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Comment by keenerd | Hacker News Reader

> The figures for Scotland are even more striking. Nearly half the land is in the hands of 432 private individuals and companies. More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic families. In total they hold some 2.24m acres, largely in the Lowlands.

This is balanced by their Right to Roam. For those in the US, this will sound completely insane: there is no concept of trespassing provided you act responsibly when on other's land. Access to the country is a common right, and the owners are stewards to it.

~~Arguably, the most practical way for such a law to come into existence is for the bulk of the land to be owned by a tiny minority, and for a democratic majority to create the law.~~ Strike that, didn't research. Sorry.

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Edit: thankyou for amending your comment about this being a good way to achieve right to roam. It's a rare thing from anyone on the internet to admit any kind of inaccuracy.

This view ignores all the history and has it exactly backwards. A full description would require at least one book, although I'd suggest starting with http://www.andywightman.com/poor-had-no-lawyers

A few things which must be taken into account:

- pre-feudal common ownership

- confiscation of land during the 1700s Jacobite rebellions. "More than a quarter of all Scottish estates of more than 5,000 acres are held by a list of aristocratic families" is not at all surprising when you consider that those families were given the land from its original owners and occupants at gunpoint by the government.

- the Highland Clearances

In short, the right to roam pre-existed; it was only removed by extremely questionable action; and the minority who owned the land fought access to it.

(For the situation in England&Wales, start at the Kinder Scout mass trespass)

The Jacobites were themselves aristocrats and were violently rebelling against the monarchy. Also, the Highland Clearances were not acts of theft, the landowners already owned the land at that point.

edit: I should also state that the Highland Clearances were complex but get retold as: "rich people stole land from poor people" often.

Highland Clearances were complex but get retold as: "rich people stole land from poor people" often.

This is where I think we need to treat history differently from current events, because concepts like ownership, title, rights and such are ultimately subjective outside an agreed legal context. Obviously, there is disagreement here.

I don't know much about that period, but there are countless examples of similar things.

The system of land ownership was at one point, tribal (clannish). tribes controled lands and chiefs control tribes, rights to the land negotiated custom and familial means. Chiefs became lords. Tribesmen, tenants. Titles, privelages and customs changed.

Eventually, the lords became modern peope, industrial era capitalists. Economies became monetary. Clans ceased to exist. Titles became wealth. Tenants became squatters.

I think it's hard to follow the history, while maintaining a modern sense of property.

I can certainly see how people view the scottish peasant class as having a moral claim to the property.

"Chiefs became lords."

They became feudal lords by accepting the King of Scots as their feudal overlord - this is what gave them the "ownership" of lands that had previously been held communally.

"The Poor Had No Lawyers - ho Owns Scotland and How They Got it" covers this and much more:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006WB2E9Q/ref=dp-kindle-redirec...

Scotland has had well over a thousand years of legal shenanigans around land ownership - it is amazingly complex for such a small country.

> "rich people stole land from poor people"

Is that or is that not a fair summary, though? If the mass eviction happened to be legal, is that sufficient to make it morally OK? What about the enclosure of genuinely commonly-owned land at the time?

The rich people owned that land already. The poor leased it.

It looks like the rich only owned it because it was gifted to them by the crown - and the crown only owned it because they took it by force. Maybe all this was legal but only because the laws were bad.

Actually, in lots of areas of Scotland local chiefs willingly became feudal lords gaining "official" title for their lands.

...became feudal lords gaining "official" personal title to their clans' lands, IIUC.

Exactly - what was communal became personal. Which if not legally theft was certainly the moral equivalent.

aka rich people stealing land from poor people.

"This is balanced by their Right to Roam. For those in the US, this will sound completely insane ..."

Actually it sounds very familiar as we have a (somewhat) similar tradition in the western US that continues to this day:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_range

I don't know... democrat-ish ideals maybe. It's the same law in Sweden and arguably the Scots got it from when the Danes ruled the land. (In these matters, you can rather safely lump together Danes, Swedes etc into a generic "Norse" category.)

And interestingly Denmark doesn't have this law. Sweden, Norway and Finland all have it, and they all have decently similar cultures. Denmark might be the outlier because of it's small size?

Too close to Germany? I'm not even kidding!

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