Charter of the Forest — Still Relevant After 800 Years

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The Political Hat

Charter of the Forest — Still Relevant After 800 Years

Posted on November 6, 2017 by The Political Hat

     Eight hundred years ago today, Henry III of England signed the Carta de Foresta, better known by its English translation: The Charter of the Forest.

  It was a rejection of the “Norman Yoke” and the restriction of lands from public use of commoners to the exclusive and reserved use as a royal demesne or other “forested” area. Forest meaning “an enclosed area where the monarch (or sometimes another aristocrat) had exclusive rights to animals of the chase and the greenery (“vert”) on which they fed”.

The Charter of the Forest reaffirmed the fundamental rights of the people to use public land and lands they had a right to use, more generally, that had been “forested” by the monarch, the monarch being the sovereign (i.e. the state power). Today, in England, this is taken as a proto-environmental (or “green) charter, the argument being that “the people” through democracy can preserve nature and keep out “teh eeevil corporations”.   

[Valin]

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This, however, belies the fact that they are calling for the state power to control and restrict usage of such common and public land, abet a state power that involves democracy (more or less) rather than the absolutism of the monarch.

 

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