In 2008 I took part in an event called Disclosures II: The Middle Ages it was part of Nottingham Contemporary’s Histories of the Present, and a beautiful publication of the year long series of events has just been published.

Disclosures II: The Middle Ages explored the idea of ‘commons’, both in the sense of agricultural commons (the grazing of animals and growing of crops on shared land) and what’s increasingly known as the ‘cultural commons’: the shared production and free distribution of digital resources, and more broadly culture in general.

Disclosures II: was set in the unique Nottinghamshire village of Laxton: unique in that it is the last substantial surviving example of the medieval ‘open field’ system of farming in England. In Laxton farmers farm individual strips of land in shared fields, now owned by the Crown, as they have done for centuries.