A sketch history of this land

Part One: From pre-history to the abolition of slavery

I want begin to sketch a map in time of what I know, what I imagine and what I do not know of the history of land that has become England. To question my own knowledge and understanding and unsettle some of the dominant narratives that are often told. This feels particularly important because of when the story of this land starts in narratives about the histories of this place and the peoples who have lived here.

Imagine this the start of a patchwork which many gaps, piecing together, unstitching and restitching memories and stories and ‘facts’, full of questions and wonderings.

Early history

I wonder when this island that now consists of England, Wales and Scotland first emerged in deep time. Did it separate from pangea millions of years ago? What geological processes took place to form this piece of earth between the channel and the Irish sea, the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean? What plants liked the climate and the soil here, well enough to grow and establish themselves? What animals made home in the woods and the moorlands?

When did the first peoples come here? And where did they come from? What were their beliefs? How did the organise their lives? The earliest human remains to be found in England date back about 500,000 years. Between then and Stonehenge being built about 5000 years ago I know almost nothing of life here.

The stories I think I have been told are that the peoples who lived here long ago were hunter gathers, as in many parts of the world. Since starting to read The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow, this story has become unsettled. They argue that these stories of our distant ancestors actually were produced in the 18th century in reaction to indigenous critiques of European society. That instead of this narrative, there were many forms of social organisation that existed during this time.

With the building of Stonehenge over a 200 - 300 year period, stories of the peoples of that time conjure images of ancient religions connected to the sun and the seasons form. Burial rituals and circle gatherings. We don’t actually know what Stonehenge was built, and some evidence suggests it was build long before there is record of the Druids, but for its resonance for druids and those who celebrate the solstice today evokes something of a ritual past.

Roman, Viking and Norman Invasion

Then another major gap in my knowledge until perhaps the invasion of Rome between AD 43 and AD 87. Much of my knowledge of this time is being created through reading the Boudica books by Manda Scott. Drawing on archeological finds and the first written protohistories of England written by Roman historians, as well as her own dreaming and imagination, Scott describes life before the Romans came.

She details the lives of different tribes living across the land with different languages and ways of life. Sometimes in peace and sometimes at war. With warriors working their swords. And dreamers trained on Mona - what is now called Anglesey or Ynys Môn. It is a work of historical fiction because there is so much we cannot really know, but she evokes a time that inspires deep connection in earth, the Gods, and community.

The work of David Olusoga in Black and British: A Forgotten History, documents the arrival of Black people in Britain during the time of the Romans. This began an interwoven connection between peoples of the African continent and Britain that stretches back a long way before processes of colonialism and slavery of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Following the Roman invasions, again the details become hazy. In AD 793 the Vikings arrive, raiding settlements and taking several counties in the North West and North East, making York their capital. I imagine there was ongoing tension between Vikings and Anglo-Saxons with continued raids that in the stories told me as a child about this time involved the raping of women and pillaging of towns by the invading forces.

The last Viking invasion was in 1066 when Harald Hardrada marched on Stamford Bridge under his battle banner called ‘land-waster’. Harold Godwinson, the English king, marched north and defeated the Vikings in a long and bloody battle preventing the invasion from Scandanavia.

But immediately after this battle, Godwinson got word that William of Normandy had landed in Kent with an invading army. The English forces turned south and fought the Battle of Hastings but lost, Harold died famously with an arrow in his eye, and William the Conqueror became king of England - taking all the land under his ownership.

Most of my knowledge of this period of history came from repeated visits to see the Bayeux Tapestry as a child although because the tapestry is kept in Normandy and the exhibition is told from the French perspective, William the Conqueror seemed like a hero of sorts. It wasn’t until more recent years that I came back to this time and questioned it.

