  Meadows are a sort of commutative rings with a multiplicative identity
element and a total multiplicative inverse operation. In this paper we study
algebraic properties of common meadows, which are meadows that introduce, as
the inverse of zero, an error term $\abf$ which is absorbent for addition. We
show that common meadows are unions of rings which are ordered by a partial
order that defines a lattice. These results allow us to generalize some
classical algebraic constructions to the setting of common meadows. We also
briefly consider common meadows from a categorical perspective.
