Forest Charter

[Mark]

The Charter of the Forest

Mark Barret from People-in-Common (who do stuff at parliament Sq every
Sunday afternoon) was kind enough to let us know about this. Very
interesting...

2 links:

http://www.constitution.org/sech/sech_045.htm

&

http://www.metamute.org/en/node/5602

(article of this last link copied here):

Charters of Liberty in Black Face and White Face: Race, Slavery and the
Commons
By Peter Linebaugh
Mute Magazine - Nov 2005

The Magna Carta is renowned as the 'Charter of Liberty' which inspired
modern constitutional safeguards against the power of the State. But its
smaller companion, the Charter of the Forest, enshrining the customary
rights of the commoners to land and resources, has been overlooked.
Cutting between the political struggles of the early 1970s and the 1720s,
Peter Linebaugh shows how the struggle against enclosures in the woods of
England is inextricably linked with the struggle against slavery in the
Atlantic

I am thinking about revolution and constitution, where the former means
the overthrow of capitalism and the latter means the ways we re-constitute
our governance. Capitalism is the accumulation of commodities, and the
production of surplus value by means of unpaid labour. Government concerns
the rule of the Many by the Few, a task solved by divide et impere and
named the Constitution.

The legal cliché is that the American is a written constitution, while the
English is unwritten. Yet strictly speaking this is untrue inasmuch as
both have stemmed from the Magna Carta of 1215, 790 years ago.

The Norman and Angevin kings afforested as much as a quarter of England,
making game reserves, monopolising hydrocarbon energy resources, in zones
where the only law was the king’s pleasure. They were crusaders, in world
competition with Jews and Arabs for the commerce of the Mediterranean, and
to launch such crusades they forced marriages among the barony and took
children hostage, pulled teeth of Jewish money lenders, as well as
squeezing the serfs and villeins dry. Civil war was the result but
cease-fire was obtained with Magna Carta. It revealed the contradictions:
between state and church, between monarchs and barons, between them and
merchants, between all those three and the commoners who were dependent on
forest resources.

Magna Carta has 63 chapters. It is accompanied by a smaller charter, the
Charter of the Forest with seventeen chapters. They belong together. They
are the two documents printed first in the book of English law for over
five centuries. The most esteemed commentators, Edward Coke who influenced
the 17th century English Revolution and William Blackstone who influenced
the 18th century American Revolution, always treated the two charters as
one; the English charters of liberty. We can follow their precedent.

A word about each. The Magna Carta used to be well known and what was most
well known in it was chapter 39, because four principles of justice are
sometimes derived from it, viz., habeas corpus, trial by jury, prohibition
of torture, and due process of law. All of these have been curtailed by
the USA Patriot Act. The Charter of the Forest assumes a notion of the
‘commons’ or a practice of subsistence commoning in the hydrocarbon energy
resources of the time. This important presupposition is indicated by
technical terms, viz., herbage, assarts, pannage, chiminage, and estovers.
Herbage means grazing for cattle; assarts means clearing trees and
grubbing stumps for gardening or growing grains; pannage means letting
pigs into the woods for mast and nuts; chiminage means no tolls on the
roads and paths; estovers means getting wood for fuel, for housing, and
for tools and implements.

Now, to express these theoretically we might say that they refer to
use-rights rather than to exchange value and thus they refer to
particular, concrete labours rather than abstract labour with its
universal equivalent in money. From this formulation we might then say
they refer to a pre-capitalist mode of production, or we might say they
refer to those classes of people whose goal in economic life is the
consumption of uses rather than the accumulation of money. In short, they
refer to the Many not the Few.

Considering the two charters, some of their provisions concern subsistence
and some concern government. Some are negative; they prevent or prohibit
arbitrary behavior by armed forces of the king, such as bailiffs,
sheriffs, knights and so forth. Others are positive; they provide fuel,
travel, food, milk, clothing for commoners. So, like two baskets of law,
panniers on the back of a mule, they have trudged down the centuries,
sometimes hidden from view or apparently stuck in a slough, at others
times requiring a goad to get going again.

