The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

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Learned quite a lot as a land and property owner myself, particularly about what not to do and the privilege that comes with.

Glimpsed through trees on a warm summer evening, its magnificent portico crested by golden sunlight, it rises like a beacon, a sight from which it’s hard to tear the eyes. It explores the question of property, land, land access and trespassing from multiple angles - from the exclusion of the working-class, privatisation of the commons, exclusion of Black people and women from property.Well this started off well with a subject that's close to my heart, the ultra-wealthy hell bent on keeping us peasants out of their precious lands. I have lunched – twice, in different country piles, and most enjoyably – with one of the principal villains of The Book of Trespass.

Trespasser is the French verb meaning to cross over, which came from the Latin word transgredior, from whose past participle we get the English word: transgression.How and why the English commons allowed itself to be destroyed in this way and has never succeeded in taking back what was stolen from it is one of the great enduring mysteries. Originally a royal hunting ground listed in the Domesday Book, Cornbury’s 5,000 acres of ancient forest and farmland and its 16th-century manor house are today a green and pleasant land of private profit. I also agree with the right of way and the right to roam within a reasonable distance from the owner's house.

But he wonders why, given the history of Basildon Park, some of its 400 acres could not be given over to, say, local allotment holders. In the end, though, for all its exuberance and erudition, The Book of Trespass is unlikely to cross many of the fraudulent culture-war fences that divide citizens today. I would have liked more poetry (although Hayes’s prose can thrillingly take flight on its own) – the incomparable John Clare seems to haunt every page without ever surfacing by name from the underbrush. The legal texts are full of variants of an old word seisin, whose origin lies in the French word saisir, to seize. However I was less enchanted by the author's constant belittling of a certain national newspaper and its readers who he seems to hold personally responsible for anything that has happened in the UK to which he doesn't agree.

This is a law we need in England immediately, Communities have a right to have a say in the land they inhabit. In those passages, we escape from the anger and reach the way things could be, and the beauty we could all share. His book begins with the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932, an act of civil disobedience that may be one of the most successful in British history (it led to the creation of our national parks). stars instead of 5 mainly partially because there were a little bit of issues with the audiobook (needed some proof.

Similarly, his decritption of Plto as a "proto communist" copies a common fallacy of those who have not turly grasped "The Republic" and Plato's views on land ownership which were ambiguous at best except regarding "philosopher guardians". Along the way, as he mounts walls and encounters gamekeepers or gardeners, Hayes digs deep into the history of landed property in England from the Norman Conquest to the National Parks Act, by way of enclosure and dispossession at home, slavery and colonialism abroad, rural rebellion and popular pushback, from anti-enclosure riots to gypsies, vagrants and “witches” with their “decoctions of sedition and heresy”. Nick’s demand is that we should be ashamed, it feels almost like religious fanaticism – we must stand in white at each corner of the churchyard to be whipped for our sins before we can deserve to make society better. This seems especially pertinent when those individuals are operating on purely commercial instincts. Of course it was insightful to see where his mind went and seeing the connections of all those anecdotes.There have existed men who had the power to hold or to give exclusive possession of portions of the Earth’s surface, but where and when did there exist the human being that had the right? This is a used book - there is no escaping the fact it has been read by someone else and it will show signs of wear and previous use. He even seems to regard anglers, those “fisher-kings” with their purchased licences, as lackeys of the ruling class. Circumnavigating the estate’s flinty, tumbledown perimeter wall, we barely saw a soul – only one mountain biker, doggedly following the same bridleway as us – and since we slipped inside the park itself, having finally found a gap just wide enough to allow us to do so, we’ve encountered no one at all. A meditation on the fraught and complex relationship between land, politics and power, this is England through the eyes of a trespasser.