Does the Common Wealth of a nation exist today?

The Norman definition of Forest extended beyond wooded areas and was used to describe any rural area that contained useful natural resources such as wood or peat, or where animals that provided game for sport and meat for aristocratic tables resided. These areas were often enclosed and became the exclusive property of the Angevin royal family. This state of affairs existed as a result of a perversion of the Norman forest laws that had been imported by William the Conqueror and applied to his new Kingdom of England in 1066.

Following the conqueror’s death in 1087, his son William II (1087-1100) had extended the ‘royal parks’, as the forests became known, and introduced harsh penalties for anyone who intruded upon his newly enclosed forests. Any person who was caught poaching the King’s deer or felling a tree for firewood could expect the amputation of a limb as a best-case scenario, and execution as another likely outcome. William II’s arrangement existed largely unaltered in the reigns of his successors and only increased under Richard I (1089-1099), who required all the resources he could muster for his persistent need to crusade. His brother John (1199-1216), continued this legacy out of a penchant for administering the King’s justice, an overriding desire to control the nations resources for his own gain, and a general need to operate out of extreme spite.

It was in this context that the Charter of the Forest was validated as a piece of legislature that complimented the rulings of Magna Carta and demonstrated this by inducing real practical changes that would be instantly visible to the nation. Whereas previously, entering and taking from a royal forest park would have seen a person maimed or killed with impunity, they were now subject to newly established ‘Verderers’ courts, which addressed issues of trespass and poaching. Significantly, these courts did not have the power to maim or extinguish life in a fashion as arbitrary as their royal predecessors. Instead, they accessed the act and could impose a fine that reflected the severity of the crime.

The charter also had the effect of restricting the amount of land that the monarchy could enclose and have exclusive control over at any one time. At the height of royal dominion in the late twelfth-century, nearly one third of the land of England was designated as royal forest and access for the people was denied. The significance of this to medieval England in the years immediately after Magna Carta is that it constituted a very public expression of contrition of the part of the King.

It also showed a recognition of and willingness to work with the principles espoused by the Barons against King John. Whilst the Magna Carta had given a platform to the eloquent ideals surrounding liberty and rights, it is likely that this had made little to no impact upon the lives of the peasants, with no property to lose or court to enforce their new-found freedoms. The Forest Charter addressed this issue by enforcing the Magna Carta in a practical way that was palpable and visible to the vast majority of the citizenry of England. The Angevins Kings were seen to bow before the knowledge of the rights of their citizens and change their policies accordingly. This was a showpiece that offered physical change and that made no secret that it drew its authority from the Magna Carta. It is a testament to the success of the document and its perceived importance by the ruling class that when Magna Carta was reissued in 1225, the Charter of the Forest was also re-confirmed by Henry, with minimal changes to the wording. Such was the significance placed on this initial piece of legislature in a post-Magna Carta England.

This new addition to Magna Carta clearly reflects the onus placed on the Forest charter being a success as it further elaborates on the former Magna Carta stance of the previous year, which only removed the royal forest areas that has been established by King John since 1199. Again it is clear that the government was aware of the parity between the ideal of Magna Carta and their applicability to the nation’s forestry situation and that the Forest Charter served as their remedy for this. Henry was attempting to be seen as attempting to expand on the liberties granted and displaying a knowledge that the actions of his predecessors had been detrimental to the people of England. This was a clear message to those who opposed his father and may well oppose him, in that it declared that he would not operate in the unpopular manner favoured by his father and that they would have no reason to take up arms against him. Instead, he was signalling that he was open to a system whereby the King and his nobles could work on a respectful basis that would not result in bloodshed on either side.

