Mutualists support land claims based on possession, which is to say upon occupancy, use, and defense, much as was employed in traditional Anglo-Saxon land claims. The Saxons were, after all, the “federalist race,” as Proudhon would call them with favor, and most of the major mutualists were Anglo-Saxon or admitted the Anglo-Saxonism behind mutualism. Kropotkin, too, acknowledged Saxon frith, or “mutual defense,” “security,” “peace,” or “freedom,” possibly ultimately derived from the Saxon and Frisian goddess Fri/Fria/Frig/Frij (associated with Venus), as the foundation of mutual aid. The Anglo-Saxons established their land claims, before the dominance of the booklands, fealties, and freeholds of the Jutes, Danes, Normans, and Franks, according to occupancy, use, and defense, as it was customary to hold one’s property, the folklands or allodial title, as a natural fact.
Early Saxons and Frisians had some of the earliest examples of proto-mutualism, too, when the Stedinger developed a peasant republic. The Stedinger had managed to secure their own freeholds under the Frankish Holy Roman Empire by homesteading the swamps of what would become Holland, being the first Hollanders themselves, the Hollandi. Saxons were among the most resistant to Christianization, affiliating Christianity with the Franks, their bitter enemies, who were themselves associated with the Rhineland and, by extension, Jewish Radhanites.
With the Danish and Norman invasions had already spread Jewish-derived Christianity into pagan Europe, and lands were changed by the People of the Book. The Anglo-Saxon customary law was modified by Roman conceptions of equity through the Courts of Equity or Chanceries that the Normans implemented. Where before Crusaders would leave their lands in trusted hands, only to face legal claims that their betrusted agent was now the rightful owner due to their outright possession, the new courts kept lands on the books, as booklands, and enabled the practice of trust ownership, whereby the trustee does in fact take on ownership, but to the benefit of another. In this way, and without defying occupancy and use, but by compelling behavior– a feature previously foreign to Anglo-Saxon law–, trusts secured lands for further abandonment, such that the lands would always remain on the books as operating to the benefit of the Crusaders. This way, the Holy Land could be secured from Mongol and Muslim invasions.
One of the early Crusades they went on was against the Stedinger, however, after they refused to pay taxes that were unlawfully levied against them. Their peasant republic of free men, organized into traditional democratic assemblies, or Things, of the Saxon and Frisian sort, lost the very lands that they had dug and dammed from out of the muck of the swamps, which would become Holland after the attempted genocide of the Stedinger. The Stedinger had been declared Luciferians, perhaps because of their veneration of Fri, who was Venus, which is associated in exoteric Christianity with Lucifer, the Lightbearer, despite lucifer (originally not a name, but a principle) referring to the light or brightness of Venus, the Morning Star (which Christ himself was also affiliated with). The Crusades were as much about destroying Native European religion and lifestyle as they were about protecting the Jewish and Samaritan homelands, and by extension Europe’s access to the most efficient access to Oriental goods from the Silk Road.
The occupancy, use, and defense standard of ownership is derived from natural law, the facts and forces of Nature that make things as they are. In a raw condition of nature, where social structures of state are absent, there is no alliance of people to control the behavior of others. People must simply protect their things. If one can take hold of something and maintain possession of it is effectively one’s own. This isn’t a prescription, but a description. And the Anglo-Saxons had a strong appreciation for natural law, which reflected in their customary and, with the appearance of the book people, formal common law. The mutualists, inheriting their native common sense approach of mimicking natural law from their Anglo-Saxon ancestors and inspirants, agreed that occupancy, use, and defense, or possession, is the natural foundation for ownership.
To own something means, in Saxon, to “owe” it. With Anglo-Saxon lands, it was understood that one’s individual land claim was temporary, and a greater part of a more permanent familial land land. This, as an owner, one had a responsibility of good stewardship. This was owed to one’s family and theirs and one’s own heirs. That was the understanding behind ownership.
