‘Of course, (the Charter of the Forest) it did not do anything like what we would do today. But it set out in a progressive direction. Vitally this was the first charter in history to assert rights of the common man (and woman). This was nice, since really it was asserting the rights of the property-less, whereas the Magna Carta was essentially about the rights of property-owners.
The Charter set out the right to subsistence. It said, in effect, that those who did not own property nevertheless had a right to have access to the means of subsistence, and to do so in a managed way so that the resources could be reproduce and preserved. This is a fundamental principle of the commons, and of all progressive politics worthy of the name.
In establishing a right to subsistence, the Charter pointed in two directions that are fundamental to a Left-Green narrative in the 21st century – the right to work and the right to a basic income. As far as the former is concerned, the Charter is more radical than leading declarations in the 19th and 20th centuries, notably the Papal Encyclical of 1891 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, both of which boil down to saying that the poor have a duty to labour and the state has a duty to support those who demonstrate their willingness to labour.
By contrast, the Charter gave substance to a real right to work, by enabling the property-less to have access to means of production and reproduction, and access to raw materials. This was a defence against labour commodification. The Charter has suffered from having been written in a language of the 13th century, with concepts and words that have faded into obscurity.
Nevertheless, in its difficult prose, it asserted that commoners – the property-less – had the right to obtain and use wood, water, clay, peat, minerals, herbal medicines, the right to pasture animals and take and breed fish and the right to build small mills, ponds and pits. What was called ‘the common of marl’ was symbolic, in that it referred to taking and using clay for all sorts of productive purposes. And it allowed for the ‘right to estover’, meaning that people could gather wood, fruit, nuts and so on constituting the necessaries of life. ‘
It is clear that the Charter still speaks for today.
Watch the International Basic Income Week Global Videothon below to see why people around the world support a basic income.