There is a third point, the mule can turn around and go the other way.
Both charters were committed to disafforestation, or the removal of the
king’s sole law and the return to conditions prior to the afforestation of
the Norman Conquest. Energy resources were to be returned or restored and
reparations made for harm done. The King took what did not belong to him;
two centuries later he was made to return it. Thus, they reversed two
hundred years of history making it, so to speak, go backwards. So much for
the self-serving bourgeois doctrine of progress!

The important difference between English and American constitutional
development is not that one is unwritten and the other is written. The
difference is Africa. American constitutional and revolutionary history
depended, first, on taking Indian lands, and, second, on maintenance and
expansion of unwaged labour on the plantation where slaves produced
surplus value. This is an 18th century problem, as references to the
Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution make clear, and as
the references of the U.S.A. constitution of 1787 as amended subsequently
also makes clear.

In England the protracted struggle to maintain subsistence by access to
the commons, or (to express this dynamically) by making commons, or
commoning, had the unintended consequence of closing England through the
repressive response of the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts passed between
1760 and 1830. What was the relationship between, on the one hand, the
expropriation from Africans by the slave trade and the resistance to
enclosures and, on the other hand, the formation of the working class?
This was the problem some of us of ‘the Warwick School’ set ourselves in
the early 1970s. We saw it, at first, as a problem of ‘crime’. Then we saw
it as a problem of ‘custom’. We did not see it as a problem of ‘colour’,
nor did we treat it as a problem of ‘capitalism’. Certainly, we failed to
see it constitutionally.

To see it as crime was easy enough. George Rudé taught us that
revolutionary crowds were criminalised by counter-revolutionaries and
their historians. E.J. Hobsbawn taught us that the romanticised criminal,
Robin Hood, appears in the transition into capitalism but not during the
transition out of capitalism. Plus were not the great revolutionaries
imprisoned, and did not the prisons – Siberia, Kilmainham, Devil’s Island,
Soledad, Robbin’s Island – become seminaries of truth?

We were conscious of colour, because unpaid labour in America depended on
it. In 1963 James Baldwin published The Fire Next Time, an essay whose
wrath anticipated the municipal rebellions of the future but with a title
alluding to the rainbow sign.1 In 1963 the English translation appeared of
Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth which expressed the hurricane-like
energy of the Third World in general and north Africa in particular. It
warned against black capitalism. That was also the year of E.P. Thompson’s
The Making of the English Working Class whose version of the working class
saved it from Cold War dismissals and whose call to human agency seemed to
revive the nerve of change, as it showed the autonomous self-activity of
workers in the past in strike, riot, mutiny, and commotion. These
American, African, and English voices were anti-capitalist and
anti-imperialist.

Between 1963 and 1968 occurred the great municipal rebellions in American
ghettoes under the slogan of ‘Black power’. How was a revolutionary class
analysis to be made? Though we understood Black, we were not yet aware of
white. We did not yet understand the DuBois principle of ‘the wages of
whiteness’.2

In 1968 after ‘the summer of love’ I drove across the country from
Columbia University anti-war sit-ins to the Berkeley commune and the
bulldozing of People’s Park. We stopped in Bloomington, Indiana, in whose
rare books library I found a scholarly key to the contradictions besetting
the world. It was yet another book by ‘anonymous’ who in my naiveté I
thought was the most frequently mentioned ‘author’ in the library card
catalogue. ‘Anonymous’ seems to have understood the problem and here was
the answer called The History of the Blacks of Waltham in Hampshire
(1723). I had it photocopied and then protected by some cardboard covers I
made and hinged with band-aid tape, which I took with me to England where
‘criminality’, Black history, and the English working class were going to
join, I thought, in a grand revolutionary project. Edward Thompson soon
had us formed into a research collective and I gave Edward my treasured
copy of The History of the Blacks which surely would introduce to England
the ‘black power’ discussions which were rocking the USA. Some years later
he returned it, with his marginalia, after it had helped him get started
with Whigs and Hunters (1975) which was published with Albion’s Fatal Tree
(1975).

He wrote a brilliant book about law and the ruling class, but it was not
the book I had dreamed of. It did not lay the axe to the root. I wanted a
book about Africans and commoners. I would put forward the fact that the
poachers defended commoning, not just by disguising themselves but by
disguising themselves as Negroes, and they did so at Farnham, near the
heart of what became the quintessence of England as Jane Austen so gently
wrote about it, or Gilbert White, the ornithologist, so carefully observed
it, or William Cobbett, the radical journalist, so persistently fulminated
about it.

