09/13/2026
The reverberations of ancestral wounding from the Loss of the Commonage, when you’re of English descent.
I feel a quiet rage every time I see a private property sign on vast acreages. Every time I can’t access a shoreline because of a line of second homes. Every time I see long held farms and forests, accessed by the community with a handshake understanding with the long term owners, sold off and parcelled and levelled by developers. And it comes up again now that I’m learning in detail the mountain of regulations curtailing what and where and when and how you can hunt and fish (tempered though, because it’s premised in conservation).
This is an ancestral rage, seeded nearly 1,000 years ago in my ancestors in England.
The creation of private property is an entirely arbitrary act, grounded on “first” occupation and then, “use” of the land, doled out by those in power, and concreted into legitimacy from the passage of time. Literally cleared from homelands, then violently punished (branded, jailed, executed) for “vagrancy,” having nowhere else to go. Punished again, unable to leave an area, without express permission of an authority.
Don’t go there. Don’t move. Don’t set foot.
Or else.
Rinse and repeat, and you see same done in North America, just a little ways down the passage of time.
I’d wager this ancestral wounding is why any conversations around property and access to lands are so heavily charged, even today.
lays out the history of private property in England in his book Trespass. A brilliant and comprehensive read.
