“They Wandered Out of Their Knowledge….”
Coming to terms with the commons means a willingness to learn a new language and the alien worldview that it makes possible. That is one of the great lessons that I have gleaned from reading histories of English commons and the enclosure movement.
I realized this anew upon reading an essay by historian Peter Linebaugh, “Enclosures from the Bottom Up,” in the December 2010 issue of Radical History Review. (Alas, the essay is locked behind a paywall, but fortunately, a website called “Envisioning a Post-Capitalist Order: A Collaborative Project” -- which Radical History Review has a hand in – has posted a downloadable pdf version of the essay here.)
Linebaugh -- the great scholar of the commons and author of The Magna Carta Manifesto (University of California Press, 2006) – has a way of conjuring up entire ways of knowing that have disappeared. I was struck by two passages describing the folkways of commoners. The first links “body-snatching” with the commons, a conjunction that made me start. It turns out that, amidst a civil rebellion in Otmoor, near Oxford, England, in the 1830s, a rallying cry of the commoners was “Damn the body snatchers!”
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