Round about Farnham timber was wanted for the construction of men-of-war
and East Indiamen which stopped in Portsmouth for repairs, or were built
there from scratch for the purpose of the globalisation of commodity trade
characteristic of the time. Here’s how a flashpoint in the episodes of the
Waltham Blacks began: ‘Mr. Wingfield who has a fine Parcel of growing
Timber on his Estate near Farnham fell’d Part of it: The poor People were
admitted (as is customary) to pick up the small Wood; but some abusing the
Liberty given, carry’d off what was not allow’d, which that Gentleman
resented; and, as an Example to others, made several pay for it. Upon
which, the Blacks summon’d the Myrmidons, stripp’d the Bark off several of
the standing Trees, and notch’d the Bodies of others, thereby to prevent
their Growth; and left a Note on one of the maim’d Trees, to inform the
Gentleman, that this was their first Visit; and that if he did not return
the Money receiv’d for Damage, he must expect a second from 
 the Blacks.’
This is not exactly tree-hugging or Indian chipko, though it did have
warrant among local antiquarians in the nineteenth century who searched
for a charter of such commoning. The leader of the Blacks and ‘15 of his
Sooty Tribe appear’d, some in Coats made of Deer-Skins, others with Fur
Caps, &c. all well armed and mounted: There were likewise at least 300
People assembled to see the Black Chief and his Sham Negroes
.’

Charles Withers, Surveyor-General of Woods, observed in 1729 ‘that the
country people everywhere think they have a sort of right to the wood &
timber in the forests, and whether the notion may have been delivered down
to them by tradition, from the times these forests were declared to be
such by the Crown, when there were great struggles and contests about
them, he is not able to determine.’ The Waltham Blacks, they said, ‘had no
other design but to do justice, and to see that the Rich did not insult or
oppress the poor.’ They were assured that the chase was ‘originally
design’d to feed Cattle, and not to fatten deer for the clergy, &c.’ The
central common right was pasture, ‘common of herbage’ as the Forest
Charter says. Keeping a cow was possible on two acres, and less in a
forest or fen. Half the villagers of England were entitled to common
grazing. As late as the 18th century ‘all or most householders in forest,
fen, and some heathland parishes enjoyed the right to pasture cows or
sheep.’3 So, the Waltham Blacks were class conscious. There was also an
awareness at the time that the keeping of a cow, essential to the material
constitution of the country, was backed up by charter.
Timothy Nourse denounced commoners at the beginning of the century. They
were ‘rough and savage in their Dispositions.’ They held ‘leveling
Principles.’ They were ‘insolent and tumultuous’ and ‘refractory to
Government.’4 In September 1723 Richard Norton, the Warden of the Forest
of Bere, wished to ‘put an end to these arabs and banditti.’ The commoner
belonged to a ‘sordid race.’ The commoner was compared to the Indian, to
the savage, to the buccaneer, and to the Arab.

The ‘Blacks’ defended the customs of the commoners; the commoners were
both criminalised and racialised in the discourse of the enclosers, the
privatisers, and the big wigs. There was even the suggestion that
attacking them was a sort of crusade. The Waltham Black Act of 1722 thus
became, among other things, a means of drawing a colour line and
criminalising common right.5

We can put forward as evidence what was neglected in Thompson, the fact of
the African slave trade. Blacking, wrote the anonymous historian in that
treasured pamphlet history, commenced ‘about the times of general
confusion, when the late pernicious schemes of the South Sea Company boure
all things down before them, and laid waste what the industry and good
husbandry of families had gather’d together.’6 The South Sea Company was a
slave trading company, formed a few years earlier, to take advantage of
the asiento or licence to trade to Spanish America. On September 11, 1713,
Royal African Company congratulated itself on obtaining ‘such advantageous
terms, as never were before granted to the people who undertook the
furnishing of negroes to the Spanish West Indies.’ The crisis of the
commons began as a financial crisis which itself arose from slaving.

