Future Uncertain (2021)

“It’s a fact that never fails to jolt my brain: the idea of private ownership of land as we know it today is only a few hundred years old. A few hundred years. It says something about the world we live in that even to absorb that information requires a moment of reflection. Just conceiving of it necessitates a mental dismantling of everything that modern existence is predicated upon. Look from an aeroplane window over Britain’s patchwork of farms, fields and woods today and what you’ll see is an almost entirely privatised place, three-quarters of which is owned by the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population. Swathes of it are even propped up by the taxpayer in the form of grants and subsidies. Yet, in contrast, as Simon Fairlie – editor of The Land – states: ‘Most of the rest of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line.’ Ours is a deeply entrenched culture of exclusive land possession, of privilege and poverty, begun with the Norman land grabs and legitimised by a 500-year system that spread from these shores and would go on to change the physical and psychological landscape of the world. Enclosure.

In the minds of medieval peasants, the idea that a single man or woman might one day have absolute and exclusive rights over an area of ground would have seemed incomprehensible. Although The Crown or a Lord of the Manor ostensibly ‘held’ much of the land, it was worthless without peasants working it, producing crops and paying duty as tenants. In return they had rights in common over ground, allowing them to sustain their families, which in time became codified, passing down from generation to generation as customary and legal rights of access. They became traditions and outlived the feudal system, their persistence down to the effectiveness of the open-field system. This was a kind of cooperative arrangement between neighbours and families that formed the bedrock of rural communities and villages.”

From Common Ground by Rob Cowen.

Published by Windmill Books.