‘For the moment, our freedoms have to be restricted. But when the lockdown ends, let’s celebrate by demanding a right to roam on open land in both cities and the countryside. Let’s have a legal definition of public space, in which peaceful use and assembly is established as a universal right. The freedom to roam is as fundamental a right as freedom of speech. When the pandemic is over, let’s make this the free nation Johnson boasts about.’
(George Monbiot: The Land was Locked away from us before Lockdown, The Guardian April 22 2020)
Golf courses to the left of you,
Golf courses to the right of you,
Golf courses in front of you,
Golf courses behind you,
In
Lockdown tower block Britain,
In
Anyone for tennis Britain,
In
Let’s go angling kill fish Britain,
But we common without garden ordinary folk,
All we can do is peer over the hedgerow
And imagine the hay while the sun shines …
With criminalisation of trespass
On the future map and compass,
For England and Wales,
And all parts, my Lord,
South of right to roam go it alone Scotland -
With an expansion of stop and search,
And the privatisation of public space,
And social apartheid on kids’ playgrounds,
While
In lockdown Britain,
The stately homes of England,
The truth – discreet – they hide
From plebs inside their tower blocks,
Toffs wandered far and wide.
And at the intersection of social-class,
Income, housing, job, and racial profiling,
Here’s George Monbiot again:
‘Today we have no right of access to 92% of England …
in London four times as many BAME people are stopped and searched
as white people …
in Suffolk … 17 times more likely …
in Dorset 25 times.
Is it any wonder that so few people of colour visit the countryside?’
So let’s go back in time for a bit,
After the time of Roman soldiers of colour,
After the time when there were
‘Black people here before the English’,
To 1086 and Domesday Book,
When as Guy Shrubsole in Who Owns England? shows,
The monarchy and family owned about 5.4 million acres;
But, rejoice!
Today,
‘The Crown in all its institutional guises’
Owns only 1 million acres or so,
Including, natch,
‘foreshore and river beds’…
And what of the Church?
Back in Domesday, a feudal overlord,
But now the Church of England,
‘The Tory Party at prayer’,
Well, its’s obvs not what it was back in 1086,
But it still has
‘a property portfolio worth at least £8 billion’.
And what of the common land and enclosure?
What of that steady spread of land-grabbing,
From Elizabethan times and onwards?
In sum and total according to the abacus
And ready-reckoner of thwarted liberty:
The privatisation of about 20% of all English common land:
‘The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose’.
And what of those stately homes?
So many acres steeped in slavery,
Sugar, plantations,
The triangular trade,
Compensation when slavery was abolished,
A colonial landscape hidden by false history,
As Nadine El-Enany writes in
B) Ordering Britain,
Law, Race and Empire:
‘Immigration law teaches white British people
that Britain and everything within it is rightfully theirs.
“Others” are here as guests.
Yet Britain would not be the wealthy, plentiful place
that it is without its colonial history …
British immigration laws are acts of colonial seizure and violence,
obstructing the vast majority of racialised people
from accessing the spoils of empire’.
And Guy Shrubsole again:
‘half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population’:
‘The stately homes of England
How beautiful they stand
To prove the upper classes
Have still the upper hand’.
But what of the metropole?
And what of ‘Old Money’?
‘You can walk from Sloane Square to Regent’s Park without leaving land owned by the aristocracy and the Crown. One hundred acres of Mayfair and 200 acres of Belgravia are owned by the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estate … To the north of Oxford Street is the Portman Estate …110 acres … in Marylebone … Next door is the Howard de Walden Estate … 92 acres of Marylebone …To the south of Hyde Park is the Cadogan Estate, a 93-acre stretch of Kensington and Chelsea … Almost a thousand acres of central London remains in the hands of the aristocracy, Church Commissioners and Crown Estate. They own most of what is worth owning in central London’.
And what of elsewhere and what of ‘New Money’?
‘Private, non-aristocratic landowners’,
Sundry celebrities,
‘the new plutocracy’ –
They own close to 20% of land in the UK.
