The historical antecedents of Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” are generally understood to lie in the common grazing lands of medieval and post-medieval England. The concept of the commons current in medieval England is significantly different from the modern concept; the English common was not available to the general public but rather only to certain individuals who inherited or were granted the right to use it, and use of the common even by these people was not unregulated. Thus, the traditional commons system is not an example of an inherently flawed land-use policy, as is widely supposed, but of a policy which succeeded admirably in its time.
