This paper explores the origins and management of Wallingfen, a large tract of waterlogged marshes and carrs near Howden in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Subject to annual flooding throughout much of its history, the area was utilized by the surrounding parishes and townships throughout the medieval and early modern period, providing a range of important resources to the neighbouring communities including fish, fowl, turves and summer grazing. In this it had much in common with wetland commons elsewhere in England and on the Continent. Yet while the East Anglian Fens and the Lancashire mosses were being drained and enclosed in the seventeenth century – as too were the wetlands around the southern shore of the North Sea Basin in Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands – Wallingfen remained wet, marshy and entirely unsuitable for arable agriculture long into the eighteenth century. In other ways too, Wallingfen was highly unusual. Not only was a true form of intercommoning practiced here until parliamentary enclosure under an act of 1777, but there is evidence too of a cooperative system of wetland management which fell outside the direct authority of the neighbouring manors or any higher form of overlordship. The survival of precedent rolls and notebooks preserving extracts from the annual court rolls of Wallingfen from as early as 1425 gives a fortuitous and rare picture of the governance of a large wetland common and its resources over a period of several centuries
