Legal Definition and Related Resources of Common field

1. The arable land of an ancient village community which though divided into parcels, long narrow strips, separated by balks of turf perhaps a yard wide, and allotted to ownership in severalty, lay otherwise in common, were to some extent used in common, and were cultivated, or at any rate ploughed, in co-operation. In this sense usually in the plural. See Pool. & M. Hist. Eng. Law, I, 364. 2. In those parts of the southern states which were of French settlement, a field divided into lots from one to three arpents in width (front) by forty in length (depth) for cultivation by the inhabitants of a village, the whole enclosed by a common fence. The term common field is of American invention, and adopted by congress to designate small tracts of ground of a peculiar shape, usually from one to three arpents in front by forty in depth, used by the occupants of the French villages for the purposes of cultivation, and protected from the inroads of cattle by a common fence. The peculiar shape of the lot, its contiguity to others of similar shape, and the purposes to which it was applied, constituted it a common-field lot. 1 Black. (U.S.) 600.

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This definition of Common Field is based on the The Cyclopedic Law Dictionary . This entry needs to be proofread.

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