On Sunday, August 7th, 2022, myself and 150 other common folk took part in a very English protest: the Dance of the Commons. Morris dancers, trad musicians, shamans, storytellers, bejewelled and sparkling fantastical creatures stepped, strummed and strolled together through the Englefield Estate in West Berkshire – 12,000 acres of privately owned land, inherited by Lord Richard Benyon, Minister of Access to Nature. It was a joyful and peaceful honouring of our right to roam.
Englefield, or the Saxon Field of Angles, was common ground until the 1700’s when the Benyon family began the process of privatising it. Multiple Enclosures Acts in the early 1800s forced anyone who still made their home on the land to leave the countryside and relocate to nearby towns, disconnecting them from the land and the wisdom and practices that were intertwined with it.
This estate, and this story, is one of many. In England, only 8% of the countryside and 3% of rivers are freely accessible to the public, but the Right to Roam campaign is working to change that. With its roots firmly planted in the folk cultures of England, the campaign prioritises diversity, inclusivity, and creativity. When co-founders Nick Hayes (The Book of Trespass, 2020) and Guy Shrubsole (Who Owns England, 2020) cooked up the idea in Shrubsole’s kitchen, folk music was a primary ingredient.
The same system that excludes us is the same system that gives the landowners the right to exploit the land that they own
Nick Hayes
“On a personal level, this whole thing comes from folk music for me,” says Hayes. “It’s the spirit of folk – being connected to the land. I kind of see this as the culmination of what began with deciding to write The Book of Trespass in the first place.”
I spoke to the artist, author, and organiser a few days before the trespass, to better understand why the Dance of the Commons was shaping up to be something more akin to a festival than a protest.
“On top of this being a land rights thing, it is also, in a way, a resetting of English folk music where it should be, in the heart and centre of English communities. Local, connected, integrated communities that come together and, of course, need space on the land and need this sort of freedom to be able to fall in love with nature, because that’s where half of the folk music comes from. I have this overwhelming love for folk music, but I feel the current dynamic is that they’ve got all the land and they’ve got all the power, but we’ve got the culture, and the creativity, and the song and the art and the craft, and that it’s time to actually use that. The direct analogy between our rights to the commons is folk music – you’re born, you don’t have to pay anyone for singing these songs because no one wrote them, we all did!”
Discrediters say that allowing people to roam freely through the countryside will result in the littering and destruction of wildlife habitat. But in May 2022, a group of Right to Roam campaigners discovered approximately 100 pheasant carcasses dumped alongside household debris while walking through woodland owned by the Duke of Somerset. This begs the question: are those who own the land the right people to care for it?
“What we have to do is get over this notion first,” explains Hayes, “that [humans] are a threat to the land. And the central point of our message is that we have been a threat to the land because we’ve been so divorced from it for so long that we’ve forgotten our responsibilities to it. If we actively engage with the land, we can improve it. Citizen science, pulling out Himalayan balsam, monitoring our water levels, reengineering our relationship with nature so that you’ve got the whole nation protecting it rather than just the stewards of our land, who are basically the people that exploit it. The same system that excludes us is the same system that gives the landowners the right to exploit the land that they own.”
So, who is best equipped to care for our land? In countries like Canada, indigenous peoples have relied on their knowledge to live with the land since time immemorial, despite the attempts of colonial violence to eradicate this wisdom.
They fenced up the wildflower meadows and they ploughed them into monoculture, and that’s exactly what they’ve done to our society – they’ve ploughed us
Nick Hayes
“There’s a real yearning for English indigeneity and it’s really tricky because we’re just coming to terms with the idea that England colonised and destroyed other cultures and exploited their indigeneity. But we’re kind of forgetting that there was an English wisdom of the land and knowledge of flora and fauna, a craft and a culture that we had, that was our indigeneity. It’s got nothing to do with DNA, or where your grandparents are from. It’s got to do with a lived experience of the land and wisdom, and a creativity born of just knowing the land that you live in. That’s what indigenous wisdom is, and we’ve lost it, but we can get it back. They fenced up the wildflower meadows and they ploughed them into monoculture, and that’s exactly what they’ve done to our society – they’ve ploughed us. The conservatives are desperate for us to be this one crop, just one type of person. What we’re saying is that English folk culture has got nothing to do with race or gender. In fact, the spirit of the commons encourages diversity, inclusion, mutation, weirdness, feyness, whimsy – all the kinds of stuff that is actually quite threatening to monoculture.”
