Tribune

The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All by Peter Linebaugh
University of California Press, £16.99

PETER LINEBAUGH, Professor of History at Toledo University and author of Albion’s Fatal Tree and The London Hanged, has written a splendid book on Magna Carta.

In the early 13th century, England’s landed aristocracy were destroying the country’s woodlands for commercial profit, undermining the basis of material life and expropriating the property of the people. So the people forced two charters on King John at Runnymede in 1215 – Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest. Those two charters became the common law of the land – chapter 39 of Magna Carta laid down habeas corpus, trial by jury, a ban on torture and the concept of due process.

However, the ruling class has wiped the Charter of the Forest from public memory. It has also twisted Magna Carta into a defence of private property, corporations’ rights and laissez-faire. But the two charters should not be separated. Political and legal rights exist only on an economic basis. To be free citizens, we need to be free producers.

So what did the Charter of the Forest say? It limited expropriation and upheld the principles of neighbourhood, subsistence, travel, anti-enclosure and reparations. It pointed towards protecting the people from privatisers, autocrats and militarists. It was against false idols and for the right of resistance. And it defended the commons, maintaining that all property should be vested in the community, and that labour should be organised for the benefit of all.

The ruling class has always feared – as well as detested – the people (there are more of them, for a start). Linebaugh cites an Indian Famine Commission report in 1885 which blamed the famine on “the ignorance of the people, their obstinacy and their dislike for work”.

This book reminds us what Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest meant. Important when, 800 years later, we are again experiencing the theft of common land and the privatisation of our energy resources.

Will Podmore