GET OFF MY LAND!
THIS IS THE message the landowners of Britain have been giving working people throughout the centuries. And this message remains the same today. With the government backing down (what a surprise!) on its Right to Roam legislation the mass of the people remain not only excluded from the land unless the landowner deigns to grant access, but also excluded from any decision-making about what is done with this land. We need to question this myth of land 'ownership'. For, in fact, the whole land-owning system is based on theft. To understand this we need to go back to the times of the Norman Conquest.
Without romanticising the Saxon period (slavery was wide-spread and it was clearly a class system), peasants before the Norman conquest had a certain control over the land. Free, independent peasant owners called ceorls cultivated their own areas. They owed certain duties to the king, but there were no non-cultivating landowners. This situation started to deteriorate even before the Normans arrived. As a result of various military campaigns, lords were granted control over certain territories. The treatment and extent of the peasants' exploitation depended on the whim of the particular thegn (lord). Some peasants found themselves forced to sell land to the thegn and had to become wage labourers. However, there was still extensive common land which was available for grazing, fuel collecting and gathering.
The Norman Conquest fundamentally changed the Saxon system. The land was taken from the peasants and put firmly in the hands of a land-owning class whose sole aim was to manage the land for the benefit of themselves. William, who now claimed to own all the land, needed to reward the military. As a result he gave the barons and other knights the rights to tracts of land on the condition that they provide soldiers for wars. The ceorls lost their position as freeholders and became serfs. They could only use the land if they paid for it by providing free labour. Worse than not owning the land, they themselves were now owned by the barons. The whole basis of land ownership in Britain is thus based on conquest; the consequences of which are still with us today. Some landowners such as the Grosvenor family (present Duke of Westminster) trace their ownership back to this time. Their ancestor, Hugh Le Gros Veneur, was given major land holdings by William.
Blood Sports
It is not just a grossly unequal system of land ownership that dates from the Norman Conquest but also the tradition of blood sports, so dear to the hearts of the present ruling class. In many respects, this obsession with hunting is one of the primary influences on the way the land has been managed and developed. William was a passionate hunter and set aside huge areas of land for this purpose. 'Royal Forests' covered almost a quarter of England by the mid-12th century. And these 'forests', which included much more than forests, were subject to Forest Law, designed with the sole purpose of protecting and breeding game which William and his cronies could then kill. Forest officials made sure that grazing animals were kept out and even barons couldn't plough up the land. Poaching, of course, was a serious offence, often resulting in the death of someone who dared interfere with the King's pleasure. The barons and knights, eager to ape the King, also took to hunting and set up areas that were called 'Chases'. The most highly controlled areas, 'Deer Parks', were fenced and maintained by serf labour. Many of these places still exist and are often the main areas that the public is denied access to e.g. the 3,000 acres of Hulne Park owned by the Duke of Northumberland.
This system of land management was developed purely for the satisfaction of the blood sports obsession. Not only did the peasants not benefit from it, it was hardly a productive use of land for the country as a whole. And the problem is that very little has changed. Though much land has now been turned over to agriculture and forestry, there are still huge areas, for example much of Scotland, where hunting is the main use of the land. it is still accepted that the ruling class can do what they will with their land, regardless of the impact on the rest of the community or on the land itself. But as we have seen, this 'tradition' is based on conquest and usurpation.
Struggles
Peasants did not succumb passively to the exploitation of the landowners. (See accompanying article). As a result of their struggles, some reforms were made. But the past 900 years have been a history of continuing exploitation. Reforms would be made and then a new form of exploitation would emerge, causing further resistance. By the 14th century there was a sort of social contract. Common land and common rights had been reduced but still existed. Peasants also had a right of passage over any land that was uncultivated, except deer parks and other hunting areas. Landowners had an obligation to see that the main tracks were maintained. The Forest laws were relaxed and Henry III started allowing the felling of the Royal timber, the killing of game and the cultivation of certain tracts of forest. Penalties were also reduced.