Then we have to factor in, inter alia,
The Ministry of Defence, the land fill sites,
The corporate ownership of land,
The farm subsidies to the rich,
Signs such as ‘Landowners welcome caring walkers’,
The privatisation of public space,
Places where you are not allowed to sit, nap,
Loiter, photograph,
And that don’t always appear on Google Street View,
Then, of course, we have the apparent freedom of footpaths,
And what that does to your head …
Such freedom,
Apparently.
These ribbons of land where we can wander at will,
A seeming assertion of the rights of the downtrodden,
A peculiarly English fusion of feudalism and freedom,
Where we can walk right alongside the gates of the great and grand,
But,
On the other hand, and foot,
When we ponder on the origins of these tracks,
These palimpsests
That sometimes follow the lines of prehistory,
It’s too easy to forget Gramsci and Cultural Hegemony,
And Marcuse and Repressive Tolerance,
For some of these illusions
of freedom and self-assertion,
Where, unhindered, you put one foot in front of the other,
To some unmeasurable degree,
Have their origins in a feudal landscape,
Where the church owned so much of the land,
And so much of your mind,
And where you had to tread your path,
To be told what to believe
And to render your tithe and your labour,
Your body and your soul to the gatekeepers,
Speak they Englisshe, French, or Latin:
The rich man at his castle,
The poor man at his gate,
God made them high and lowly,
And ordered their estate.
But what about the camel and the needle
And the rich and heaven?
What about when
Adam delved
And Eve span
Who was then
The gentleman?
Oh just get on and …
‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s
And unto God what is God’s’.
And what about the impact of enclosure
After the Reformation?
What about the impact of enclosure,
After the Bible was written in English,
And after the separation from Rome?
How many of our current footpaths,
The ones that take us into pastoral bliss,
Have their origins in the privatisation of the landscape?
Paths to take labourers to work in fields
they once shared as common land,
For grazing, collecting firewood, furze and so on,
Or footpaths that took them to till in communal labour
in shared open arable fields,
Devoid of fence and gate and hedgerow,
But then in legal trick of legerdemain,
Footpaths that took them to a lifetime of toil and poverty,
To indigence, starvation wages, and occasional revolt,
Footpaths that would lead to Captain Swing.
Singing,
Honesty’s all out of fashion,
These are the rigs of the times,
Then and now,
Let’s remember that when out walking,
And let’s remember Gerard Winstanley and the Diggers,
And the Diggers down at Slimbridge:
‘Break in pieces quickly the Band of particular Propriety,
disown this oppressing Murder, Opression
and Thievery of Buying and Selling of Land,
owning of landlords and paying of Rents
and give thy Free Consent
to make the Earth a Common Treasury
without grumbling....
that all may enjoy the benefit of their Creation.’
And let’s remember John Clare:
‘Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave’
Singing,
Honesty’s all out of fashion,
These are the rigs of the times,
“No wonder that butter's a shilling a pound, See those rich farmers' daughters how they ride up and down If you ask them the reason they'll say, “Bon alas! There is a French war, and the cows have no grass.
Chorus (repeated after each verse): Singing, honesty's all out of fashion These are the rigs of the time, Time, my boys, These are the rigs of the time.
Now here's to our landlord, I must bring him in, Charges tuppence a pint and yet thinks it no sin. When he do bring it in, the measure is short And the top of the pint is all covered in froth.
And here's to the butcher, I must bring him in, Charges four pence a pound and yet thinks it no sin. Slaps his thumb on the scales and makes it go down He declares it's full weight yet it lacks half a pound.
And here's to the baker, I must bring him in, Charges a ha'penny a loaf and yet thinks it no sin. When he do bring it in, it's no bigger than your fist And the top of the loaf has popped off with the yeast.
Now here's to the tailor who skims with our clothes, And here's to the cobbler who pinches our toes, Our belly's all empty, our bodies are bare, No wonder we've reason to curse and to swear.
Now the very best thing that I could find Is to toss them all up in a high gale of wind. When the wind it do blow, the balloon it would burst, And the biggest old rascal come tumbling down first.”
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