Land is not properly considered anyone’s property, because a property is an attribute or characteristic of something, a derivative of it. While indeed capital can become property by having created it, its having been owed to one’s labor, and thus a property of the individual’s derivation, raw land and even the material itself can never truly be a property of the person, only the form given by the individual is their attribute. That is, the matter is never the natural property of the individual, as it is created by God alone, but we are made in the image of God and reflect God’s creativity, allowing us to claim the form we give things. That is our property, as well as God’s.
Traditional landholdings begin in the Stone Age, among nomadic hunter-gatherers. Bands might secure territory, but not for long in one location. Individual landholdings are basically unheard of. Then herding begins, and lands are used in common among clans and then tribes, who herd their flocks and herds to different pastures as time goes by. Common ownership means that any member can access the land if not occupied and used for the moment. This is not so foreign, because customs of common use are also often at play on public state-owned property, such as in parks, where it is not the custom to rent swings out nor to take one that is in use.
As people settled down to gather year-round and then farm, they had started to inhabit caves year-round and build semi-permanent dwellings, such as rock shelters, pit houses, and eventually proper houses, such as the Celtic stone round house and the Germanic square timber beam house with wattle-and-daub walls. Homesteads and villages did not initially contradict occupancy, use, and defense, but instead were simply examples of it.
With the rise of the state and social stratification, things would change. While at first elite landholders would justify large claims with gifting, such as we find as a relic at Christmas, which approximated the rent of the land to some extent, paid to others, this would not be practiced with conquered peoples, who would be enslaved. This reversed things, because conquered people then had to pay taxes to non-relatives. Even the Anglo-Saxons kept conquered slaves on their allods, but their slaves were more like tax-paying peasants than Roman-style slaves. The justification for this was, of course, the Right of Conquest, that the conquered people (often Celts) had failed to defend their possessions, and so lost ownership. But even then, the Anglo-Saxons maintained much of common lands, which commoners used freely, having rights to herd and coppice, but not to be poor stewards by abusing the land.
With the appearance of the Danes and Normans, and the expansion of the Franks, the commons of Anglo-Saxon society, often maintained after the fashion of the Celts they conquered, would disappear into the king’s lands, noble fealties, and then eventually a plethora of freeholds come the time of mercantilism and the enclosures, which had privatized the commons and cruelly closed them off from the commonfolk’s use. The ex-commoners could no longer hunt deer, herd their sheep, or coppice from the woods. The open field system of later, Normanized Anglo-Saxon society, which had distinguished cropland from common land, also disappeared into private capitalist ventures. Having no free source of food derived from their own labor, the peasants and other commoners were forced to work in the mills for meager wages, and this “Norman yoke” fueled the labor force of the proto- and early Industrial Revolution. Something similar would be repeated with Reconstruction and the Gilded Age of the Second Industrial Revolution, which saw many white farmers in America forced off of their farms and into itinerant labor, sharecropping, mines, mills, and factories to work alongside migrants, blacks, and then, come the World Wars, women. The scarcity of employment led to job salesmen called, by the IWW, “labor sharks,” today’s temp services, middlemen of employment, who gouged the needy.
American society was built on the premise of the smallholding farmer and their participation in civil society through fraternal associations, which had been the real vehicle of American self-government and the true foundation for American federalism, which acknowledged “private” contractual law as a realm separate and away from public governance, and which held its governance over public affairs in check. That which was contractual was effectively personal law, and had to be respected by the state as a lawfully-protected sphere of self-governance. The forcing of Anglo-Americans off of their farmsteads and into the factories, and then destroying civil society, such as fraternities and other third places, was a grave shock to their freedom. The people they had fled in Europe had followed them across the sea, and their republic was corrupt from the beginning as a result, and this was the rot that would come of it.
The mutualists, however, or proto-mutualists (associationalists), had been responsible for the associations, and had come to see the problem with tolerating even limited government. Retroprogressive Anglo-Saxonists, they wanted to go back to traditional occupancy, use, and defense standards which denied raw ownership of the Earth, holding that while land claims may be individualized that they could not be perpetual and that the cost must be maintained without externalization, an innovation to the traditional tenure, which at least as is known of the earliest periods attested to, had allowed nobles to control slaves. While Anglo-Saxonists, and traditional to an extent, these were progressive free thinkers, not dogmatic religionists.
A common question comes up regarding roadways and such things, with common use. Who has authority of the speed limits, for instance? The answer is that anyone may put up, or remove, a road sign suggesting a limit, but not with intent to harm others, which would be an aggression under Anglo-Saxon custom. The sign could be widely respected or quickly removed, but if a judge of the common law rules, for instance in the case of a wreck, that there was negligence from not having followed the advice on the sign, the custom becomes law by precedent, and it could be possible that removal of a sign deemed to help others by a judge might then be seen as a harm to others, though Anglo-Saxon law would only treat this after proof of harm is shown as having had been caused. While mutualists would adopt concepts from the Danes, Normans, Franks, and Romans, too, they limited their practices of a priori law-setting to realms of “private” law in their associations.
Proudhon famously criticized property and defended possession as the basis of property. This distinction has also been known as that between private property, or real estate, and personal property. Possessions consist of that which one controls, and personal property is typically moveable property, but can also include intangible property such as use-rights. Private property or real estate refers especially to land property and buildings out-of-use. However, there is a sense private property is defensible also. The etymology of private is Latin, and it could refer to something individualized or else to deprivation. Mutualists support private property as individual property, but oppose private (privare, privatus) property as a deprivation of others. We philosophically oppose real property, or property in re, in land. Real estate is cognate to royal state, and is a deprivation of others. Taking rent as an entitlement is a royal privilege. However, what is otherwise royal privileges we claim for ourselves by fact of our claim, as Proudhon suggests.
The original shift from common land tenure with smallholdings secured by occupancy, use, and defense, toward real property, such as occurred with booklands and fealty, when royalty claimed allodial title of all lands, was an act of aggression. It is upon this act that all landlords and capitalists must historically trace their freeholds, which are privileges and not allods of right, as the state holds the collective allod now, giving the right to tax the freehold.
That is not to say that one cannot secure exclusive use rights on the commons, including during periods of temporary abandonment, but that this would require compensating the commoners who are in demand of but excluded from use. You may claim exclusive title by contract if you pay the community the economic rent– the value they demand–, and, thereby, afford their protection. In such a case, violent enforcement of the claim is mostly or wholly unnecessary, unlike with capitalist property, because the property-holder’s occupancy and use functions to the benefit of those from whom defense is being bought. To steal someone’s land that they pay you satisfactorily to use is simply not rational.
Usufruct is a French term referring to possession or occupancy and use rights. For instance, in various situations, one may retain right of use, including consumption of fruits therefrom, while another holds legal title. In the case of mutualists, it would be the commoners at-large who hold the territory, but the individual who has rights of usufruct as a usufructuary. Usufruct has also been used to describe the tenure of the Iroquois, whose tribes, clans, and sometimes smaller households rotated territory, camps, and campsites, being prohibited from abusing these but free to consume from them. While Proudhon appealed to the Saxons for his federalism, it was natural for him to speak in French and Roman terms, as he did not inherit Anglo-Saxon law in his native France, but Roman and Frankish law.
Proudhon himself had a peasant mother and artisan father. While likely having some Frankish Alpinid in him as well, it is not impossible that Proudhon had some Saxon to him of a proto-Nordid, Nordid, or Pontid variety. His birth home, in Besancon, nearly borders Germany, and it is known that the Saxons conquered into Gaul (France) as well as into Italy, were interspersed between their Frankish enemies along the Rhine, and that by the time of the Holy Roman Empire Saxonia and Francia bordered one another directly. The Franks reduced Saxons to the lower class upon conquering them, and Proudhon, or perhaps Pierre Charnier who inspired him, may have been a relict Saxon to some degree or another. It is not without good reason that Marx associated his views with those of the Anglo-Saxon liberal socialists, or “Ricardian socialists.” He was certainly their continental brother, whether ethnically or just politically.