The Norman Conquest and the emergence of the land system in England

Many histories of land (in)justice in England begin here - at the point of the Norman Conquest. Perhaps this is because it was in this time that the land system as it exists to day was put into place. The first record of land ownership can be found in the Doomsday Book of 1086. And what can be seen is a very hierarchical distribution of land with over 50% owned by the aristocracy - friends of the new king, with a strict social hierarchy in operation with the king at the top to the landless serfs at the bottom. Some of the descriptions of how the Normans took the land from those who lived there already is detailed in The Wake by Paul Kingsnorth - a book which described the Harrying of the North - a violent ravaging of the land and people to subjugate them to the new ruling forces.

Although as an aside here, I don’t know anything about the land system that was in existence before Doomsday. Was it still hierarchical? What was the relation to land in this period? Was there one people united across the land, where their different groups? With Vikings in the north, what was going on in the south?

The Normans also invaded Wales and had conquered most of southern Wales by 1094. An Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland took place later in 1169 marking the beginning of more than 800 years of English, then British conquest and colonialism. Northern Wales and Scotland remained independent of Norman settlement during this period, and it would be in later periods that they would come under English / British rule.

I know so little of the histories of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. There are moments that stick but the processes of colonisation by England / Britain of the peoples and the lands of these places are not detailed in my mind. It feels important to remedy that and to find out more - this is a subject I will return to.

The commons

Under the land system developed by the Normans, ‘common’ land in England fell under the control of the lord who owned the land and was worked by tenant farmers who had certain rights - for example to graze animals on the common, to cut peat for fuel or to gather wood from the forests, and to fish in the rivers. These were rights to subsistence, rights to live on what could be gleaned from the land.

Yet, even with these land rights, serfdom would have been a challenging life for the poor, I imagine given the desire to overthrow it. The Peasant’s Revolt in 1381 began the decline of serfdom in England coming to an end in 1574 when Queen Elizabeth I released the last serfs. I don’t fully understand the serfs relationship to the land - they were not slaves and yet they were tied to a place to labour there. Or how the system of serfdom actually came to an end. What were the economic and political conditions that meant it was an expedient choice for a Tudor monarch not reputed for her benevolence?

Enclosure

From as early as the 12th century, landowners in England began to enclose the land, putting up hedges and fences. Enclosure came with waves of changes in agriculture, seeking more efficient farming techniques to raise higher profits. Alongside deepening philosophical and political beliefs in private property. Enclosure intensified during the Tudor era with more and more people evicted from the land.

More formal processes of Parliamentary enclosure through the passing of Acts of Parliament began in 1604 and intensified throughout the 18th century. Between 1604 and 1914 there were 5200 enclosure bills, enclosing 6,800,000 acres of land or one fifth the total area of England.

Alongside these enclosure bills, Parliament also made property rights absolute and the traditional practices of living from the land became theft, gleaning became trespass and fishing became poaching. People were separated from the land by law unless they owned the land in England.

These processes together both forced people off the land and into the towns to find work or changed their relationships to the land where they were to one of waged labour to the lord or landowner. How did this differ from the serfdom that came before? And how swiftly did processes of urbanisation take place? A process that was to be necessary in the providing a work force for the Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and 19th century. (I want to return to this thread in part two).

The witch trials, the subjugation of women and the separating of women from the land

While the land was being enclosed so too were the knowledges of that land especially the plant medicines and ways of healing that (mostly) women practised in medieval England. The podcast, Witch, describes some of this process. Especially interesting is the episode on Midwives and Healers. Through the persecution of witches there was a double spell cast - the separating of particular women from their practices of healing connected to the land, and the subjugation of women in general.

In her book, Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici sets the witch trials in the context of the transition between feudal to early capitalist society in Europe. The labour, economic and population conditions of this period led to a series of interventions by the state to control women’s lives, work and bodies.

As capitalism developed, women found their freedom limited, their work devalued and made dependent on the wages of men, and their bodies marshalled for the reproduction of the workforce. This marked ‘the construction of a new patriarchal order’.

Federici argues, ‘what has not been recognised is that the witch-hunt was one of the most important events in the development of capitalist society and the formation of the modern proletariat.’ It weakened the resistance of the peasantry, already under threat of disintegration through the processes of enclosure. It deepened divisions between men and women through re-inforcing patriarchial control. And destroyed a way of life, ritual, beliefs, community that was incompatible with capitalistic work.

