Venville and Commoners' Rights

The central moor was the royal Forest of Dartmoor, a legal term for a hunting preserve, and the Duchy of Cornwall has owned it since 1239. Farmers in the parishes around it, said to number 23 and called the parishes 'in venville', could pay the Duchy for the right to graze their animals on the Forest by day. Some venville men were still paying in the 1970s.

Commoners elsewhere on Dartmoor hold other rights. Most attach to a farm, called the dominant tenement, and the number of animals it can carry through the winter limits how many a commoner can graze, a principle called levancy and couchancy. The other rights are turbary (cutting peat for fuel), estovers (firewood, wood for repairs and bracken for bedding), common in the soil (stone or gravel for repairs), piscary (fishing) and pannage (feeding pigs on acorns or beech mast), all for the commoner's own household use. The owner keeps the sporting and mineral rights.

In 1984, under the Commons Registration Act 1965, the Duchy did not oppose registering the Forest as common land, and those who had registered a right on it were confirmed as its commoners. Chagford Local History Society's notes on the commons cover the medieval records, including grazing rents rising in the Chagford manor accounts of 1466 and 1467.