The South Sea Bubble was the wreck of a kind of capitalist commoning.
Thirty years earlier, this new form of commoning had been produced through
developments within English constitutional governance. During the 1690s
sovereign legal authority (King-in-Parliament) united with the financial
form of value resulting in the Bank of England, Lloyd’s Insurance Company,
the Coinage Act, &c. Money and other financial instruments liquefied the
clumsy, cumbersome form of wealth as private property which was presented
as use values in warehouses, docks, ships, shops, etc., and moreover
placed it directly under fiscal state command. The creation of monetary
liquidity permitted the distribution of surplus value as investment in
various commercial and industrial enterprises according to the needs of
capital as a whole without regard to rates of exploitation in individual
enterprises. Investment and speculation appeared insubstantial,
disembodied, atmospheric or gaseous. The South Sea ‘bubble’ popped owing
to cupidity which seemed infinite and to anonymous Atlantic obstacles,
namely, resistance, recalcitrance, and revolt.

The decade between 1716 and 1726 was the golden age of piracy, Marcus
Rediker informs us.7 The significance of piracy during these years was
twofold – it was multiracial and it was against the slave trade. They
blockaded ports, disrupted the sea lanes. The pirate ship ‘might be
considered a multiracial maroon community.’ Hundreds were African. Sixty
of Blackbeard’s crew of a hundred were black. Rediker quotes the Negro of
Deptford who in 1721 led ‘a Mutiny that we had too many Officers, and that
work was too hard, and what not.’ They also prevented the slave trade from
growing. This was the complaint of Humphrey Morice, MP, Governor of the
Bank of England, owner of a small fleet of slavers, who led the
petitioning to Parliament and who suffered severe losses in 1719, the year
that serious blacking commenced. A naval squadron was sent to west Africa.
Four hundred and eighteen pirates were hanged. The conjuncture of
apparently very distant forces, struggle for common rights and the
Atlantic slave trade, in fact met in intimate proximity.

Daniel Defoe, the most prolific prose writer in the English language, was
preoccupied with the issues of Atlantic labour power. Coincidently, his
writing transpired during the privatisation of the printed word by means
of Queen Anne’s Copyright Act. He precisely combined the intimate
conjunction of opposites with a trans-Atlantic background. Robinson
Crusoe, Mariner was published in 1719. The book dramatises the labour
theory of value, glories in the intricacies of the division of labour, and
puts the European foot (Crusoe) on the African neck (Friday). Alexander
Selkirk, the actual person who was the prototype of Robinson Crusoe, died
in February 1721 as a sailor in a naval squadron that was sent to west
Africa to extirpate the piracy interrupting the slave trade. The
Adventures and Misadventures of Moll Flanders, published in 1722 treats
the issues of criminalisation of the commons and large scale cooperative
labour. Upward social mobility was not accomplished by ’affirmative
action’ but negative criminality, as Moll Flanders hooked up with
highwaymen on the first step of the ladder of success and whose final rung
she at last attained – a Virginia tobacco plantation – so she too could
put the boot to the African enslaved.

These are the classic fictional disquisitions on subsistence, survival,
and surplus in that era of off-shore and homeland plunder; they also
present heroic prototypes of the ‘white’ worker. Indeed, these novels
coincided almost to the year with ‘the invention of the white race,’ to
give the title of Ted Allen’s compelling thesis.8

A buffer stratum was to be created by offering material advantages to
white proletarians to the lasting detriment of black proletarians. When
and how did the ‘wages of whiteness’ originate? The first date DuBois
gives in the protracted process is 1723 when laws were passed in Virginia
making Africans and Anglo-Africans slaves forever. The bonded people
objected in 1723 to the Bishop of London and the King ‘and the rest of the
Rullers.’ ‘Releese us out of this Cruell Bondegg’ they cried. In the same
year Richard West, the Attorney General, objected to the same law, ‘I
cannot see why one freeman should be used worse than another, merely upon
account of his complexion
.’ But the Governor of Virginia understood the
necessity of ‘a perpetual Brand’ – skin colour, or the phenotype, which
marked the person as surely as the burnt flesh caused by the golden brands
used by the South Sea Company. In this way, Ted Allen tells us, a
‘monstrous social mutation’ occurred, namely, that stratum within the
American class structure which derives its hopes, security, and welfare
from white skin privilege. It has been essential to the constitution of
American class relations ever since.

