ve
the return of the beasts and the amends, and not the lord of the
pasture, and that would be improper. But this does not hold good where
the King is the lord of the common pasture, and several persons holding
of him in socage have common, because in that case anyone having common
may avow a good distress. The reason is because the King will not be a
party in such case or distrein anyone."

In mediaeval country life, then, commons might be either manorial or
forestal. Bishop Stubbs in his "Constitutional History" affirms that
"neither the hundreds of England nor the shires appear ever to have had
common lands." As regards hundreds, on the enclosure of a common,
allotments were made to several townships of Knaresborough, and Stubbs
himself allows that "it seems a fair instance of common lands of a
hundred." Similarly, there is in the hundred of Coleness in Suffolk a
pasture common to all the inhabitants. But in each instance we have
probably to distinguish between use and ownership; and the same
distinction applies to counties, otherwise the case of the Devonshire
Commons might seem to refute the dictum.

The Devonshire Commons are not to be confused with the Forest of
Dartmoor. They constitute rather the purlieus, and, in general, afford
better pasturage than the forest itself. Neither are they identical
with the commons of the separate vills--the manorial or parochial
commons. The whole of the inhabitants of the county may be regarded as
possessing an interest in the Devonshire Commons, with the exception of
the people of Barnstaple and Totnes, the reason being that those
districts not having been afforested with the rest of the county, the
residents acquired no new privileges when Devonshire was disafforested.
The other inhabitants retained whatever rights they had previously
enjoyed not only in respect of the Devonshire Commons, but of the Forest
of Dartmoor, of which, at some early period--before the era of
perambulations, in which they were not included--those commons had no
doubt formed part. One effect of the wide extent of the right of common
was that the rule of _levant and couchant_ did not obtain here.
Naturally, when all Devonshire men were entitled to the use of the land,
it was impossible to fix a limit to the number of the beasts that might
be turned out throughout the length and breadth of the county.

Mention was made above of royal forests as occupying, in some respects,
a different position from o