Use, management, and organization of collective space are preoccupations that cross centuries, with diverse interpretations for each era. Still today, even if the intensification of agricultural practices has tended to marginalize collective spaces, they have a social, ecologic, and even economic role, one that preoccupies their multiple users as well as public powers. It is because the invention of new ways of seeing value in these spaces requires the knowledge of their history and the varied territories in which they are found that this work surveys the last millennium in order to understand better their place in the life of past and present populations, in France and in Europe.