This was not known to Thompson. The experience within England (though not
Ireland) was different, where the policing of the wage relationship, or
the exploitation of the Many by the Few, did not depend upon the colour
line, and where therefore it was unnecessary to constitute that structure
of white supremacy. Thompson wrote the famous ‘rule of law’ coda to Whigs
and Hunters. ‘As the last imperial illusions of the twentieth century
fade, so preoccupation with the history and culture of a small island off
the coast of Europe becomes open to the charge of narcissism. The culture
of constitutionalism which flowered here, under favoured conditions, is an
episode too exceptional to carry any universal significance.’ Yet, even
smaller than England was the island where Robinson Crusoe met Friday and
that story spread world-wide.

The colonists of the north American mainland, even at the time of Robinson
Crusoe (1719), the Waltham Black Act (1722), and the South Sea Bubble
(1722), had begun to graft some of that English constitutionalism to their
own purposes. For example, The New-England Courant in its summer issue of
1722 sought to be rectify the stupidity of the colonists by quoting
chapter 39 of Magna Carta and commented, ‘No Freeman shall be taken, &c.
These words deserve to be written in letters of gold, and I have often
wondred that they are not inscribed in Capitals in all our Courts of
Judicature, Town-halls, and most publick edifices; they being essential to
our English Freedom and Liberties
’ ‘No man ought to be put from his
Livelyhood without answer’ rings hollow to the unemployed, or to the
Indians who were proclaimed rebels in the same newspaper for attacking
fifteen commercial vessels intruding on their fishing grounds and whose
women and children were taken in captivity to Dunstable. ‘No man can be
exiled or banished out of his native country’ is hypocrisy to the men and
women and children from the west coast of Africa enslaved in America. The
New England Courant’s sole advertisement reads ‘A likely Negro Woman to be
sold by Mr. Thomas Selby at the Crown Coffee-House, the lower end of
Kingstreet.’

Thompson, however, did not accept a ‘South Sea’ or Atlantic perspective,
much less a planetary one in his references to constitutionalism. He
reversed himself, moving from a mood of postcolonial narcissism to one of
praise for the English ruling class as a whole: ‘
 the inhibitions upon
power imposed by laws seem to me a legacy as substantial as any handed
down from the struggles of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth, and
a true and important cultural achievement of the agrarian and mercantile
bourgeoisie, and of their supporting yeomen and artisans.’ And when
Thompson writes of the culture of constitutionalism, why does he exclude
the charters of liberty?

Dorothy Thompson, many years later, attributed this coda to heated
arguments that she had with her husband and co-worker, Edward, arguing
that ‘he was leaning too far in the direction taken by some of the
contributors to Albion’s Fatal Tree in dismissing the law simply as an
instrument of class power.’9 The context of the discussions about these
books took place in 1970 and 1971; when for instance Howard Zinn in
November 1970 said ‘The Problem is Civil Disobedience’, and he ran down
the law, how the bill of rights is publicised but not enforced, how the
property laws are enforced but not publicised. He showed how decorum and
propriety fool us and cause us to revere the law. He reminded us that
often we have to go outside the legal framework – the Civil War, the Union
drives, the American Revolution. He said ‘people in all countries need the
spirit of disobedience to the state
.’ The American and the English
experiences were different. The Attica revolt was in September 1971, and
the trial of the Mangrove Nine was finished in 1971. Internment without
trial was introduced in 1971, and ‘Bloody Sunday’ was in January 1972.
These events of state terrorism were not yet answered by similar violence
of those taking an anti-imperialist stand. Furthermore, they still seemed
part of an ancient constitution in which ‘race’ played trumps.

Our books were not published until 1975. During the interval the world
changed direction. The PLO assassinated Israeli athletes at the Munich
Olympics. The IRA brought the war to England. The Guildford pub bombing of
October 1974 left five dead, a month later the Birmingham pub bombing
killed twenty-one. While the political climate became more violent, the
intellectual climate became more academic, more legalistic, more obscure.
Critical Legal Studies (formed in 1977) stuck to the high theory of
Frankfurt School and French post-structuralism, obtusely reluctant to
engage English social history, or to raise the constitutional issues of
race or the commons.

