The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

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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. This is a passionate, brilliant, radical and persuasive work. Hayes is a trespasser who takes us on a series of walks which explore parts of England (92% of it) we are not allowed to see. To wander and to roam are implicitly connected with moral failings and the word ‘vagrancy’ has as much sense in morality as it does in legal cases concerning homeless people. A deviant is someone who has turned off the right way. To stray from the path suggests a clearly marked line of righteousness, signposted by societal or religious doctrines. And the most fundamental link between the physical world of trespassing and its moral parallel, is the origin of the word itself. 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. Transgression, which carries with it that pungent whiff of candle smoke and incense, that sense of religious damnation, is the reason Christians pray for the Lord to Forgive us our trespasses.

The Book of Trespass: ‘Every step on forbidden ground’ The Book of Trespass: ‘Every step on forbidden ground’

I'll be honest with you, I'm not much of a reader of non-fiction so in a bookstore I would totally have just walked pass the book. As it is, the book became available on Pigeonhole and the title and description of the book intrigued me so I signed up for it. This isn’t the politics of envy. All we’re asking is that the lines between us and the land are made more permeable The book takes the classic nature writing template as its structure – person walks through nature, describing what they see, giving historical context to the landscape. But in this case, every step it takes is on forbidden ground and, in one chapter, water. 92 per cent of our countryside and 97 per cent of rivers are out of bounds to the public, so finding places to trespass was not difficult. 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. 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 authorThe 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. 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. 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.

The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes, review: A gorgeously

Defend our footpaths and rights of way – and expect landowners to maintain them as they are required to doOn childhood rambles I learned that those “Trespassers will be prosecuted” notices were legal fictions. But it’s easy for me. I am white, middle class and male in an empowered situation in society. There are communities in England that have been traditionally marginalised from our countryside for so long that even the idea of accessing nature barely registers. Working- class communities, queer communities and people of colour all are disproportionately affected, in social and health parameters, by their exclusion from the countryside. Exhilarating . . . A gorgeously written, deeply researched and merrily provocative tour of English landscape, history and culture These signs conjure a spell, words that trigger my conscience and change the chemicals in my blood. Out of nowhere I feel as if I am doing something wrong”. Please bear in mind we all work part time and have limited capacity to respond to enquiries outside our core areas of work.

The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Hayes also digs into the history of land ownership in England. Crucially, he links subjection overseas to servitude at home. Land became “commodity alone”, “partitioned from the web of social ties” that truly gives it value. 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 nosesThe book ends with a call to extend the Countryside and Rights of Way Act in England, expanding our Right to Roam , no matter who owns the land. This is obviously a worthwhile endeavour as long as it is a part of a much wider movement that also looks to challenge the power of the vested landed interests of this country, dismantle the lines that divide us and repair the deep wounds those lines have caused. The Book of Trespass is a beautiful, powerful call to know our many histories, the struggles that have gone before, and offers a powerful awakening from the spell of ‘ownership’. Read it, let it galvanise you.

Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler Book of the Week: The Book of Trespass | Idler

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. 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”.

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I found the first part of this book to be very informative and discovered quite a bit about life in England before the Norman Conquest which I had hadn't known previously. The information about the Enclosure Act was also very enlightening. 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. I hadn't realised when reading the book of his connection with The Guardian newspaper, otherwise I wouldn't have been quite as surprised at his views. I was so also unsure why a trip to Calais to visit the migrant camps, however laudable, was included in a book about trespass in England. Apparently there are also some beautiful illustrations in the book which unfortunately I couldn't access on my tablet. Otto Ecroyd on his Northbound and Down journey: ‘I left a top job in the city to cycle 5,000 miles’ 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.