Read The Trouble with Tom for Free Online Page B

nearby:
    EGGS
hens
duck
goose

HAY
MANURE
    People still work their land here. But what, exactly, do we mean by their land? Many years ago, a rector named Augustus Jessopp pondered just this question. "If I take my handkerchief out of my pocket I show you something which certainly belongs to me; I bought and paid for it," he explained. "If I please I may— as I can —toss it into the fire and reduce it to ashes in a few moments; in fact, destroy it, practically get rid of it, annihilate it." It was his property, after all; why not? But, ah—there was a catch—for all property is not the same. Look down at the plot of land that you are standing on: "I cannot destroy it," he reasoned. "I may not quite serve it as if it were wholly and exclusively mine." So we may call our friends with the hay, eggs, and manure owners of the land, but only for now: it was once someone else's, and it will be someone else's again. Their tenancy on the land, even if for three, five, or ten generations, is temporary. This is why any owner who rails against land-use rules has forgotten a basic tenet of common law: they are the stewards of their plot, and not its sovereign.
    A thousand years ago, these lands that we see before us here on the A323— all land, in fact-belonged to the king. It was granted to nobility at his pleasure, and revoked at his displeasure. These lords, in turn, let their manors to local gentry, who then sublet plots to the farmers. If anyone died intestate—as a great many of them were prone to do during plague years—land would escheat back up the chain of ownership. And nobody was unreservedly entitled to this land: it was always the king's, and subject to his taxes and demands for military service. That's why to this day in Britain the Treasure Act requires any poor sap unfortunate enough to find a buried sack of doubloons in their backyard to turn it over to the crown. But this was part of a rural covenant, for in return every village had a commons land where citizens could graze their sheep and cows. It was far from perfect. There was a tangle of laws over how often you were allowed to graze, how much turf you could dig up to burn as fuel, or how many branches you were allowed to lop off a nobleman's trees as kindling. These land arrangements stifled mobility: they ensured that the rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor. But everyone was indeed guaranteed something.
    Visit the Normandy Commons now, and you'll find a pleasant sprawl of wodn fields and trees; there's slide, monkey bars, a public loo, and a decent soccer pitch. What you will not find are sheep munching the grass, or anyone hoeing beans. We're expected to earn our livings in private dwellings now, a transition from public to private wealth that occurred before Cobbett's eyes. Parliamentary orders for the fencing off and sale of commons land-known as Acts of Enclosure—remade his countryside at a frantic pace. In the decade before Cobbett's birth in 1763, there had been 163 such acts: the first decade of the new century had seen 906. Once landowners possessed this land, they guarded it jealously. They'd bore holes into hedge stakes and funnel in gunpowder; any shivering impoverished soul unfortunate enough to steal a hedge stake for kindling would, upon tossing one onto a fire, be rewarded with a hearth-shattering thunderclap. In another town, Cobbett even found a self-styled Paradise Place encircled with signs warning of leg-snapping mantraps. He shook his head at the sight of it: fancy that as Paradise!
    Commons lands— wastes , landowners now sniffed—disappeared, and private property arose in their place. This hedge in front of me—and there are now some five hundred thousand miles of them in England—arose during these years, not as quaint sidings to rural roads, but as a sentinel of newly created private property. Cobbett was outraged: "[What] could lead English gentlemen to disregard matters like these!