In his new book Plunder of the Commons economist Guy Standing demonstrates how much of the UK’s public wealth has been redirected to 1% of the population through state-approved exploitation of everything from land and water, to housing, health and benefit systems, to the justice system, schools, newspapers and even the air we breathe. Professor Standing presents a positive manifesto for recreating a society based on community, public commons, and sharing. In this extract he tells the story of the Charter of the Forest, the legal foundation of our rights to the public commons.

‘Know ye, That We . . . have given and granted . . . to all Freemen . . . these Liberties following, to be kept in our Kingdom of England forever.’

Preamble, The Charter of the Forest, 1217

Imagine the scene. On 6 November 1217, on a dank cold morning in the original St Paul’s Cathedral in London, ten- year-old King Henry III watched his uncle, William Marshall, Earl of Pembroke, acting as Regent, and an Italian cardinal, representing the Pope in Rome, put their seals to two documents, each consisting of a large single piece of parchment crammed with elegant Latin script that the boy-king would scarcely have understood. What was being done in his name was nothing less than momentous.

One of those parchments has resounded down the ages to become the inspiration for national constitutions and the protection of human rights around the world. It had begun life on 15 June 1215 as the Charter of Liberties, sealed by King John under duress from the barons in the meadow at Runnymede by the River Thames, only to be hastily abrogated by him and by the Pope. On that November day in 1217, in a somewhat reduced form, it became the Magna Carta.

The second document is scarcely known today, but at the time of its sealing was regarded as equally fundamental. This was the Charter of the Forest, or Carta de Foresta. And it lasted longer on the British statute books than any other piece of legislation, only being fully repealed 754 years later.

For generations after the Charter of the Forest was promulgated, all churches in England were required to read it out in its entirety on four public occasions each year – at Christmas, Easter, the feast of St John in summer and the feast of St Michael in the autumn. It was regarded as that important. In 1297, King Edward I declared it and the Magna Carta to be the common law of the land, in the Confirmation of Charters.

Yet today its principles are ignored, and few will have heard of it. In 2015, when the British government ordered a copy of the Magna Carta be sent to all 21,000 state primary schools, along with simple guides on what the text meant, it certainly did not do the same for the Charter of the Forest. No wonder, since, although it continues to inspire those who bother to read it, the exemplary values and principles it enshrined have been abused over the centuries by monarchs, elites and governments.

Guy Standing will be in conversation with Tom Hodgkinson on Wednesday 6th November at the Marx Memorial Library, Clerkenwell Green, Farringdon, London EC1