October 29, 2008

Forestry Commission scraps Magna Carta right to collect woods from forests. The Forestry Commission of Great Britain is phasing out licences for people to gather firewood from the forests, an almost 800-year-old right which was established in 1217 in the Magna Carta's companion document, the Charter of the Forest (previously on MeFi). [Via]
posted by homunculus 16 years ago
  • Les estovers est over, as our Norman forebears wouldn't have said. I lived in a caravan for a year or so when I was young and this is how I got my firewood, though I never bothered with a licence -- I almost never met anyone else while I was out collecting. Not sure how they're going to enforce this, or if they'll even try if you're not filling up a pick-up.
  • Abiezer lived in a van? By the river?
  • Worse than that actually Capt.; it was an old ambulance parked up in some woods along a cycle track. I am a right dirty hippy, it cannot be denied. Though in my defence, I did have a job.
  • When going in the woods is outlawed, only outlaws will be in the woods. Long live Robin Hood!
  • I am out-the-fuck-raged. Where was the House of Lords on this? Sleeping! That's where!!!!11!!
  • Don't expect any support from Iceland, you anti-Icelanders.
  • We're sorry about that now and would like them to come across in their longboats and sack and pillage the Forestry Commission headquarters.
  • Mmmm, sacks of pillows...
  • When Britain really ruled the woods, In good King Johnny's time The House of Peers made no pretence To intellectual eminence, Or scholarship sublime; Yet Britain's woodstoves were ablaze In good King Johnny’s glorious days! Yet Britain's woodstoves were ablaze In good King Johnny’s glorious days!
  • On a more serious note, I'd be interested to see a little more detail on the particular health and safety provisions that have supposedly lead the FC to do this. I see these "PC-gone-mad" health and safety stories from time to time forcing us all to have Christmas crackers with no bang or some made up shit and suspect it's all part of a long plan to have health and safety abolished so they can send kids up chimneys again and bring back the 18-hour day. I do not of course discount the possibility that there really are pointless bureaucrats with nothing better to do, but it does smell a tad fishy, god wot.
  • Too much health and safety no doubt put an end to It's A Knockout. Ban H&S, I say!