Manor Lessons: Commons Revisited

Our contemporary condition, governed by the abstract apparatus of the capitalist market, demands a critical reading of the distribution, ownership, and use of common resources, especially on an island that has experienced a long history of privatization stemming from enclosure. Manor Lessons, the third investigation into what laba has termed “environmental objects,” looks at how the manor house can be used as a testing ground to reassess Britain’s complex and ongoing relationship to the countryside. As the most rural region of one of the more densely populated countries in Europe, the South West of England reflects all the absurdities of a globalized country under pressure to develop economically, physically, and environmentally. Highly protected landscapes, both natural and composed, sit as the backdrop to historic seats of political power, while sites of intense production are neatly concealed behind natural veils. This publication asks what lessons can be learned from the multi-layered history of the Manorial System, whose forgotten feudalistic origins were once rooted in the idea of the land not as private property but as common ground.