Magna Carta Below Risk – Runnymede Eco Village 12 June 2015
On fifteenth June 1215, insurgent barons compelled King John to signal a royal constitution of rights at a gathering at Runnymede, only a quick bike journey from the place I reside. In keeping with Wikipedia, “it promised the safety of church rights, safety for the barons from unlawful imprisonment, entry to swift justice, and limitations on feudal funds to the Crown.” Whereas excellent news for the church and the barons, it had little to supply the frequent males, and neither facet took a lot discover of it and was in any case quickly annulled by the Pope.
Two years later after the loss of life of John and a warfare by the Barons a revised model was a part of the peace treaty, and this was then given the title Magna Carta, as there was one other smaller Constitution of the Forest additionally agreed between the events in 2017. This re-established the rights of free males in royal forests which the Normans had largely eliminated, on the similar time making a few third of the land within the south of England into royal forests, giving rights to gather firewood, burn charcoal, graze pigs and different animals and reduce turf – all very important actions for maintaining alive.
Though the authorized significance of Magna Carta quickly light away, it re-emerged from the sixteenth century on because it grew to become seen as the premise for the English structure, restoring the freedoms that the conquering Normans had eliminated, and it grew to become broadly seen as the premise for “the modern powers of Parliament and authorized ideas equivalent to habeas corpus.” Varied British monarchs tried to supress even its dialogue but it surely remained “a robust, iconic doc, even after virtually all of its content material was repealed from the statute books within the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” And these discussions had a robust impact on these writing the US Structure.
The one clauses of Magna Catra that stay in power are these defending the Church and the Metropolis of London and Clause 29 which said “The physique of a free man is to not be arrested, or imprisoned, or disseised, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any method ruined, neither is the king to go in opposition to him or ship forcibly in opposition to him, besides by judgment of his friends or by the legislation of the land.” However when Occupy London tried to utilize this to withstand eviction their argument was unsuccesful.
Extra just lately Magna Carta “truthers” have unsuccfully tried to make use of it in opposition to numerous laws, together with the Covid legal guidelines, significantly over sporting masks. However with none likelihood of success. Freedom to flout the legislation appears primarily to be granted to these in authorities. And far of the laws being pushed by means of the UK parliament now by a big Tory majority does go in opposition to our ideas of freedom, equivalent to severely limiting our rights to protest and deporting asylum seekers.
Again in June 2012 I had sat on the grass with ‘Diggers’ camped on Cooper’s Hill near the US Bar Affiliation Magna Carta memorial (and probably near the place King John and the Barons met, although which will have been fairly nearer to Staines.) The unique Diggers or ‘True Levellers’ have been based in 1649 after the primary English Civil Conflict by Gerard Winstanley who said “England just isn’t a free folks, until the poor that don’t have any land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons.” His concepts of the sharing of property got here from the New Testomony.
This 12 months it’s significantly applicable to recall the Biblical concept of ‘Jubilee’, the place after 49 years there could be a ‘12 months of Launch’ when slaves and prisoners could be freed, and money owed could be forgiven. The land could be allowed to lie fallow and all land and different properties (besides homes in walled cities) could be returned to the unique house owners or their heirs.
Land possession within the UK has modified comparatively little for the reason that Normans took it away from the inhabitants after 1066, with the identical households nonetheless proudly owning the nice majority of English land. A minute fraction of the UK inhabitants – 0.65% – presently personal greater than two thirds of the UK land space. Land possession is the muse of our class system and whereas a revolution appears unlikely within the close to future, any reforming authorities must be placing a land tax on the centre of its programme.
The Diggers at Runnymede in 2012 had heard a discourse on Magna Carta and the Diggers from a historian on the close by school of London College, and talked about more moderen occupations of disused Land by ‘The Land Is Ours’ on the Wandsworth/Battersea Guinness web site in 1996, on the Kew EcoVillage in 2009 and at Develop Heathrow.
My submit Diggers at Runnymede Name For Freedom provides some element on the 2012 occasion in addition to the organising of the Runnymede Eco Village. On the assembly folks agreed to carry a celebration of the 2015 anniversary of Magna Carta on the village web site.
Many in the local people welcomed the presence of the Eco-village, and the group work they’d performed over the three years. What little bother there had been had been brought on by outsiders, thought by some to have been inspired by landowner and police. And though the celebrations have been deliberate to be completely peaceable, police, urged on by Surrey County Council and virtually actually some authorities ministers, laid on an enormous and virtually actually unlawful train to forestall the occasion going down.
I wrote: “Police surrounded the Runnymede Eco Village because the Magna Carta weekend Competition For Democracy was to start out and prevented some folks getting into, issuing some with exclusion notices protecting a large space.“
“The police motion gave the impression to be a wholly politically motivated motion in opposition to the group and its many buddies to forestall their long-planned celebrations of Magna Carta, a constitution imagined to signify freedom underneath the legislation however right here at its very supply 800 years in the past it was being suppressed in an unfair and arbitrary method by the forces of the Legislation.”
In addition to my account of what I noticed on Friday twelfth June at Runnymede on My London Diary, Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta competition, you may also learn the submit I wrote the next day right here on >Re:PHOTO, Celebrating Magna Carta.
Tags: arbitray, aunfair, group, Diggers, Eco-Village, exclusion notices, competition, Competition For Democracy, free folks, Jubilee, land possession, Magna Carta, misuse of energy, peaceable celebration, peter Marshall, police, repression, Runnemede, Runnymede, sharing property, Surrey, Surrey COunty COuncil, True Levellers, woodland
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