That seems to be ahistorical revisionism. The common land in mediaeval England was literally called "waste" as in a "wasteland". It seems that some ideological academics are now trying to rewrite this history. Wikipedia has been edited into a state of internal inconsistency where it says [2]:
> Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it
So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners".
It also says:
> the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing
... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says:
The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment.
... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist.
Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad.
> Millions of acres were "common land", but this did not mean public land open to everybody, a popular fallacy ... Certainly their rights were strong, because the lord was not entitled to build on his own land, or fence off any part of it
So this land wasn't fenced off in any way and the putative "owner" couldn't build anything on it, yet this article argues it also wasn't "open to everybody", despite literally being called "common land" that is the root of the word "commoners".
It also says:
> the commoners' right to graze the lord's land with their animals was restricted by law - precisely in order to prevent overgrazing
... but the citation for this is very curious. It's a book [1] with an abstract that says:
The report of the Royal Commission on Common Lands (of which both authors were members) revealed not only the chaotic state of the laws relating to the commons but also the lack of information regarding their nature, distribution and extent. Some commons being shamefully misused, while some very large tracts are lying idle and serving no useful purpose either economically or for public enjoyment.
... which sounds exactly like the well known tragedy of the commons that supposedly doesn't exist.
Checking the history of the Wikipedia talk page (which is nearly empty) reveals what you might expect: someone engaged in a massive edit war to totally rewrite this page along ideological lines, claiming the classic understanding taught to British schoolchildren was "neomalthusian rubbish", whatever that means. They appear to have simply ground down their opposition, then the whole discussion was deleted by a bot. Nice. Wikipedia has become such a dumpster fire in recent years, it's so sad.
[1] https://www.amazon.co.uk/Common-England-Collins-Naturalist-L...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons