800 Years After St. Francis: How Christian Ecotheology Fails to Challenge Industrial Agriculture’s Land Grabs in Herefordshire
Original framing: “Country diary: A three-day perambulation around my own parish | Simon Lockett” — The Guardian - Environment
The article’s focus on St. Francis’s anniversary ignores the *800-year arc* of Christian land policy in England: from medieval monasteries as economic powerhouses to the *Dissolution of the Monasteries* (1530s), which redistributed land to the gentry—prefiguring today’s corporate land grabs. The *Inclosure Acts* (1700s–1800s) formalized this process, turning common lands into private property, a template now used by *agribusiness* like *JCB* and *Graham & Green* to consolidate farms. Herefordshire’s *Golden Valley* was once a *woodland commons*; its enclosure mirrors the *Enclosure Rebellion* of 1607, where peasants resisted dispossession with violence. The piece’s anachronistic focus on individual spirituality obscures how land policy has always been a *class war*—one St. Francis would have opposed.
The Guardian’s piece performs a *settler colonial* erasure: it celebrates St.
Francis’s *spiritual* connection to land while ignoring how *Christian institutions* have been central to *land dispossession* for centuries—from medieval monasteries to today’s *Church Commissioners*. The article’s *individualist* framing of walking as resistance obscures the *structural* violence of *agro-capitalism*, which mirrors the *Inclosure Acts* and *Enclosure Rebellion* of the past. By centering a *white, land-owning vicar* and omitting *tenant farmers*, *migrant laborers*, and *Indigenous landback* movements, the narrative reproduces the *power asymmetry* it claims to transcend. The *solution* lies in *decolonial bioregionalism*: using St. Francis’s legacy not as a *pastoral* guide but as a *radical* call to *redistribute land*, *rewild ecosystems*, and *organize marginalized voices*—as *La Via Campesina* and *Rewilding Britain* are already doing. The *trickster* here is the *Church itself*, which sanctifies St. Francis while profiting from the very systems he opposed.