The Land Is Ours

a landrights campaign for Britain

LAND ESSAYS 2
3. Landrights

CONTENTS(click any row of trees to return here)

The Prehistoric Right to Roam by Edgar S J Powell

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The Prehistoric Right to Roam by Edgar S J Powell

Instead it is the search for the moral justification for such a right of access and a hope that such a moral right, being well and justifiably established, should be set within the framework of law.

The method of analysing the validity of a proposition by testing it against the circumstances that might be imagined to prevail at either of the two extreme limits is inherent in the consideration of the history of land ownership.

In the beginning there was no law, no written word, no ownership of land, no estate agents, no estates, no title deeds and no need for any of it. The concept of ownership is older than man, according to a code whose primary purpose was the well being of the group.

I do not mind that the Earl of this or that owns vast mega acres largely as a result of winning an historic lottery.

Proof of ownership today relies upon signed and witnessed legal documents drawn up by sp ecialists.

Disputed ownerships can be settled by independent courts having the backing of the might of the state apparatus.

But this modern proof of ownership by which we set such store today did not exist before 1189 when the legal system (which we now recognise as providing the supply of the documents that become the means by which proof of ownership may be authenticated) began to emerge during the reign of Richard the First.

Certainly up to the time of the Norman conquest every particle of this land had been 'owned' several times by different people or groups of people from Celtic tribes to Anglo-Saxon Kings who all shared the fact that at the time of their ownership they had a bigger clobber rating than anyone else who may have been inclined to try to take it away from them.

The multi-layered ill-documented confusion of the origins of land ownership presented to us by history resolves into two certainties: one that may be deduced from reason that at some time in the distant past none of the world was owned by anyone and a second one that can be deduced from available well-documented fact that today most of it is owned by a very few people.

Those who won the ancestral lottery and accepted their prize of a vast estate from a King who obviously had a mighty justification for doing so could be said to be the Earl(y) birds that caught the worms and that I believe is as far as the ownership debate can reasonably be taken because no method could justly resolve what reason so powerfully argues to be the injustice that so many feel.

A right to roam ... is capable of full moral justification.

I, and I believe most people, do not covet the ownership of the Ox and the Ass which in this context are the symbolic representatives of the vast estates however pompous the Ass in these cases usually seems to be.

I do not mind that the Earl of this or that owns vast mega acres largely as the result of winning an historic lottery of being given it by some King who had little moral right to it in the first place.

In my opinion the important question is not who owns the land but rather what absolute and exclusive rights does that ownership morally provide to deny the rest of us the quiet enjoyment of roaming amongst aesthetically pleasing vistas that access to it woul d provide.

The matter of land ownership is rooted in the vague distant fog of the past more often, at such a distance, capable of being evaluated only as an intellectual exercise and almost never as a matter of legal fact. It seems appropriate therefore to apply the same reasoning processes to consider what the wider public access might reasonably be expected to have been at the time the ancient ownership was first acquired.

Before man became a settled agrarian dependent animal, tilling and cultivating land, the hunter gatherer mode of existence must have imposed the need for a right to roam which gave a sort of aboriginal perspective to the concept of land ownership. In such circumstances the ownership of land must have seemed as peculiar a concept as the ownership of the atmosphere would be if that were to be considered today.

Consider the application of the principles of our modern legal system to the act that consisted of land being taken, from whoever in ancient antiquity first owned it, by force of arms not capable of being justified by the force of law. Such a method of acquisition must have constituted a criminal act not so very different from ram raiding and, as with the goods from the raided sho p, every transaction after that cannot confer ownership which denies the property to the original owners and their successors in title.

Since the population at the time being considered was so small, the probability is that we are all their descendants and have become the successors in title to the goods taken from our ancestors by force of arms.

In the absence of proof, and based solely upon a theoretical speculation about the time that dates from the birth of our common ancestors, this proposition offers no valid legal argument whatsoever. There is however a great strength in the moral argument since the scenario seems to be the only logical reverse extrapolation towards the origin from the known history, unless you happen to believe that ram raiding is a very moral act.

The concept of access to land in the ownership of one party being available for certain purposes as of right to defined public groups is not unknown to our law and where it is so known it is validated and dignified by the custom of usage back into antiquity.

No one that I know wants to take land away from the over fortunate few that inherited it from their ancestral lottery winners, won from a King who, taking it by force of arms with all the panache of a ram raider, had no legal right to own it in the first place.

However a right to roam, over uncultivated open countr y, cast firmly within the framework of law, drafted with the full consideration of the needs and sensitivities of all interests, and setting out the rights and responsibilities of all concerned, is capable of full moral justification and would return an inalienable, in aeturnaum, birthright to descendants of those whose ancestors could not pass it on to their descendants because they had it taken from them, unlawfully, in a fight.

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