This Land is Your Land

 

This is a series of posts loosely draped around my interest in our practical, emotional, legal and very often delusional relationship with land as property, and its origins. Each of them can also be read as a 'standalone' piece, but although they come at the story from different angles, some overlap with others. Sorry. Can't be helped. 

The Lib Dems' anthem, sung in a boozy session at each conference, is ‘The Land Song’. The chorus finishes with the declaration that ‘God made the land for the people'. The old hippies among you might recall that Woody Guthrie expressed a similar sentiment in secular terms. “ This land is your land, this land is my land…….This land was made for you and me”.

The Glee Club Song

In real, tangible terms, how can you own something that will be here for aeons to come? In what sense is the land yours, mine, or ours? Ill-defined rights to ownership are frequently claimed which on examination prove to be nebulous, a bit like the bloke who claims that the parking space on the street outside his house is ‘his’. 

People are protective about property rights as if they are obvious and relatively unchallengeable by God or Man. After all, the Englishman’s home is his castle and one advantage of land is that no one can pick it up and walk away with it. Their land and often the house on it, was theirs to buy, sell and use as they wished, grudgingly acknowledging some town planning controls, a few conditions written into their title deeds and rights of way etc.

The Englishman's Home etc.

This view is a romantic view. History and the law tell a different story, and even castles have a habit of changing hands without due process of law let alone the interference of so-called human rights.

At a very basic level, you might ask which people God was referring to and on what basis the gift was made. Clearly, it doesn’t say ‘all of them, no strings attached’. The Bible makes it clear that the land that the Israelites had their eye on was a gift to them. Leviticus adds the caveat that it could not be sold because it was God’s land, where they only resided as ‘foreigners and strangers’ and that the gift was dependent on good behaviour. It is a wonder that, based on the last condition, God hasn't foreclosed on it. 

The first post is about what happened after 'God Gave the Land to the People' and how the basis for owning land under the law has changed over time, from communal to capitalist, with final control moving from the Crown to Parliament, or in the USA after the revolution, to the colonies.  

The second is about two pivotal moments in the 13th Century when the disputes about land rights between the Crown and the Barons came to a head and King John (whatever you read) didn't sign anything called the Magna Carta before England was saved by the Greatest Knight in Christendom, from the issue becoming resolved by a French invasion. 

These two took quite a lot of research. It was an effort to distil the mass of historical information into something that I hope is readable. comprehensive histories into the readable, so the third post was a recreational diversion. It looks at the motives and realities of the micronations, usually established by eccentrics, whose claims to independence for their handkerchief sized plots of land are invariably denied or ignored. 

The third is a light hearted look at Micronations, established people who for a variety of reasons, have tried to defy the rule that everywhere is owned by some state or other. 

At some stage in the future I want to tangle with the difficult but usually topical subjects of  irredentism, revanchism and colonialism.