Connections are also drawn between the witch trials and control of women’s bodies in this period with the development of techniques later used in colonial projects overseas. Federici states, ‘the differences should not be underestimated’, as different class relations and systems of discipline where used in the colonies. Yet similarities in treatment between populations in Europe and the Americas can be seen. And seen perhaps most starkly in the exportation of witch-hunts to American colonies.

And the systemic mechanism of separation, subjugation, use of violence and the creation of hierarchies based on ‘difference’ can be seen in colonisation as in the witch trials, the treatment of peasants who once gleaned from the land, and the creation of ‘whiteness’ to legitimise slavery and domination of indigenous peoples in the Americas and then across the globe.

Colonisation of land and peoples further afield

In her book, Green Unpleasant Land, Corinne Fowler has observed, the period of intensifying enclosure corresponded with the time of colonialism and the establishment of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade: ‘Commodifying the land and commodifying people went hand in hand’.

From internal colonisation projects of enclosure across and within the British Isles through projects of land grabbing and cultural suppression, colonial projects further afield took place. Waves of colonisation took place over centuries until the British Empire covered 23% of the Earth’s land mass by 1920 - land acquired through violence, domination and oppression.

The enslavement and transportations of millions of people from the African continent, and participation in the brutal systems of plantation slavery were deeply entangled in the colonial projects of the British empire. As well as the development of technologies of racism that enabled the dehumanisation of peoples across the world.

The creation of whiteness as a concept by the courts and law makers of Virgnia and Maryland sought to justify and legitimise the creation of hierarchies of people based on their skin colour. And through the creation of hierarchies, dehumanisation and the extracted labour it enabled ensued.

The wealth generated through colonialism and slavery came back to England to enable the purchase of more land and more property. In his Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us, Nick Hayes illustrates how wealth generated through colonialism in the Caribbean and in India part-funded the 18th century land grabs in England. Hayes also weaves together many other stories of land, enclosure, witch-hunts, the persecution of gypsies, as well as colonialism,

In his treatise, Capitalism and Slavery, written in 1944, Eric Williams traces how the money from plantation slavery came to shape the landscape in England from country houses to gardens, industry to infrastructural development. Even post abolition in 1933, cotton produced by enslaved people on plantations in what had become the USA continued to fuel the industrial revolution through the exploitation of the working classes in the mills and factories of England.

And money from compensation given to the former owners of enslaved people in the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1834, continued to be paid off until 2015. The work done by the Legacies of British Slavery  project, led by Catherine Hall, was able to bring slavery and its consequences back to English shores, tracing wealth from compensation back onto the maps of England.

The money used to buy land, to enclose land, and extend the private property of landowners correlated directly to the pursuit of power. The right to vote, the right to a seat in Parliament was directly linked to landownership until the Representation of the People Act 1928 when all adults over 18 can vote no matter their property status.

Until then, these landowners had the power to shape law and policy to protect their own interests. To accumulate more land, to continue profit making activities that enabled them to accumulate more land, to enable colonialism and slavery to continue for so long.

It is important to name that in many ways these processes are still ongoing - they have not closed. Neo-colonialism through the control of resources and territories continue, often by corporations as well as nation-states and wealthy individuals, and the legacies of the systems of slavery and colonialism today still shape who has access to material wealth and who does not. As well as who has access to land and who does not. And the even the well-being of the land itself which has been extracted from and decimated in so many places. This report from War on Want called ‘The New Colonialism’ outlines some of these processes.

Alongside all of this processes of violent colonisation and subjugation there was resistance and revolt - peoples rising up against their oppressors on plantations, to demand ‘land back’, in factories, fields and mines, and in the streets. Histories of the resisters are less well known to me but through projects like Insurgent Empire, Connected Sociologies and Three Acres and a Cow I’m starting to learn more of these stories.

To be continued…