‘Aye Defend Your Rights and Commons’

I grew up in a small industrial but rurally situated  town in the Scottish Borders -  Hawick - a place which has shaped me in ways I am still learning about. It has taken me a long time to understand that my views on the world stem from growing up in a community whose core values are community, collective responsibility and a sacred duty to land and tradition. 

Hawick, like many of the communities of the Scottish Borders,  celebrates a Common Riding each year annually. The festivals vary widely from town to town with many having fallen away in the past but been reinstated in the 20th century (with the exceptions of Hawick and Selkirk which can trace their continuity back for hundreds of years .All have adapted to incorporate  new elements through time - for example Selkirk is based around the Trade Guild system and features ceremonial flag waving more commonly seen in Belgium & Holland, whilst Peebles incorporated elements of Beltane celebrations with monarchist pageantry when it reinstated its festival during the Victorian period. 

Hawick’s festival revolves around the Battle of Flodden in 1513  - an event which laid waste to the Borders and lead to the death of most of the men of fighting age. The boys of the town - who were too young to go to war - ambushed  a disbanded raiding party of the English army in 1514 returning with the flag of their defeated enemy.  The captured flag is ridden around the ‘meethes an merches o the commonti i Hawick’  I’ll check the exact wording each year by a young man elected to be Cornet and represent the young lads who kept the town safe in 1514. 

Growing up in Hawick I mainly experienced the pageantry, watched the horses ride out and come back each Tuesday and Saturday for 6 weeks of the summer, grabbed for pennies and photos of the cornet at the Strive and went to school dressed in blue and yellow. We learned songs - Hawick has almost as many songs about it as London and eat a picnic up ‘the Mair’ (a big picnic on the towns Common land ). It was fun and it's what everyone did but I didn't really know what it was about - and neither it seems do many folks either in Hawick, or spectating the moments of controversy from the outside.

It was only as an adult, studying history at Edinburgh University, wanting to write a dissertation that might actually be read by people, that I started to look at the Common Riding with new eyes. I think my research was also very motivated by a desire to belong somewhere that I grew up, but had never felt very accepted by, that I had chosen to leave (and still don't live) but wished had embraced me more fully as a child. I was looking at gender and how ideas of masculinity have evolved through time, and this can be seen in a local festival which every year chooses a young man of the community to represent itself. This was very interesting but the thing which has brought me back again and again over the years, digging and questioning and learning to love this part of my history, is that this festival is at its core an act of resistance against the process of Enclosure. The pageantry and the layers added through time, though important to people in other ways, disguise the fact that what happens each year is an execution statement of the people of Hawick rights to the Common Land.

It's hard to articulate what it means to grow up in a place like this, the duty to this tradition is not something historical or dead, it's the living beating heart of the community of Hawick. It shows up everywhere in the fabric of life - the sense of connection to and responsibility for place, the lack of belief in any kind of centralized authority sorting things out, the level of empowerment ordinary working class folk feel for starting new things and a straightforward no nonsense form of collective economy in the form of a Common Good Fund (money from the rent from Common Land available for community projects) and endless endless coffee mornings. 

Through activism, organizing and being part of political conversations I have regularly heard the term ‘recommoning’ alongside lots of other lefty jargon. I know what is meant by it, a desire for people to move back towards collective ways of life, common property, community care and connection to land and place. The trouble is that these conversations rarely engage with the flawed and complicated but living reality of The Commons and Common Ridings of Scotland. 

I have always felt a strong sense of un-belonging in the academic lefty world of the Central Belt, as much as I did growing up in Hawick. The conversations felt alienating, the list of political theories written by dead white men endless, I had to stop speaking Scots in order to be understood and all of the ideas felt completely unrooted to me. More than anything else it was clear that my life, the traditions and culture I had grown up in and the values I held because of it were uncool, parochial weirdness. With hindsight I am glad I grew up somewhere like Hawick and haven’t read Marx, Boochin or Satre and that somehow I managed to survive university and life in ‘activist’ circles without completely loosing my sense of self. 

Hawick is by no means perfect, it has a strong sense of community but it's far from the case that everyone is included in that. It is a far less individualistic or isolated place than many other communities but it is not a left wing Utopia. Racism, sexism and homophobia are there as much as they are anywhere as well as a strange anti-learning sentiment that stems from higher education stealing people from the community - I left because of these things and don’t think I will return although I visit regularly. The town knows a huge amount about certain parts of its history but it's been selective, the long history of Radicalism and support for the Abolition movement - which I would say likely stems from the traditions of The Commons - has been forgotten until recently. There is a famous phrase ‘its aye been’ that is used to justify various forms of exclusion from the Common Riding, and is a form of historic amnesia (often what’s aye been is actually from the 30’s or 50’s). Still I find that there is a lot to value and to be understood by people wanting to re-make the world in a more collective way.

I find this same inspiration throughout history in Friendly Societies of the Co-Operative Movement, Common Good Funds, the African Arts Centre in Glasgow, Women's Shelters and Housing Co-Ops, community gardens, The Steamie and everyday life of communities cut off from or denied state care. 

In Scotland today, many of us struggle with feeling isolated, cut off from our current community and our heritage. Many also experience the reality that ‘it's expensive to be poor’, that it costs so much more to live hand-to-mouth; leccy cards as opposed to direct debits, payday loans, interest rates for paying monthly, having to pay for child care and the rising cost of rent. These experiences reduce our capacity for resistance and we would argue that this is a deliberate strategy; that big business, governments and the socio-economic elite benefit from making us each fight the same battles against rising costs, mental health and overwork alone. That this takes a lot more energy, in fact all of peoples energy to survive. That it leaves no space to organize, dream or make changes because all peoples time, money and capacity is already spent. 

We also witness that there is a deliberate policy of pitting people off against each other, especially people who have more in common with each other than they do with wealthy elites. Cathy McCormack called this ‘the war without bullets’, the way that state or media propaganda turned people in her Castlemilk community against each other, with the narrative of ‘benefit scroungers’ vs ‘honest hardworking folk’ and no mention of the fact that big businesses, politicians and the monarchy don't pay anything like comparable taxes on their income or inheritance. It is also clear to see the ways these ‘divide and conquer’ tactics of the British Empire pit communities against each other - white against Black and Brown, Protestants against Catholics, 3rd generation migrants against incomers and survivors of domestic violence against Trans women - and undermine our capacity to organize together. 

I think we have a huge amount to learn from our histories of the Commons and Common Ridings, and in those communities who have resisted enclosure for hundreds of years, we can see glimpses of an alternative way of being. In order to be strong in our resistance now, I believe we need to be less individualistic, re-create (where lost) our connection to land and place and to respond in a collective, autonomous way to the problems in our community!