[Commons-Law] Commons and the Magna Carta - 2

[Monica Narula]

The Secret History of the Magna Carta (2)

The History of the Commons 

The labor process is the bedrock of human experience, though it might 
take chauvinist expressions, especially in chauvinist times, as the 
historian George Sturt wrote just before World War I. “What was the 
earlier English understanding of timber, the local knowledge of it, the 
patriarchal traditions of handling it?” The wheelwright learned truths of 
wood through his fingers and hands. Whether in watching the keen, 
unhurried loading and unloading of experienced carters or observing 
the untiring, unreliable, unlettered sawyers at work, Sturt’s descriptions 
were inseparable from the ecology of soil and timber, and reminded 
him–this is the long view–that “the settling of this island had only started 
about fifteen hundred years earlier and was still going on.” Without 
raising the flag, Rackham, the Cambridge botanist, flatly states, “to 
convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably 
the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors.” 

J. M. Neeson, an authority on commoning, like Sturt, understood the 
uses of woods: lops and tops or snap-wood for the household, furze 
and weeds for fodder, bavins or sprays such as bakers and potters 
want for their ovens and kilns, where bean-stakes could be found, how 
hazel is for good sheepfolds, how to assemble a chimney-sweeping 
brush. The woodlands were a reservoir of fuel; they were a larder of 
delicacies; a medicine chest of simples and cures. Who enjoyed them? 
She writes, “The fuel, food and materials taken from common waste 
helped to make commoners of those without land, common-right 
cottages, or pasture rights. Waste gave them a variety of useful 
products, and the raw materials to make more. It also gave them the 
means of exchange with other commoners and so made them part of 
the network of exchange from which mutuality grew. More than this, 
common waste supported the economies of landed and cottage 
commoners too. It was often the terrain of women and children. And for 
everyone the common meant more than income.”13 

This is the economy of uses, or the subsistence economy, or the 
economy of substances. Here is food, fire. Here is the human hearth, 
home. This is the economy, or labor of the household. Shelley asked, 
“What are thou Freedom?” and answered before considering justice, 
wisdom, or peace: 

For the labourer it is bread, 
And a comely table spread. 
  
Thou art clothes, and fire, and food 
For the trampled multitude. 

In these histories of the commons social and temporal specificity 
undermines the universal pretensions of law. They also tend to see that 
law was an instrument of the self-interest of rulers against which the 
recalcitrance of the poor might express itself in the ballads of the 
wildwood, in taking from the rich to give to the poor, and in not 
submitting to command for commandments’ sake. They observe legal 
and religious responses to the struggle. A miner's trade unionist from 
the Forest of Dean expressed the religious response: “I believe in the 
sacred principle that God gave the earth to the human race for an 
eternal inheritance, not to be taken away by man-made laws; and the 
man or men who would attempt to rob us of our God-given natural 
rights, must incur the danger of revolution, or other modes of popular 
resistance.” The Yorkshire County rolls contain the name of the fugitive 
Robert Hod in 1226. Thus, the most famous of outlaws, Robin Hood, 
flourished at the moment of the Magna Carta. 

Historians of the commons can help clarify the rights imputed to the 
Magna Carta at its time. If it truly is of another epoch, why bother? Can 
we give them “a fine fetch,” or an interpretation fully appropriate for 
today? 

Consider the difference between common rights and human rights. 
First, common rights are embedded in a particular ecology with its local 
husbandry. Human rights are not. That is why they can so easily be 
rendered universal. For commoners, the expression from chapter 39, 
“law of the land,” refers not to the will of the sovereign. Commoners first 
think not of title deeds, but human deeds: how will this land be tilled? 
Does it require manuring? What grows there? They begin to explore. It 
is almost a natural attitude. Second, commoning is embedded in a 
labor process; it inheres in a particular praxis of field, upland, forest, 
marsh, coast. Common rights are entered into by labor. They belong to 
experience not schooling. Third, commoning is a collective endeavor as 
depicted, for example, in the many paintings of gleaning the harvest. 
Fourth, commoning, being independent of the state, is independent 
also of the temporality of the law and state. It’s much older. But this 
doesn’t mean that it’s dead, or pre-modern, or backward. 

The Palimpsest of Petroleum 

The etymology of the word “charter” comes from Greek meaning thick 
paper or parchment. When the writing on a parchment is erased, so that 
it can be used again, the result with the new words is called a 
palimpsest. This was not the fate of the Magna Carta. Something like it, 
however, has been the fate of the economy upon which it rested. 

