Exmoor, the Charter of the Forest and our Lost Common Rights by Myc Riggulsford

Our speaker, Myc Riggulsford suggests that electricity and water bills may be illegal, and you can dig up clay or feed your pigs on public land, according to an ancient law which should guarantee all of us our basic needs met from the shared wealth of our country. The peasants of Exmoor were revolting, and so were the Dartmoor commoners in the year 1217. People trying to scratch a living in the Royal Hunting Forests were destitute and couldn’t pay their taxes to the new Norman barons. In a huge legal change they finally got our rights recognised in the Charter of the Forest.  

The Charter of Liberties extracted in 1215 at Runnymead just protected the Norman barons from being taxed and imprisoned by King John, but this extra law recognised that people living on Exmoor needed to feed and shelter themselves, their families, and their livestock. And exactly 800 years ago in 1225 the two Charters were reissued and combined, becoming Magna Carta. That’s when we peasants got our rights recognised, and today it may just make your electricity bill illegal. You might think of this law as a sort of Universal Basic Income, or a pension for life. By knowing more about our lost rights we can protect our common assets such as ancient woodlands, and help young people explore more sustainable ways of living.  

The rural skills we have lost are also interesting in their own right, as pannage, estovers, agistment and other archaic practices from the days before plastic. Join Myc for a mixture of comedy, Exmoor history, radical thinking, smallholding skills, some fun sedition, and illustrated with pictures from mediaeval manuscript marginalia. 

Myc Riggulsford is an internationally known science & environment journalist, specialising in climate change, renewable energy, biodiversity, soils, GM crops, ancient woodland and other issues, and has become increasingly concerned about land rights, the loss of our Commons, and the new field of Natural Capital. Formerly called Ecosystem Services these are the resources we get, apparently for free and forever, from the world around us such as clean air, clean water and soils to grow our food. Myc has been appearing at arts festivals, writing, broadcasting, and lecturing about the Charter of the Forest across the South West since 2017 gently spreading sedition. He is also a smallholder who has kept Exmoor Horn sheep and farmed organically in North Devon for 27 years, with an interest and practice in traditional rural crafts such as coppicing and hedge laying. For the last 12 years he was the independent adviser for the Standards Committee of Exmoor National Park Authority.