As we talk, our group chat is buzzing with examples of this passionate, diverse creativity. Images of yarn-wrapped antlers, masks made of found feathers and insect carcasses, oversized orange pipe cleaners, and a giant replica of the coronavirus flood the chat. Hayes, a talented craftsman in his own right, gesticulates with golden fingertips, the result of creating a gilded Green Man that he will mount on a wooden pole for the event.
“England needs to feel like it belongs. For us to reclaim Englishness, we need to reclaim England. We were mugged of England long before we went mugging other countries and so that’s why it’s important to me and to the message of our campaign. It’s about the culture of the commons. What we lost when we lost our access to land was also the centralised culture, the arts and the crafts and the music, the songs and the stories that really pulled us together with nature, but also with each other. Who are we? What’s our land? What are our stories? What’s our heritage? All of that stuff is crucial.”
When we talk of belonging, I’m reminded of how exclusive the folk scene has felt to me. Purist snobbery abounds in certain circles, while in others historical reenactment takes priority over creative interpretation. Despite my own intuitive connection to the sounds, movements, and practices of folk, I never felt like I had a place in it. Until now.
“There is a new folk movement, and it’s political and it’s queer; it’s multiracial. And it’s sick and tired of, you know, the pale, male, ale – that kind of demographic of folk basically. We’re just taking it back. It’s already ours. It doesn’t just belong to, y’know, Cambridge Folk Festival, or potbellied, largely bigoted white men in their late 50s. It belongs to us all.”
The group chat turns to music. The musicians are trying to settle on which song and in what key they’ll play to accompany the Morris dancers.
“I’m really into what I would say is this long tradition of English whimsy – what I would call the common power of the fey and the whimsical. It’s a very powerful tactic of undermining authoritarian power. There’s something about the bells and the hankies of Morris dancing that really says, “OK, you’re going to line up policeman to block us from the land whilst we’re dancing Morris and we’re dressed as animals and we are coming filled with joy?” Authority shits their pants when they come to it, because we’re not doing anything aggressive. And Morris dancing is so ostensibly non-aggressive, let’s take it to them!”
Being able to come together in acts of whimsical joy is very important, especially right now, but the Right to Roam is about more than just reclaiming traditions.
These are not laws for everybody. These are laws for a landowning cabal, self-interested people that have initially used the land that they owned to get into parliament
Nick Hayes
“We’re saying that the solutions to the environmental crisis, the solutions to our health, mental health and physical health, they’re all here already. But they are in the wisdom of the commons, the culture that was destroyed when they put the fences up. The conversation around access to nature has been blocked three times by the government. They’ve created the laws that exclude us. These are not laws for everybody. These are laws for a landowning cabal, self-interested people that have initially used the land that they owned to get into parliament. One of the paragraphs in the letter that we’re writing to this landowner points out that he has inherited the right to exclude all of us. But we belong to England, we belong to West Berkshire. You know, this is our heritage, too.”
Hayes is clear that the Right to Roam campaign, though seemingly steeped in left-leaning politics, is working to affect change on behalf of everyone, regardless of political persuasion.
“Caroline Lucas has brought up an Early Day Motion for the right to roam in Parliament. The Green Party is helping loads, and I was on Countryfile the other day. What I’m saying is, it’s going mainstream and that’s our number one aim. We don’t want to keep this a leftist, radical thing. It’s like the NHS: we want this to be for everyone. I think lockdown helped us. People were really connecting with nature. They were walking the same right of way every day and then looking at those woods and thinking, “Why the hell aren’t we allowed in there?” They were also paddleboarding and bird watching and suddenly realising what they were missing.”
I have a costume to make and Hayes is expecting a call from Channel 4 about filming Grayson Perry’s new TV show at the event, so we must end our call. It’s very clear to me that the Dance of the Commons is a very special trespass for him.
“There’s a real horizontal power in folk music. The person singing is not the star – the song and the sentiment and the concept are the stars. We’re just carriers of this tradition and there are responsibilities and rights, just as there are with access to land. So, yeah, for me, this is the big one.”
Find out more about Nick Hayes and the Right to Roam movement at righttoroam.org.uk. The photos are by Max Reeves and the legends over at Weird Walk. Keep an eye open for Victoria Spooner’s report from the day itself.