The development of agrarian capitalism in the 15th-17th centuries was the cause of some reforms but also created new forms of exploitation. Peasants could now sell food on the market rather than being tied to their lord, but with the decline of feudalism many were left in a position of insecurity. Landowners no longer had an obligation to the peasants. Between the 11th-17th centuries, the commercial motive predominated and this changed the nature of the land owning class to a certain extent. Henry VIII sold much of the confiscated church land to the emerging bourgeoisie and this process was accelerated under Cromwell. As capitalism became the dominant economic system, all landowners were forced to look for ways of increasing income from their land such as growing grain, raising livestock, forestry and land leasing.
Sheep
One of the main sources of income discovered by landowners was sheep, and this was to cause the erosion of the few rights the peasants did have, and would eventually contribute to the demise of the peasantry. The desire for sheep-grazing land led to an encroachment on common land, and an increased disregard for this peasant right. Common land was increasingly fenced off and used for sheep grazing. As they did not want to give up any of their hunting land, it was the common land they enclosed. The so-called English revolution, in fact, strengthened the position of the landowners. Half the members elected from the Midlands in Cromwell's Parliament had been fined for throwing people off common land or belonged to families who had. In 1646 the King no longer had ultimate control of the land and this was passed to the landowner, without giving any power to the peasants, causing further peasant revolts.
Capitalism, supposed to represent the overthrow of the feudal system by the new capitalist class did not change but instead reinforced many features of the old system. The power and ideology of the land owning class fused with and influenced the development of capitalism. Accumulation of wealth and the protection of private property was now an even stronger ideology perpetuated by the state. Parliament was dominated by landowners. The hunting obsession continued with renewed vigour; the landowners joined by reinforcements from the bourgeoisie. Sir Robert Walpole was Prime minister for 21 years and oversaw many of the enclosures. He was a keen hunter and would open the letters from his gamekeeper in Norfolk before the state papers.
Poaching
For the peasants, the situation seemed to get even worse under early capitalism. Laws against poaching were tightened and deer stealing was punished by hanging. It was even forbidden for smallholders to own hunting implements like snares in case they took game that strayed onto their land. The Black Act (named after the poachers who blackened their faces) passed in the early 18th century created 50 new offences which were punishable by death. Common rights were also attacked more vigorously than they had been under feudalism. Landowners wanted their privately 'agreed' enclosures to have the backing of law. During the 18th and 19th centuries 7 million acres of land was enclosed. The enclosed land was used for sheep, mining and cattle rearing. In addition, access to the countryside was curtailed. The old tracks were blocked by enclosures. Traditional recreation activities of the peasants such as fairs and football couldn't take place because there was no available land. This was of course welcomed by the Calvinist capitalists who thought such activities detracted from a disciplined workforce. The end result was the end of the peasantry and their transformation into an urban working class or emigrant labour.
Corn Laws
In the 19th century, the urban middle class gained strength both economically and politically and there were moves toward the reduction of the influence of the landowners. The controversy over the Corn Laws symbolised this conflict. It was against industrial interests to have import restrictions on corn and there was a major campaign to repeal the Corn laws which had imposed these restrictions. This, of course, was opposed by the landowners. The eventual repeal of the Corn Laws was seen as a victory of the industrialists over the landowners. However, the power of the landowners was never effectively destroyed. As we saw in the last issue of Organise! there was too close a connection between the industrialists and the landowners. The redistribution of land and the emergence of more small farmers did not alter the fundamental system or its ideology. In many respects, the new owners were even more committed to the old ideology, including the interest in blood sports. The industrialists often were landowners themselves but they didn't need to own land to adopt the culture of the land owning aristocracy. They rented shooting rights, with the London rich taking hunting boxes in the shires. According to Sutherland (an academic writer on land ownership), "By the 1930s, however, foxhunting was completely unrepresentative of the countryside".
The 20th century brought considerable pressure for reform. But despite the passing of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act in 1949, in terms of the mass of the people having any real access to the land itself or decisions about how the land is used, nothing has changed. Whether it is said by the Duke of Westminster or his ancestor the Norman bandit, the message is still the same: "Get Off My Land". It's about time we did something about it.
This is the second in the series on Land which will continue in future issues of Organise!