Publisher's Synopsis
Property rights or the legitimate behavioural relations regarding the use of scarce resources are a subject which has concerned past societies as profoundly as it does our own. At a regional level Danish woods had until 1830 represented a resource shortage -- whether real or imagined -- since at least the Middle Ages. But what that resource comprised was anything but simple. It was made up of a bundle of 'resource layers' such as pasture, leaf fodder, mast, hunting, timber, firewood, coppice, potential cultivation and even social standing. And this complexity was amply reflected in the property structure. "A Windfall for the Magnates" examines the development of woodland ownership from the Middle Ages to the first half of the nineteenth century. Its focus is not the juridical ideals of woodland property but the realities of divergent property concepts visible in legislation, trial records and other legal documents. In broad outlines the development describes a transition from feudal commonage to individual private ownership. But the process was not without deviations. Even the form of capitalist land ownership that concludes the process is essentially ambiguous.
