58 THE MANOR
once they were passed, the lord could enclose his common lands
without any assent of the free tenants being necessary. This still
•left him "the custom of the manor" to deal with, and this was
generally a powerful force.1 The'' common assent" of the whole
vill determined the dates at which various parts of the common
should be open, or the number of cattle which each member of
the manor might pasture thereon. Any infringement of these
arrangements caused instant trouble and litigation. Neverthe-
less, after these two statutes came into force, the lords gradually
exercised more and more pressure, and the peasants were slowly
deprived of their sometime powers and privileges.
Where the commons merged into the wastes would be difficult
to say. Some manors had only a limited amount of common
strictly reserved for its own members, but in many parts of the
country there were large tracts of waste lying between one vill
and another. They were no-man's-land, and frequently so vast
in extent that no very clear delimitation of ownership had ever
been made.2 The vills surrounding them inter-commoned there-
on at will. Such, for example, was the waste in the district of
Whalley, where some 36,000 acres were used as pasture and
woodland by various vills, and only 3500 acres were cultivated
as arable.3 The waste of the New Forest was calculated at about
60,000 acres and fringed upon some twenty-one vills; that of
Ashdown contained neady 14,000 acres, and being Crown land
formed part of no manor. Epping Forest contained about
6000 acres and extended into seventeen manors, and so the
list might be continued.4
These vast stretches of waste were utilised by all those vills
which were near enough to do so and their rights run back into
time immemorial. These vills inter-commoned in the waste in
groups roughly determined by their geographical position. To
take an example: Miss Neilson, in her introduction to A Terrier
of Fket, has analysed with great care the arrangements made in
1 See, for example, A Terrier of Fleet (ed. N. Neilson), Ixxviii, and also
below, p. 100, for a discussion of the force of custom.
2 See, for example, Bracton's Note Book, Case 1194, where the jury say a
certain piece of waste " arapla est et magna, et nesciunt aliquas divisas
quantum pertinet ad unam villam quantum ad aliam *',
8 Whitaker, Whalley, I, 233.
4 Dartmoor Preservation Association, I, xxviii.