ABSTRACT
In almost all societies in pre-modern Europe, there was land used for cultivation or pasture, wood or stone collecting for buildings, bushes for fuel or fertilising, honey producing, which was used in common by the residents of one or more nearby communities and took on different designations, one of the most frequent being communal or people's lands. In Portugal, the baldios (the most common designation today for communal lands) have survived to this day, despite the attacks against them mainly from the second half of the 18th century onwards by an adverse state inspired by liberal thought and by a fierce and powerful rural bourgeoisie who eagerly wanted to appropriate these lands. The fact that the communities faced attacks from different antagonists (feudal nobility, landlords, landed bourgeoisie, physiocratic, liberal, and positivist thinkers, modern state administration) strengthened the bonds of cohesion and identity among commoners. This text revisits the long historical trajectory of common lands in Portugal to strengthen the successive threats they had to face from these antagonists and how this historical process affected the bonds of internal cohesion and the autonomy of communities.