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A Tale of Two Enclosures: Self and Society as a Setting for Utopias

Abstract

Utopian thinking, and utopias as a genre, flourished as forms of the imaginary until recently. The emergence of the genre, with Thomas More, emphasizing spatial arrangement and with Louis-Sébastien Mercier invoking future orientation, I argue, is illuminated by placing them next to the economic enclosures of their time. (I treat the connection of enclosures and utopias as both a literary conceit and as an elective affinity.) Their utopias, however, closed off both the individual and time from the capitalist changes around them, allowing for little or no variation or expression of self. Thus, their imagined virtuous societies actually sought to foreclose the future and other spaces. The paradox is that capitalist development, with its admitted inequities and horrors, favored an expansive self and vital societies, which carry with them their own virtues. In spite of the ameliorative tendencies of utopias, their limitations, that is, their closed-mindedness, slowly but surely discredited the genre itself. Its place has been taken today by science fiction, futurist studies and the exercise of the imaginary in terms of social science.

PDF is attached

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Of Protest, the Commons, and Customary Public Rights: An Ancient Tale of the Lawful Forest

This article explores an ancient tale of customary public rights that starts and ends with the landmark decision of Brown v Tasmania. In Brown,Australia’s highest court recognised a public right to protest in forests. Harking back 800 years to the limits of legal memory, and the Forest Charter of 1217, this right is viewed through the metaphor ofthe lawful forest, a relational notion of property at the margins of legal orthodoxy. Inherent to this tale is the tension that pits private enclosure against thecommons, a contest that endures across time and place – from 13th century struggles against =the Norman legal forest==, through to modern claims of rights to the city.

the PDF is attached

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Common Law in the Thirteenth-Century English Royal Forest

I

N England during the thirteenth century many large districts

were set aside by law and called the King's Forest. Possibly

one fourth of the country was so designated.1

Readers of Ordericus

Vitalis and later chroniclers are told that the Norman kings in extending their forests laid waste great tracts of inhabited land,

William especially, in creating the New Forest, calling down the

Lord's 'displeasure that consecrated churches had been ruined to

make a shelter for wild beasts.'2

Was a quarter of England made

and kept deliberately waste by English kings during the Middle

Ages? Modern scholars know that it was not. They know that

although called 'forest' and subject to forest law, at least a part

was inhabited and cultivated like the rest of the kingdom. Every

forest had within its limits tracts of waste; but forest jurisdiction

with its courts, and its officers, the justices, wardens, verderers, and

foresters, extended far beyond, the nucleus frequently being called

the 'covert' and affording especial protection to the beasts, but in

no other way a distinct and separate part of the whole.

Learn where our laws came from…

PDF is attached

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Dave Jacke on Ecological Design and Abundance

https://www.resilience.org/stories/2020-12-02/dave-jacke-on-ecological-design-and-abundance/

For Dave Jacke, a designer of ecological landscapes since the late 1970s, human culture and our “inner landscapes” are the floating variables for our future on Earth. “Western culture, psychosocially, is extremely underdeveloped,” Jacke says in the just-released Episode #9 of my podcast, Frontiers of Commoning. “We humans believe we are separate [from natural systems]. That is kind of like the developmental stage of a two-year-old.”

The question facing the human species is whether we can sufficiently adapt our cultures to make them compatible with living ecosystems. This was a primary topic in my discussions with Jacke.

“Very few people alive today have any idea of what a healthy ecosystem looks like,” said Jacke, “because all of us have grown up in damaged ecosystems. We do not understand the abundance that is possible.”

But paradoxically, our “under-development” is a reason for hope: “If the human species were as developed as we could be, genetically, as we face all the perils we face, we’d be screwed. But the fact that we have so much room to grow, psychosocially, is our greatest reason for hope,” Jacke claims.

Jacke has been a serious student of ecology and design since the late 1970s when he embarked on a career designing and installing landscapes for homes, farms, and communities in the many parts of the United States, as well as overseas. He is a passionate teacher and consultant about designing human cultures using ecological principles — sometimes known as “applied ecology,” or what some folks call permaculture. He pursued this work through his firm Dynamics Ecological Design based in Montague, Massachusetts. [Email: davej/at/edibleforestgardens.com]

In the permaculture world, Jacke is perhaps best-known as the lead author of the two-volume book Edible Forest Gardens (2005), written with Eric Toensmeier. The 1,068-page book lays out the vision of the forest garden and explains the basic ecological principles that make it work (Volume 1) before offering more concrete guidance on how to design, establish, and maintain your own forest garden (Volume 2).

