Charter of the Forest

Diggers at Runnymede: On Saturday 16th June 2012 I cycled to Runnymede in Surrey on the south bank of the Thames, a large area of National Trust land which was possibly the site where King John met the barons and agreed to the Magna Carta in 1215. There is a large area of meadow on both sides of the current course of the River Thames and the actual site of the meeting within this remains uncertain.

Diggers at Runnymede - 2012 — *I stepped back a couple of paces from the circle to take this picture*

The meeting that I attended was close to the American Bar Association Magna Carta Memorial, unveiled here in 1957 – and almost certainly not where the 1215 meeting took place, but a short distance above the meadows on the slope of Coopers Hill.

There I met a group of ‘Diggers’ who were camping further up the hill, ecologists whose ideas mirror those of the original Diggers or ‘True Levellers’ founded by Gerard Winstanley in 1649 after the first English Civil War. He stated that “true freedom lies where a man receives his nourishment and preservation, and that is in the use of the earth” and that “England is not a free people, till the poor that have no land have a free allowance to dig and labour the commons.”

When food became horrendously expensive in 1649 the Diggers set up a camp on common land at St George’s Hill in Weybridge and began to grow vegetables there. The local landowners called in the army, who came and decided the Diggers were not harming anyone and told the landowners to take their case to court.

Instead the landowners paid a gang of ruffians to attack the Diggers, beating them up and burning down a house. Three years after the 2012 meeting, history repeated itself during the Magna Carta 800th anniversary celebrations, when police illegally invaded the Runnymede Eco-Village community set up by the new Diggers to stop their peoples’ celebration. The site is now occupied by luxury housing.

The original Diggers based their ideas of sharing of property from the New Testament and early Christianity and also looked back to England before the Norman Conquest. After 1066 the Norman Conquerors took hold of the land and divided it between themselves and there has been remarkably little change in land ownership over the almost 950 years since then, with the same families still owning the great majority of English land; 0.65% of the UK population currently own more than two thirds of the UK land area.

It was an interesting discussion with some very historically informed contributions about Magna Carta and the lesser-known but more relevant to the common man ‘Charter of the Forest‘ which was issued shortly afterwards as well as a discussion of current issues and some interesting proposals for the future. As well as hoping to use the Eco-village as a practical example of their philosophy they also decided to hold a people’s celebration of the 800th anniversary in 2015 to take place as well as the official events.

After a long meeting we walked up the hill to the Diggers camp close to the long disused Runnymede campus of Brunel University and I made a few pictures. The Eco-village was finally set up a few yards further down the slope.

You can read more about the Eco-Village and what happened in June 2015 in Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta festival on My London Diary and my posts here on >Re:PHOTO Celebrating Magna Carta and Magna Carta Under Threat. The Diggers blog with information about the Eco-village – its last post made in April 2015 – remains online.

More about the 2012 meeting at Diggers at Runnymede.

Flickr – Facebook – My London Diary – Hull Photos – Lea Valley – Paris
London’s Industrial Heritage – London Photos

All photographs on this page are copyright © Peter Marshall.
Contact me to buy prints or licence to reproduce.

*Police stop a man entering the Eco-Village*

Six years ago I went to the start of an event being held to mark 800 years since the Barons forced King Young to sign Magna Carta which placed important limitations on the power of the king and state and set in law important freedoms – at least for Barons. It was followed not long after by other charters which made those freedoms apply more widely.

*Police watched me as I took pictures at the Runnymede entrance* *earlier in the day*

The signing took place somewhere at Runnemede, though there seems to be no agreement at exactly where on this relatively wide are of flood plain between Staines where the barons stayed the previous night and Windsor where the king had his castle, though my own choice (on no historical basis) would be Ankerwyke, a little east of Magna Carta Island and to the north of the River Thames which I think back in those days proabably made most of that flat plain the National Trust calls Runnemede uncomfortably muddy.