An economic palimpsest is one where instead of finding the older 
words on a parchment which had been only partially rubbed out for the 
new words, we find that the economy we thought belonged to a different 
stage of history has not been fully erased, and in fact contains 
knowledge ignored by the new economy. Suppose we compared them, 
as follows: 

Food stamps	Herbage
Social security	Pannage
Medicare	Turbary
Housing aid	Piscary
Public education	Chiminage
Unemployment insurance	Estovers
Worker’s compensation	Lops & tops
Health insurance	Vert & venison
Small business loan	Assart
Public libraries	Agistment
Welfare	Firebote

While the comparison takes us not to a golden age, it raises questions: 
Are the columns equally consistent with war, crusades, and acquisition 
of hydrocarbon energy? How does class struggle alter from column to 
column, in the role of the state, in the role of money? Which column 
tends best to the values of mutuality and equality? 

In addition to the moral economists, Robin Hoods, and Levellers, let’s 
look at more familiar figures. As a boy Karl Marx picked berries at Easter 
time, a customary right in the town’s woods, and later he reported on the 
“theft” of wood by the Moselle peasantry that drew him to the critique of 
political economy. In exile and poverty he found recuperation in picnics 
upon Hampstead Heath, preserved by commoners’ struggles. William 
Morris nurtured body and soul among the grotesque, majestic 
hornbeams of Epping Forest, a commons of 700 years. In Morris’s 
iconography of nature a forest was the place where you both lost 
yourself and found yourself. At the end of the 19th century as forests 
around the planet succumbed to the maps, trade, and law of empire, the 
woods became a place of dreams of commonage, preserved as often 
as not in children’s books from The Jungle Book to The Wind and the 
Willows set on the river Thames only an oar’s pull from Runnymede. 

The power to dream is not deracinated; it is part of recuperation and 
imagination.14 Roger of Asterby, local knight of Lincolnshire, envisioned 
conversations with Gabriel and St. Peter, who told him that inheritances 
should be restored to rightful owners and that justice should be without 
charge. “Whether as stimulant or a sedative such tales must have 
stirred the deepest wells of political consciousness in the most 
backward of backwoodsmen.” From them wrung the liberties of 1215. 

In wartime, the soldier is promised the earth. Roosevelt and Churchill’s 
1941 Atlantic Charter, envisioning a world after Nazi tyranny, promised 
four freedoms (freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from 
want, freedom from fear). Churchill would later write that the Atlantic 
charter was not “applicable to coloured races in colonial empires.”15 So 
when the U.N. Human Rights Commission began work on its 
Declaration of Human Rights after the war, W. E. B. Du Bois led forces 
intervening on behalf of the colonized people of the world. His Color and 
Democracy and Behold the Land are implicit critiques of the division 
between human rights and common resources. For him the meaning of 
“human rights” was a totally different proposition to the millions who 
were colonial subjects rather than putative free citizens. Du Bois 
challenged the American authors of the Bretton Woods agreements 
establishing the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: 
“seven hundred fifty millions of people, a third of mankind, live in 
colonies. Cheap labor and materials are basic to postwar industry and 
finances. Was this matter mentioned in any form at Bretton Woods?”16 
The National Negro Congress in June 1946 petitioned the U.N., as 
drafted by Du Bois, “An Appeal to the World: A Statement on the Denial 
of Human Rights to Minorities in the Case of Citizens of Negro Descent 
in the United States of America and an Appeal to the United Nations for 
Redress.” 

It grounds the entire discussion of human rights in material realities, 
beginning with the description of the Afro-American in class terms and 
arguing that the deliberate disenfranchisement of the Negro in the 
American South also deprived the working class of self-protection in the 
North. He wrote in full cognizance of English history. He observed that 
the federal government “continually casts its influence with imperial 
aggression throughout the world.” And even when a strong political 
leader is able to “make some start toward preservation of natural 
resources and their restoration to the mass of people” the effort cannot 
last long. In explaining his appeal to the world, he writes, it is “this great 
search for common ground.”17 

The exclusion of the dreams of the 750 million Du Bois spoke for after 
World War II reflected the succession of the United States to Caesar’s 
imperial crown. Today, facing the unchecked power of empire we may 
go into the woods to fetch the Magna Carta completely, as it helps 
establish that, to quote Shelley, “the rights of man are liberty and an 
equal participation of the commonage of nature.” 

