Community ownership, cooperation, empowerment: all these might seem a throwback to another, collectivist age, when land was seen as a resource for all to share – somewhere to grow food, graze animals, plant trees, collect firewood, draw water and, at times, seek inspiration. However, as outlined later, resourceful communities in Scotland and, to some extent, in England are taking some of these values into a modern setting through either outright community ownership of large estates or through targeted community land trusts. From the Highlands and Islands, to Oxfordshire, Devon and Cumbria, they are delivering affordable housing, new businesses and community facilities, driven by need rather than by greed – using land as a vital resource against which they can borrow and build, with the added collateral of communities sometimes buying shares in local trusts to unleash development.

Many people, of course, once had a small a stake in land, however informal. In a small corner of England, they still do. While part of our landscape has been transformed by industrial-scale farming, forestation and mineral extraction, little has changed on five hundred acres at Laxton, in North Nottinghamshire, since the early 17th century; plots are neatly laid out in long strips on open fields, tended lovingly by 18 smallholders and farmers.

This is the only part of Britain to have survived one of the most turbulent periods of rural history: the Enclosures. Through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, millions of acres of open fields – on which rural workers had commoners’ rights for grazing and growing – were appropriated and enclosed in a long series of parliamentary acts, forcing the poor off the land. Laxton, ironically now owned by the Crown Estate – a big property, landownership and trading business, technically belonging to the reigning monarch ‘in right of the Crown’ – has thus become a testament to a forgotten way of life.

Everything is neatly detailed on an elaborate estate map – a valuable work of art evoking a rural idyll of haymaking, harvesting, oxen, sheep and contented workers – now held at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian library. It was produced by a cartographer, Mark Pierce, in 1635, for the then owner, Sir William Courten, a merchant made rich from East Indian trade.