The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

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Scots have the right to buy land as a community interest. This is a law we need in England immediately, Communities have a right to have a say in the land they inhabit. Additional functions – we provide users the option to change cursor color and size, use a printing mode, enable a virtual keyboard, and many other functions. Fences, wall and divisions of all kinds run through Hayes’s book – a gorgeously written, deeply researched and merrily provocative tour of English landscape, history and culture through the eyes of the trespassers who have always scaled, dodged or broken the barriers that scar our land. Even with recent, grudging adjustments to the law, people in England have the “right to roam” over only 10 per cent or so of their native country, and to boat down a mere 3 per cent of its waters. In global terms, that’s an almost-unique dearth of entitlement. The length of public footpaths has actually halved, to around 118,000 miles, since the 19th century. Hereditary aristocrats still own “a third of Britain”, even though foreign corporations now run them close (and have colonised the iconic Wind in the Willows villages by the Thames). Hayes wants to understand not just how this theft of access happened, how the old shared culture of the “commons” gave way to absolute rights of ownership, but “why we allow ourselves to be fenced off in this way”. But it offers a sharp-eyed, muddy-booted guide to the process that left the English “simultaneously hedged out of their land and hemmed into a new ideology”. Take it along next time you plan to jump any wall.

Hayes wasn’t what you might call a child of nature. “We came up to the rec to smoke hash as teenagers,” he says. “Sometimes, a couple of woods on from where we’re sitting now, we made fires and messed around. But we weren’t there for nature; it was just free space.” After public school and Cambridge University, he did an art foundation course and eventually, after a series of jobs working in communications for charities, he began working full time on his first graphic novel, The Rime of the Modern Mariner, a take on Coleridge’s famous poem. He has since published three more. Children need to learn about dragonflies by having them land on their noses If it isn't clear already, Hayes is a strong advocate for increasing public access to land and a fierce critic of those in power who have found ways to take possession of public land and then fence it off to deny access. Generally it is a mild mannered approach he uses, seeking the elusive meeting with a wealthy landowner, but he does bare his teeth at the Daily Mail, so much so that it is hard not to see things from his way. To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. So he sits at the apex of the system of private landed property that grants total control to elite proprietors, near-zero rights of access and enjoyment to everyone else, and underpins that “cult of exclusion” that (in Hayes’s eyes) has defined and degraded our national life. A powerful new narrative about the vexed issue of land rights . . . Hayes [is] practically a professional trespasser these days, no sign too forbidding to be ignored, no fence too high to be climed . . . The Book of Trespass is [Hayes's] first non-graphic book - though the text is punctuated by his marvellous illustations, linocuts that bring to mind the Erics, Gill and Ravilious - and in it, he weaves several centuries of English history together with the stories of gypsies, witches, ramblers, migrants and campaigners, as well as his own adventures. Its sweep is vast * Observer *As long as what happens on the land is governed by a select few there will never be a society that reflects the values of its constituents, there will never be an England that reflects the values of anything but a tiny minority of its citizens. If we are truly to discover what we have in common, we must be allowed to gather on common ground."

The author takes us on a trespassing journey each chapter with a focus on certain aspects of common law and inequalities. At times the flow can be a bit of a ramble (no puns here) but overall the writing is engaging and quite accessible. The Book of Trespass is his first non-graphic book – though the text is punctuated by his marvellous illustrations, linocuts that bring to mind the Erics, Gill and Ravilious – and in it, he weaves several centuries of English history together with the stories of gypsies, witches, ramblers, migrants and campaigners, as well as his own adventures. Its sweep is vast. Among the places he trespasses, sometimes camping out overnight, are Highclere Castle in Hampshire, home of the Earl of Carnarvon and now best known as the real Downton Abbey; Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, the seat of the dukes of Rutland; on the Sussex estate of Paul Dacre, the former editor of the Daily Mail; and on land, also in Sussex, owned by the property tycoon Nicholas van Hoogstraten. He also kayaks on the River Kennet from Aldermaston, in west Berkshire, to the point near Reading where it meets the Thames – a journey that takes him through the estate owned by Richard Benyon who, until 2019, was the richest MP in Parliament (Benyon lives in Englefield House, which dates from 1558, and which passed to his family by marriage in the 18th century; some of their money was made via the East India Company, too). He crosses the boundaries of one grand domain after another – from Cliveden to Arundel, Highclere Castle (aka Downton Abbey) to Windsor Castle. Eloquent writing evokes the woodlands, the wildlife, the landscapes and ecologies of the countryside that the post-Norman millennium of property law – or, if you prefer, “violence and theft” – has shaped. The Ramblers Association is a large organisation of 100,000 members, which supports the right to Roam – join up, they offer lots of activities and information. https://www.ramblers.org.uk/ The first thing you should know is that the famous sign ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’ is an out-and-out lie. Jolowicz [a Professor of Law] calls such signs ‘wooden falsehoods’, a neat phrase he borrowed from the arch-trespasser of the 1920s, G. H. B. Ward. Since 1694, the misdemeanour of trespass has resided in the province of civil, not criminal, law, and can only be brought to court if damages have been incurred. However, if you resist the landowner’s command to leave, if you are impolite, the police can be called and if you resist them, you can be done for a breach of the peace, or for obstructing a police officer.

Seeks to challenge and expose the mesmerising power that landownership exerts on this country, and to show how we can challenge its presumptions . . . The Book of Trespass is massively researched but lightly delivered, a remarkable and truly radical work, loaded with resonant truths and stunningly illustrated by the author -- George Monbiot * Guardian * Crucially, and ambitiously, he argues that “Englishness has always been defined by the landed lords of England and fed in columns of hot air to the landless”: our old friend, nationalism as false consciousness. Globally, an imperial machinery of slavery and conquest both bankrolled and legitimised the “cult of exclusion” that kept the English off their own turf. At home, the “magical architecture” and seductive contours of the great estates lent that dogma a patina of beauty and grace. Meanwhile, poachers swung from gibbets, plantation slaves toiled and died, proud commoners became a cowed rural proletariat and, in post-industrial mass society, the heritage industry served up centuries of mass uprooting and intimidation as a glorious aristocratic legacy. Land became a “commodity alone”, “partitioned from the web of social ties” that truly gives it value. My fellow trespasser and I do most of our talking in a hay field belonging to someone known to him as Farmer Ambler, a man who eventually appears, carrying long stems of ragwort (ragwort is toxic if eaten by cows), but who speaks to us gently, and doesn’t tell us to scram. Meandering. Fascinating. Thought-provoking. In this part polemic, part wanderer’s journal, part history lesson, Hayes organises chapters loosely around particular trespasses he has committed, exploring the history of the land he seeks to access, the beauty of nature and the way words and laws are used to guard land that, arguably, should be common land. Really enjoyed this one. Is it a bit rambly? Sure. Did I have issues with a witchcraft section overly reliant on Silvia Federici's interpretations? Yeah, a bit. But overall it's a very readable look into the abysmal state of land access and public rights in England, and how it got that way.