There is a vast amount of English social history since 1975 (and before)
recording the importance of customary rights to common forest resources.
Moreover, that story is now clearly understood to have happened all over
the world. J.M. Neeson produced a great book about the commons from
earlier discussions concerning custom. Called Commoners, it showed that
subsistence use-rights remained a material basis of many English agrarian
workers. Meanwhile, others of us adduced the evidence that the wage
relation arose from the process of criminalisation and the process of
criminalisation arose from custom. The irrationality of the wage concealed
the unpaid labour. But could these aperçus attain constitutional
importance or were they destined to dismissal as un-theorised ditty?

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But lets the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose

The violence and the terror, ‘the military option’ as the Italian Red
Brigades put it, made it harder to see the Charters, or the commons, as
anything other than a wild goose chase. Looking back now we can see that
the issue was not the rule of law against terrorism: the issue was the
preservation of commoning against new enclosures.

We could use some theory of the kind that transformed Magna Carta for the
Levellers, of the kind that transformed Magna Carta for the abolitionists.
In 1774 the former African-American slave, Olaudah Equiano, put on white
face in London in order to obtain a warrant of habeas corpus. This is
among the first actions by which Magna Carta was appropriated for the
trans-Atlantic movement to abolish slavery. In the same year Granville
Sharp wrote ‘The wisdom of ages has made [Magna Carta] venerable, and
stamped it with an authority equal to the Constitution itself, of which it
is, in reality, a most essential and fundamental part; so that any attempt
to repeal it would be treason to the State! This glorious Charter must,
therefore, ever continue unrepealed: and even the articles which seem at
present useless, must ever remain in force.’10 Granville Sharpe used the
charters against slavery, racial and otherwise, but, despite an obsession
with the gothic frankpledge, he did not take his stand with the commons,
unlike Thomas Spence or Gracchus Babeuf. Similarly with Frederick Douglass
who said in 1854, ‘Let the engine of the Magna Carta beat against the
Jericho walls of Slavery, and no seven days blowing of ram’s horns would
be necessary,’ a reference to the jubilee which, while emancipating
slaves, also restored the commons.

Edward Thompson failed to mention Magna Carta and more strategically he
omitted the Charter of the Forest. There was an opportunity to link the
constitution to the commons at that point in time, Walpole 1720-1723, when
some English and African commoners could be found together on the seven
seas and in the wild wood. The moment passed: privatisation and slavery
advanced together. We hear Blackstone crow as he defined private property
as ‘that sole and despotic common which one man claims and exercises over
the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any
other individual in the universe.’ (He admitted in his Commentaries that
there are elements such as light, air, and water which ‘must still
unavoidably remain in common.’)

Today, the commons comes back to us from the South! Subcommandante Marcos
provided the voice of the Zapatistas and the indigenous people of Chiapas
calling for the return of Article 27 and the ejidos, or common land, while
reminding us of the Magna Carta. As the Many demand water, energy, and
wherewithal against the surplus value hogged by the Few, we must reprise
those moments when the act of constitution showed not racist divide et
impere but that old, old friend of all, the commons. This enterprise calls
for our contemporary appropriations of both of the Charters of Liberty.

FOOTNOTES

1 The title alludes to a slave song:
‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign,
No more water, the fire next time’. Editor’s note.

2 David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the
American Working Class (Verso: New York, 1991). In the preparation of this
essay I thank David Roediger and his colleagues at the University of
Illinois, Champaign-Urbana

3 J.M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure, and Social Change in
England, 1700-1820 (Cambridge, 1993), p. 317

4 Timothy Nourse, Campania Foelix, Or a Discourse of the Benefits and
Improvements of Husbandry (1700), pp. 15-16

5 ‘The Black Act was instituted in 1723... in response to the Waltham deer
poachers. It made it a felony (that is, a hanging offence) to appear armed
in a park or warren, or to hunt or steal deer, with the face blackened or
disguised...’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Act

6 The History of the Blacks of Waltham in Hampshire, Anonymous, (1723)

7 Marcus Rediker, Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden
Age (Beacon Press: Boston, 2004)

8 Ted Allen, The Invention of the White Race, volume two, The Origin of
Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (Verso, 1997)

9 Daniel H. Cole, ‘“An Unqualified Human Good”: E.P. Thompson and the Rule
of Law’ http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=169264

10 A Declaration of the People’s Natural Right to a Share in the
Legislature (1774), pp. 202-3


Peter Linebaugh <plineba at yahoo.com> teaches history at the University of
Toledo in Ohio where he is also writing a book on the Charters of Liberty