While the Magna Carta is singular, an English peculiarity, its story is one 
of oppression, rebellion, and betrayal. It has become a story with global 
significance. We are commoners looking in at it from the outside. We 
have seen its history from the robber barons who became chivalric 
knights who became law lords who became “founding fathers.” Having 
studied their doings in the forest, in Palestine, in the law court, on the 
frontier, and now in Iraq, we have learned to be suspicious. 

The Magna Carta awaits further interrogation, as begun by 
Subcommandante Marcos. It has more for us than we thought. It may 
yield us both radical and restorative sustenance. The American Bar 
Association’s monument, we remember, found the epitome of the 
Magna Carta in the phrase “freedom under law.” The modern authority 
concludes, “taken as a whole the Charter was a remarkable statement 
of the rights of the governed and of the principle that the king should be 
ruled by law,” and the Victorian authorities sum it up: “the King is, and 
shall be below the law.” Yet even this is incomplete. If an epitome is 
needed, let it be “widow’s estovers,” both ample and just. _ 

Notes 

1. Norimitsu Onishi, “As Oil Riches Flow, a Poor Village Rises Up,” New 
York Times, 22 December 2002. 

2. Tuong Vi Pham, “Gender and the Management of Nature Reserves in 
Vietnam,” in Kyoto Review of Southeast Asia. 

3. See particularly, “Midnight Notes,” Midnight Oil, Work, Energy, War, 
1973–1992 (Autonomedia, 1992), 303–33. 

4. Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, The Subsistence 
Perspective: Beyond the Globalised Economy, translated by Patrick 
Camiller, Maria Mies, and Gerd Weih (New York: Zed, 1999). 

5. J. C. Holt, Magna Carta (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1965), 46. 

6. Oliver Rackham, The History of the Countryside (London: J. M. Dent 
and Sons, 1986). 

7. Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas 
during the English Revolution ( Viking Press, 1972), 41–44. 

8. George Sabine, The Works of Gerrard Winstanley (Cornell Univ. 
Press, 1941), 303; W. Wilson Hayes, Winstanley the Digger: A Literary 
Analysis of Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (Harvard Univ. 
Press, 1979), 240–41. 

9. The originals of the Charter of the Forest are in the Bodleian and 
Durham Cathedral, the regent’s seal in green, the papal legate’s in 
yellow. 

10. Francesco Gabrieli, ed., Arab Historians of the Crusades (Univ. of 
California Press, 1969), 260. 

11. In contrast to the war widows of World War II who had to manage 
without estovers of common but rather upon a pension of £1 a week, 
which hardly covered lodging, heat, and food, the War Widows Archive at 
Stoke-on-Trent (Staffordshire) was collected by Iris Strange as part of a 
campaign to alleviate the appalling condition of widows as late as the 
1960s. See Janis Lomas, “So I Married Again,” History Workshop 
Journal 38 (Fall 1994), and Geoffrey Field, The British Working Class in 
Wartime, 1939–45, ch. seven (forthcoming). 

12. Gareth Lovell Jones and Richard Mabey, The Wildwood: In Search of 
Britain’s Ancient Forests (London: Aurum Press, 1993). 

13. J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social 
Change in England, 1700–1820 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), 
158–59. 

14. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical 
Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002). 

15. Penny M. Von Eschen, Race against Empire: Black Americans and 
Anticolonialism, 1937-1957 (Cornell Univ. Press, 1997). 

16. David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and 
the American Century, 1919–1963 (New York: Holt, 2000), 504. 

17. In describing the postwar panopoly of state power Nancy Peluso 
has emphasized the concept of the political forest. These were 
landscapes of racialization. They were a terrain of imperial law. They 
were created by the dispossession of foresters and by the expropriation 
of those enjoying common rights. She and her colleagues are 
conducting an historical excavation that yields a new perspective, 
namely that the 750 million of the colored and colonized were the true 
commons of the planet. 

Originally published in the Summer 2003 issue of Boston Review 

----------------------
Peter Linebaugh’s The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the 
Eighteenth Century has just been reissued in a second edition. 
Professor of history at the University of Toledo, he is also coauthor with 
Marcus Rediker of The Many-Headed Hydra. 


-- 
Monica Narula
Sarai: The New Media Initiative
29 Rajpur Road
Delhi 110 054