ditch. So it starts here and it starts there and then it ends up eventually in the load. And it's sent into the load through wooden pipes made by slotting hollowed tree trunks together end to end. So you hollow it and stick it in and then... So, you know, it's a bit like those games we used to play with straws when we were children before they had fancy electronic games like they used to be. The outfall from the pipes was controlled by one-way doors or hatches. So it's what it looks like. That allowed water only to flow outwards from the fhen. When water levels were higher in the river levels, in the rivers or the loads than in the fhen, the door was, the pressure of that water kept the door closed, protecting the fhen from flooding. When water levels were higher in the fhen, the water drained out into the river. Now the use of hollowed pipes, trees as pipes, has a long history. They were used for managing water in Dutch marshland as early as 175 BC, which is actually this example, but I couldn't find another nice one as good as this. They were widely used across Roman Britain from Lincolnshire to Hadrian's Wall, as well as in prehistoric and Roman Gaul in medieval Finland and in British towns from the Middle Ages into the 18th century. So that functional hierarchy of loads, catchwaters and ditches suggests a second proposition that the presence of a load implies structured water management. So were there loads in the Anglo-Saxon fhen? Because if there are, then that suggests that there was structured water management going on. Right. So the surviving documentary evidence suggests that at least eight loads and catchwaters were constructed before 970. That's before the monasteries were refounded. Two were already present when they were recorded in 972 in the Endowment Charter with which King Edward endowed the refound of Peterborough Abbey. So I've shown each one as a blue circle, and then I've shown it on subsequent slides as a green one. So the blue one on each side is the new one, and the green one is the one you've already looked at, because this is the first, so there aren't any green, but it will become green. So King Stealth forms part of an ancient waterway between Stangrand, which is here and Benwick, which is there, along which the River Neen had by then been re-routed. Another one from the same charter, Abmerlaid, had been constructed to connect the now-vanished Ugg and Whittlesey Mears. A charter of 956 for Yaxley and Farset on the south-western fhenedge includes in its boundaries a catchwater, referred to as Dhamdicam, along which three heiths, keys, lay, the heith along the ditch, ditch heith, south heith, the south heith, and north heith, the northern heith. So now Hart, who knew the area well, suggested that Dhamdicam referred to Yaxley load. I think that it's more likely that the ditch referred to one or another of the two catchwaters that fed the load and whose existence they implied, because the thing is, as soon as you put the catchwater along the fhenedge and you're collecting the upland water in the catchwater, unless you send the water from there somewhere else, all it's going to do is spill into the fhen and flood it. So you need to, if they're the catchwaters, they must also be a load. A charter for 945, so again backwards in time, a charter for 945 for Lake and Heath inadvertently records a heith there that was important enough for a five heith estate to be named from it. The existence of the heith implies the presence of a load since it lay on the fhenedge five kilometres away from the River Little Ooze. Three artificial watercourses form part of the Cambridge and County boundary, which Hart suggested was established between 917 and 921. Should be noted though that Rolf suggests a more gradual emergence of the county boundary across the 10th century. Each also formed the boundary of the early Anglo-Saxon territorial intercommons identified by Nielsen. So the first one here is must, listed in Edgar's charter to Peterborough in 972. It was a catchwater running along the medieval fhenedge between the Neen at Peterborough and Crolund. It was part of the county boundary between Cambridgeshire and Northamptonshire and between the estates of the Abyss of Ely in Peterborough. The old course of the River Ooze included at least two canalised sections between its entry into the fhenbase and near Eareth, which is down here, and its confluence with the Neen at Benwick, which is... Both formed the boundary between Cambridgeshire and Huntingtonshire and between the lands of the Abbeys of Ely in Ramsey. They're called hollode and crollode, which sounds ridiculously like something out of the Hobbit. Finally, there's Merelaid, now called Conquest Load, also listed in Edgar's Charter of 972. It was, however, also named in a 12th-century forgery of a charter purported to have been written in 664, with which King Wolf here of Mercia endowed his new Abbey at Meadamstead, was now called Peterborough. Her Avril Morris, in a carefully constructed argument, agreed that most of the boundaries listed in the charter were 12th-century fabrications, but she also argued that those in the south-west and Fenn Basin drew on much older traditions and or a much earlier document. As she's right, then the date of Merelaid, while still unknown, might just be pushed back into the 9th century or possibly even earlier. At its most conservative then, the presence of these loads in catch-water suggests that water management was being practised across the Fenn Basin by the first half of the 10th century and perhaps as far back as the 8th. This is certainly possible since contemporary canals were also being built in other places. Charlemagne, for example, famously constructed a three-kilometre-long canal in Bavaria in 793 to link the Rhine with the Danube. The successful diversion of tributaries of the river Sain into canalised courses between 840 and 877 is equally well known. Closer to hand, wooden revetting of the banks of a canal linking Glastonbury Abbey with the River Brew have been carbon dated to between about 850 and 900. The Roman Foss and Cardykes in Lincolnshire are both believed to have been refurbished in the 8th century and, of course, similar engineering was required for the leets and overflow channels of the many water mills constructed across early medieval Europe. So they knew how to do it. There's no reason why they shouldn't have been doing it in the Fenns. So who was responsible? These were expensive undertakings whose construction and maintenance represented a considerable investment of time and labour. Some have