Book Review--The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us

Compared to a country like the United States, where federal and state lands to which citizens can lay substantial if still fraught claim, the overwhelming majority of land in Britain is private. Even “national” parks in England and Wales comprise a patchwork of lands under different ownership regimes, to which people have overlapping, highly litigated claims, those of private landowners often retaining real force. The significance of this fact, the forms that it takes, and the background to the privatization of this land form the background to Nick Hayes’ The Book of Trespass: Crossing the Lines that Divide Us (Bloomsbury, 2020). In a book that blends nature writing, history, social commentary, and advocacy, and supplemented by beautiful black and white illustrations, Hayes takes readers along as he trespasses on a series of properties across England.

Each chapter in Hayes’ book is devoted to an account of a trespass he committed on a particular English property. Some of the trespasses are brazen, but Hayes goes to great lengths to demonstrate how the legal meanings of this term have been dramatically expanded, with implications not just for roamers and ramblers, but for political expression and dissent. Each episode is rich in its description of landscapes, its faunal and floral inhabitants, and the social dynamics that structure access. Readers can almost imbibe the smells of grassy fields and river embankments in summer, or feel leaves beneath their feet.

But more powerful than the descriptions of spaces from which the public are excluded are the accounts of how these properties and their borders, and the legal regimes which define them, came to be. From the fortunes gathered from the slave trade (Hayes delves into UCL’s Legacies of British Slavery project), to the marriages that cemented estates to the portfolios of current Members of Parliament, to the means--historic and current--that landowners deploy to defend their properties, Hayes leaves readers with much to consider.

Hayes reminds readers that there is nothing natural about England’s strict demarcation of property borders and intolerance of trespass. The earlier great era of enclosure--the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries--with all the social strife they generated were followed by a second selling off of the public estate during the 1980s and 1990s. These dramatic processes, Hayes argues, remain under-considered when thinking about the meanings of space and democracy in England today.

Alternatives to England’s draconian laws of trespass (and it is important to emphasise that the property regime in question is an English and Welsh one) abound. Scotland’s public rights to lands, emerging from the devolution project of the late-1990s, are far more generous than those south of the border. If the creation of a massive federal estate--like that which exists in the United States--is geographically and legally impractical, Scandinavian nations that offer the public substantial rights of access to private property offer an alternative model.The Book of Trespass is written for a wide audience, and Hayes is as expert and gentle a guide through the legal and historical thicket of trespass in England as down the footpaths and over the fences of the nation’s countryside. I knew a bit of this history--both from studying British history and from having hiked quite a bit in the British Isles--but after reading Hayes’ powerful, amusing, and deeply thought-provoking book I will not view the British countryside in the same way.