Back on 16th June 2012 I’d sat in a circle of Diggers camped nearby on Cooper’s Hill next to the Magna Carta Memorial erected by the US Bar Association listening to a lecturer from Royal Holloway about both Magna Carta and the ‘Charter of the Forest’ issued shortly after, and discussing their plans for the future. A friendly police officer and a man from the National Trust came along to see what was happening and gave us some information about the area

*One of the well-organised public areas of the eco-village*

There are pretty large areas of unused land in Surrey and the Diggers had come out from a community allotment in Syon Lane in Brentford to make a widely publicised occupation of a small neglected area of Windsor Great Park. Local residents assured them that nothing had been done on this land for many years, but they were served with injunctions and the Crown Estate produced someone to say he was shortly to crop the dense growth of nettles for silage. They moved on, camped overnight at Runnymede and then occupied a piece of land owned by Royal Holloway College. RHUL were fast to serve injunctions though I think 9 years later the land is still not used, but the diggers found a better site a short distance away in the grounds of the former Shoreditch College, which had been sold to a developer in 2007, who had not yet been able to find the cash or get planning permission.

The 2012 meeting decided enthusastically they would hold a people’s celebration of the popular celebration of the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta on their site and had done a great deal of planning for it as I saw when I arrived on 12 June 2015. There was also a general agreement that something needed to be done to reclaim civil liberties that have been eroded over recent years with various suggestions for action and perhaps a new people’s charter. The events of 2015 made this very clear – and things including the current Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill now make this far more urgent.

*Vinny’s badge says ‘Who Protects Us From the Police’*

What we saw on Friday 12 June 2015 was a completely politically motivated operation against the community and its many friends to prevent their long-planned celebrations of Magna Carta, a charter supposed to represent freedom under the law but here at its very source 800 years ago it was being suppressed in an unfair and arbitrary manner by the forces of the Law.

Police or state security had put about fake rumours about a planned ‘rave’ on the football field next to their camp, and claimed to be ‘protecting people’ but I’d seen them clearly refusing entry to visitors to the fenced-off Eco-Village which was a clearly safe place. I listened to one of the officers in charge talking with Phoenix, one of the event organisers and it was very clear not only that he was lying but that he knew he was lying. Reading the Surrey police web site later that evening it made it clear that the police action was a deliberate attempt to prevent the planned festival from going ahead. Together with Surrey County Council they had made an order under Section 63 of the The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 which allows police power to restrict access, remove people and issue exclusion orders. It seemed a clear abuse of a law intended for quite different purposes, of stopping illegal raves, and though a number of people were arrested after having been given exclusion orders banning them from coming within five miles of the village, I don’t think any of their cases came to court.

*Luke, a trained forester tells me the woods have been neglected*

As I left, despite my press card I was also handed a notice of exclusion, though it would have banned me from my home for three days. At the time I wrote:

It would indeed seem a travesty if at a time when we are celebrating 800 years of freedom under the law against the arbitrary power of the state achieved at Runnymede, the authorities should abuse the law by using those arbitrary powers to prevent a people’s celebration of freedom

Although police stopped many and arrested some, others found ways in over the fence and the festival continued though on a reduced scale. The Eco Village residents were summoned to court on the Monday of their festival, when the Queen was attending official celebrations at Runnymede. Few attended and the court refused to listen to their case, simply making an order for eviction, apparently on the basis that the right of private property trumps all other rights. But again the state acted clumsily, and a a few days later Mr Justice Knowles in the High Court ordered a stay of execution accepting that many matters raised by the applicants might not of been dealt with adequately by the lower Court. Interestingly their case included the assertion of rights granted by Magna Carta and its 1217 companion Charter of the Forest as well as the rather more recent European Convention on Human Rights. But they failed to convince the courts that these were a part of our Law, and three months later the High Court issued an order for eviction , which was carried out rather brutally. The site is now a luxury gated village with prices starting around £1.2 million for a 1-bed flat. Some of the residents came to Staines and occupied a former adult education centre which had been empty for some years. They were evicted after around six weeks despite considerable local support for their plans to make the building a local community hub – six years later it remains boarded up and unused.

More at Police threaten Runnymede Magna Carta festival

All photographs on this and my other sites, unless otherwise stated, are taken by and copyright of Peter Marshall, and are available for reproduction or can be bought as prints.

Tag: Charter of the Forest

Diggers at Runnymede – 2012

Time for a New Magna Carta