argued that only menorial lords had the authority and resources to initiate, direct and coordinate work on this scale and to enforce the participation of large numbers of labourers and overcome the innate conservatism of farming communities. The trouble for Finland is that there was no one with such large-scale overarching control over substantial areas of the basin between 870 and 970. The region came under Danish control in 870. The foundation of new monasteries and the refoundation of much diminished possibly abandoned 7th century houses came a century after that. Landholding in the intervening period appears to have been characterised by relatively small estates held by many secular owners. So in the absence of lordly direction who can have been responsible for the construction of such sophisticated water management systems? An answer might be found in Dyer's submission that large-scale landscape remodelling could as straightforwardly be undertaken by local communities as by menorial lords. A proposition refined by Faith who has suggested that collective action was probably limited to the substantial farming families in each village, that is in effect those with rights of common. That possibility is worth pursuing since across the Fenn Basin, the ancient liability for maintaining a common and the loads, ditches and banks that protected it had time out of mind laying with those commoners whose herds grazed upon it. If you had the right to graze upon the common you had the responsibility to maintain it. And that collective duty was called mean work. It was overseen by Fenn Rives or Ditch Rives appointed by the same Fenn courts that governed the commons, the gamainer work. The word is derived from this old English phrase. It means work shared in common, an element preserved in the place name at Mainie, the common Fenn, the gamainer E. And it survives in modern Dutch and in Afrikaans as Chementer community. Mean work included the construction of canals and drains as well as their maintenance. The men of land beach collectively made beach load at their own liberty and will in 1235 to drain their common pasture from water. The commoners of the ancient fleet of marshland constructed the old podike in 1223 to four to exclude the water that threatened their grazing from deeper peat fence to the south. And commoners were still constructing canals in the Lincolnshire fence in 1555, making a new drain and sewer to protect 800 Fenn and into common so ancient that it was grazed by men from the veils of 800s. Those responsibilities for systems of water management were an integral part of the work and entitlements involved in owning the right of common. The inclusion of all aspects of engineering for water management in mean work can see it's unspelled there, mean work. Suggest that they were simply another aspect of the careful management of shared Fenn pastures across the region's wetlands. It's difficult to see why loads, catch waters and ditches would have been collectively maintained within a set of common tasks, responsibilities inseparable from common rights and with the overall label of domain of work that they had not also been collectively planned and constructed. So there are good reasons then that nowhere in England were common rights more important that such rights in Fennland was so ancient and that the cultural identity of early medieval territories was structured around them. Common rights signalled a minimum level of prosperity. They indicated a man's free status. They offered opportunities to interact on equal terms with others of different rank and wealth and brought with them treasured, concomitant responsibilities for participation in the active governance of a territory as a whole. The livelihoods and valued signs of status of early medieval Fenn peasants depended on their access through common property rights to economic opportunities in the Fenn and that depended in turn on careful management of those wetlands. As Susan Reynolds has argued, the mutual obligations, responsibilities and rights integral to their collective governance as well as their shared oral traditions of custom and practice are very like those in extended as well as nucleated families. It's not surprising, she suggests, that members of early medieval territories described themselves as members of the same kin or folk descended from the same real or mythical ancestor. All that their polities were named from their localities. This is not, however, to argue that early or middle Anglo-Saxon Fenn communities were structured on a utopian egalitarianism or a lack of conflict, or that such structures were an unsophisticated precursor of more complex social and political hierarchies. The growing development of hierarchical structures across early medieval society is well accepted and understood. An individual's social position increasingly depended on his rank, wealth and access to power. Nothing could have been less equitable. On the other hand, membership of, attendance at and participation in, collective institutions governing equitable rights of common were also integral to social identity in the status they bestowed and in the distinctive rights and responsibilities that went with them. So the triangle shows the social hierarchy and then the green area shows those that have got rights of common. Not everybody gets rights of common. Those at the bottom don't have them. Only the people with free status and those are with themselves within a social hierarchy access to rights of common. They existed with complemented and enriched vertical hierarchies of status, wealth and power by offering individuals carefully controlled opportunities to create reciprocal horizontal relationships with others of different power, wealth and status. An investigation of the practical implications of rights of common reveals a system in which society and ecology were mutually sustained. Giving practical expression to the particularities of kinship, prestige and access to wealth. They offer the possibility of an empathetic understanding of the complex tangle of relationships between individuals, between individuals and their communities, the recognition of their status, their active participation in the collectivities that govern the land they found, the folk they belonged to, the territory they inhabited and the significantly pastoral livelihoods that supported them. This was not Gwthlach's Wild Wilderness, nor Ethelthrith's Desolated Landscape that a managed environment controlled by and supporting a stable and evolving social economic and territorial order. Hurrah.