DUMMERSTON-Without wanting to validate Trump's demonization of America's shockingly large homeless population, I would like to correct Tristan Roberts' skewed and cherry-picked version of English property history that carried forward into American law.
The period referenced by Roberts, the 12th to the 19th centuries, was the time of other property-related events than just the Enclosure movement that converted communal land into private property.
It wasn't as if peasants happily cultivated whatever land they chose until Enclosure. They were serfs - not much different from slaves - bound to the land and to the feudal lords who controlled the land and the people. Not only forced to work the land, serfs also had to fight the lords' military battles. Land was not "communal assets" as Roberts claims; rather, hereditary control of it by the nobility was the basis of the feudal system.
Serfdom was abolished in the 16th century. Feudal land control was not. It was these landless former serfs who were branded "vagrants," as Roberts mentions, hiring themselves out as laborers and shifting to follow the work.
Communities did have limited common land on which anyone might graze livestock, but Roberts' claim that the "tragedy of the commons [...] is a myth" is false. Everyone had use of common land, but no one had the responsibility to manage or maintain it. Overgrazing quickly became a problem, and wealthier people with more animals could take unfair advantage of common land.
The 12th to 19th centuries also saw population growth that overwhelmed ancient land systems and rendered them untenable. Then, starting in the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution converted millions of rural workers into urban-industrial ones, to whom land control became less relevant.
Many societies still have communitarian land management systems, where village authorities assign temporary control of land to farmers on condition that they continue to cultivate it. The weakness of non-ownership of land is that it discourages long-term management and improvement strategies, such as planting orchards, digging irrigation canals, improving soil fertility, building structures, limiting grazing and timber cutting intensity, etc.
No one wants to make that sort of expenditure on common land that could wind up reassigned to someone else or be used by others who don't make the investment.
The Enclosure movement, reflected in American property law, may have been implemented harshly and punitively, but it was a logical response to the end of the feudal system and ambiguous land management responsibility. To portray it as the demise of a happy tradition of peasant freedom is highly misleading.
And common land has little or nothing to do with today's homelessness epidemic, caused by unlivable wage levels, lack of investment in affordable housing, addiction, and inadequate mental health services.
Steev Lynn
Dummerston
This letter to the editor was submitted to The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at [email protected].