The right to graze your pigs in the forest, collect firewood, and to be genotyped
Magna Carta may get all the attention, but its poor cousin, the Charter of the Forest, deserves at least equal consideration. For one, it was the writing of the Charter of the Forest, two years after Magna Carta in 1215, that put the ‘Magna’ in Magna Carta. What we now call Magna Carta had been known at the time of its issuance as “The Articles of the Barons”, which sounds more like a polite euphemism in the castle laundry room for the barons’ undergarments than something to keep in the history books. After the writing of the Charter of the Forests, so as to distinguish the two charters, Magna Carta received the title that helped ensured its Olympic enshrinement.
Secondly, the Charter of the Forest has a much more exciting vocabulary. The language of Magna Carta, dealing most with property and inheritance issues, was well within the staid grasp of the Latin in which it was written. But the Charter of the Forest deals with more down to earth issues, and it’s written in a delightful Anglo-Norman bastardization of Latin. One can almost imagine the clerks scratching their tonsured scalps, trying to figure out how to translate old English words like ‘swanimote’ (‘swain’+’moot’, a court held to decide on offences related to the forest), which they rendered in Latin as ‘suanimotum’. Or ‘pannage’ (the right to let one’s pigs browse in the forest), which possibly came to English via the French ‘pasnage’ via the Latin ‘pastionaticum’ (which also means letting pigs graze on acorns) but was rendered back into Latin in the Charter as ‘pannagium’. Or cheminage, which is the right to pass through a forest, and in its usage in the Charter, specifically with the intent of collecting wood , comes via the French ‘chemin’ (road), which is from the Latin caminus, but is rendered back into Latin in the Charter as chiminagium. I was brought by the lee in many a French test in high school via similar guesswork at what I hoped might be French, but possibly Madam Kessler was more exacting than whoever checked the work of King Henry’s clerks.
Finally, while Magna Carta mostly addressed grievances of the barons, the Charter of the Forest addressed those of the common person. Barons may outrank us commoners, but we decidedly trump them on sheer numbers. Take that word ‘cheminage’; the Charter says that a forester “may exact chiminage … only from those who come from outside his bailiwick … to buy wood, timber, bark, or charcoal and take them elsewhere to sell…. Those, on the other hand, who carry wood, bark, or charcoal on their backs for sale, although they get their living by it, shall not in future pay chiminage.” In other words, a forester cannot charge someone who comes into their forest to take out firewood, unless they don’t live in the neighborhood and can afford a donkey and a cart. Recalling when I lived in northern China with its cold winters (now we live on China’s more sultry southern shores), I can attest that come autumn an entire village’s economy may seem to be entirely based on gathering and accumulating large piles of sticks. Those carrying the bundles on their backs did not appear to be among the baronetcy.
Denying the existence of a commons transforms something from being a right of the community into a resource to be monetized.
In fact, the Charter of the Forest was one of the first legal documents to lay out our rights to the commons, that is, those parts of our community or neighborhood that we use not for commerce but to simply provide for ourselves. Collecting sticks in the woods, or letting your pigs graze on acorns, were aspects of the commons protected by the Charter. This was important from both an economic perspective as well as a societal one. Denying the existence of a commons transforms something from being a right of the community into a resource to be monetized by the few. Unfortunately we have proven to be better at the latter than protecting the former. However without the existence of commons, people are forced to change from being, well, just ‘people’, into ‘consumers’.
The advent of the science of genomics raises a new item that could be added to these charters. Is our genome a commons, or a resource? May we employ our genome on our own terms, or only on the terms set by companies, pharmacies, or the government? In terms of our genetics, are we destined for autonomy or dependence?