An edible forest garden is a “perennial polyculture,” which means that many different plant species grow together and naturally regrow every year without replanting. As Jacke and his coauthor explain,

“A forest garden is an edible ecosystem, a consciously designed community of mutually beneficial plants and animals intended for human food production.”

What’s refreshing about Jacke’s approach to regenerative economics and landscapes is its integrated grasp of ecosystems, human technologies, culture, and our inner lives. Jacke points out that as soon as humans make their tools, they begin to treat any natural objects through the lens of that technology. This immediately focuses and limits our perceptions of the natural world – a tendency that becomes more entrenched as economic and social institutions arise to develop the technologies.

Jacke warns that healthy cultures acknowledge that a boundary is crossed when we convert the multi-dimensionality of nature into tools for human use. A tree that lives a complicated, embedded life of interdependence within an ecosystem is seen as something quite different when it is reduced to timber. It becomes a dead “resource” that reflects human uses alone.

The movement for “appropriate technology” that flourished in the 1970s sought to emphasize this point – that the tools we create and use influence how we end up seeing the world. Too often, our tools have objectified the living world into “the environment” — an inventory of inert resources with little connection to life. It’s important to acknowledge to ourselves that the very idea of “value-neutral tools” is a self-deception. Our tools invariably reduce our appreciation for the complexity of “nature.” Which is why we must constantly remember that our tools and “nature” co-evolve together.

Informed by decades of practice in ecological design, Dave Jacke is a deep thinker about the subtle interactions of ecosystems and humanity, and the role of the commons can play in mediating this (perceived) divide. Here is the link to the full podcast interview.

What Post Scarcity Means: Why the post-scarcity economy is hard to reason about

https://hackernoon.com/what-post-scarcity-means-7c4d653418f4

Many act like post-scarcity is some pipe-dream. The stuff of utopian fairy-tales and science fiction. I beg to differ. Actually, I think in many respects, it is already here in the US. We just don’t see the abundance right beneath our noses because our current economic paradigm makes it incomprehensible.

Post-scarcity is an economic situation in which the production of a good outpaces its demand.

But when I take a step back, I see millions of pounds of excess clothing being dumped in other nations. I see free couches on the side of the road. I see ballpoint pens that people take from banks without blinking an eye. I see so many entertainment options, that there are whole channels dedicated just to telling you what’s on other TV channels. At the same time that income inequality is rising, and people are homeless and going hungry, I see people buying slick FitBits and fancy cars. So what of homelessness? Surely I can’t deny scarcity when people are hungry?

While I do believe that many types of scarcity do exist (and some may always exist), I don’t think that scarcity is to blame for homelessness. I think Capitalism and Socialism are to blame. Because Capitalism is so prevalent in the US today, I’m going to focus on it rather than on Socialism. But my critiques and comments apply to both. First, I’m going to explore the nature of post-scarcity. Then, I’ll turn to why nobody knows what to do with it and what’s needed to change that.

Two types of post-scarcity: Products and financial resources

Discussions of post-scarcity typically center the conversation around products, specifically. I suspect this is because financial resources are valued only for the sake of the products they allow a person to purchase. Still, the distinction between these two types of post-scarcity has important implications for why post-scarcity is incomprehensible from Capitalist (and Socialist) frameworks. These implications will be spelled out further in the next section.

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Typical disruptive CLOWN shills

Works in partnership with CLOWN psychologists who make you think that the images and lingo used, are signs of a friend, one of our guys, a true patriot

But the truth is that they are ALL CLOWNS and enemies

True friends TEACH and give you something to THINK'' about, to stimulate your ''MIND'.

Remember that the chans were created by the CIA Psyops psychologists as a forum to use for their deception operations and to recruit people into their action organizations like Antifa.

You are in the heart of evil here.

THINK and be careful