This Land is Our Land
by Marion Shoard

(Gaia Books)

A BADFA review by Chris Beney, 1999 (put on web 2002)

This Land is Our Land by Marion Shoard [ISBN 1-856-75064-7, Gaia Books] was out of print and has now been reissued with an updating chapter. She puts the view that more and more people want a voice in the fate of the countryside, and the opportunity to visit it for journeys or for recreation.

She tries to put land ownership into historical perspective, particularly the dramatic change in the way land was owned after William the Conqueror seized it all as personal property and gave bits of it out to his friends and supporters.

She talks of the wrongs done during the Enclosures when many small landholders lost their property to the bigger estates.

She highlights the way that even today most people’s thinking on land ownership still carries strong echoes of the feudal system.

She reminds us that despite the landowners’ groups claiming that our paths were originally only used for going to work or business, in fact they have always been used for recreation as well. In Elizabeth I’s time Londoners on May Day “would walk into the sweet meadows and green woods, there to rejoice their spirits with the beauty and savour of sweet flowers, and with the harmony of birds” according to John Stow, a reporter of the time.

Some of her example of landowner behaviour, while doubtless true, are not well enough shown to be typical of landowners and that risks alienating some readers. That is a pity, but anyone reading the book is likely to have their perception of land ownership changed for ever.

C.B.

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