The traditional, centuries or even millenia-old way of dealing with the commons was a set of customs and practices that resisted both the monied lords and the indigent local fool. These were resilient across an extraordinary long time, but the way in which industrial capitalism leveraged and facilitated greed defeated most of them, leading (in the late 20th century) to a belief in "the tragedy of the commons" and very confused thinking about how a commons could function.
