Dual Rights

At the time of registration, farmers were often unsure which common their rights should be registered on, especially where registered CL (see Glossary) units split areas that they had formerly regarded as one common. As a consequence there was a tendency to register their rights on more than one common. Some of these dual rights are recorded in such a way that it makes clear that the registration is to be read alongside the dual registration on the other commons and that the rights can only be exercised once. Others make no reference to the dual reference and the registration is often ambiguous for how the rights should be exercised.

There is no definitive legal argument for the treatment of dual rights as it has not been tested legally. However, in calculating money for the Basic Payment Scheme, Defra took a view as to how dual or split rights should be treated (please refer to the information in the section on BPS).

In brief, Defra’s view was that if a right is available on both common A and common B, then the rights would be shown in full in each register with no reference to the other CL unit. Where the rights are shown in the register with a reference to another CL unit (e.g. entry on Common A shows a right to graze 30 sheep across Common A and the entry also states these rights are also to be grazed on Common B and Common B has the reciprocal entry) then this was taken to mean the total rights available should be split across all the CL units (i.e. commons A and B) in proportion to the areas of the commons.