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Unfortunately, the fertility of land is not the same throughout the various continents and islands of Planet Earth. Neither is the rainfall and sunshine it receives. The quantities and types of minerals also vary from place to place. Dividing the planet's surface into fixed areas is not therefore a fair way of sharing it out among its inheritors. Some measure of quality must also be applied.
Our farmer measured his land in acres. Nowadays land is measured in metric hectares. Each of these units of measurement represents a fixed physical area of land. However, in ancient times in England, land was measured in a variable unit called the hythe.
NOTE: Currently, the most popular view of the meaning of the word 'hythe' is as the Saxon word for a quay or place at the side of a river where boats could be loaded and unloaded. This is different from the meaning I use in this book. There is only a limited number of phonemes which humans tend to use in their speech. Also words become corrupted by lazy pronunciation and emulated speech impediments of dominant individuals. Words of different origin and meaning can thus easily over time merge into an identical pronunciation or spelling. The word as I use it may have quite a different origin from the Saxon word for 'quay'. If you are pedantic about the definitions of ancient words, please regard the word 'hythe' as I use it in this book as a context-dependent label which denotes the unit of land I describe.
The hythe was not a unit of constant area. Its area varied according to the fertility of the land concerned. A hythe was smaller for rich land than it was for poor land. It was a unit of equal productivity or yield. It was the area of land required to sustain a family. Thus if the productive land surface of the Earth were divided into hythes, their sizes would vary considerably from one part of the Earth to another, and perhaps even from one time to another.
The hythe of land made a family economically independent. With their hythe of land, they could transform their own labour directly into their own wealth. And they could do this entirely on their own initiative and under their own control. Their survival and well-being did not rely on a corporate master having an on-going requirement for their labour. Their basic needs were assured. A family with a hythe of land could never be held to ransom to sell their labour for a wage which could barely keep them fed and clothed. Their survival and well-being could never be jeopardised by the ravages of fickle and dispassionate market forces.
Contrary to what the inhabitant of a modern free-market economy may suppose, an established hythe of land does not demand that we spend the best part of all our days locked in hard toil in order for it to yield to us the needs of life. There is plenty of prime time left in the course of a year for the pursuit of other things. A hythe of land allows its owners the time and the means to be artisans as well as farmers. It enables them to become scientists, designers, engineers, artists and philosophers as well as workers. It empowers them to become educators as well as parents.
It is important to realise that the basic knowledge and understanding on which proper specialised skills can be built can only come from nature.
If I had never swung on a rope tied to a tree branch when I was young then I would never have been able to visualise and fully understand the pendulum. If I had never understood the periodic motion of a pendulum I may never have grasped the mathematics of differential equations. If I had never watched a leaf floating down a stream after a heavy rain and pondered the various ways it translated and rotated as it moved, I may never have grasped the physical concepts behind vector analysis. If I had never seen the seasonal changes in water pouring over a waterfall, I may not have perceived the true relevance of the exponential constant. If I had never seen clouds drifting and swirling on the south-west wind, I may never have grasped the rudiments of complex dynamical systems.
I am sure there are countless examples in every specialist discipline which illustrate how the understanding of its fundamental concepts are firmly rooted in one's formative personal experience of natural phenomena.
I was lucky. As a child I lived close to the old wild scrub-covered slag heap of a disused coal mine. Adjoining the grounds of my school was a stretch of natural woodland which was part of an old aristocratic estate. During the lunch hour we would go into the woods and play on a rope which was hung from the branch of an oak tree over a stream. It was the most beautiful place I knew, carpeted with crocuses in the Spring as far as the eye could see. Then there were the holidays to North Wales and the Lake District where I was exposed to the beauty of the mountains.
Yet in all this, I was not much more than an observer. I was never able to use the land. I never had the chance to work with nature. I never had the opportunity to marshal its resources for the production of food and materials. If I had, I think I would have been much the wiser for it. I am convinced that the ability to understand the basic concepts and notions of even the most abstract areas of science and mathematics must come ultimately from one's formative experiences of the natural environment.
Whenever I come across a concept I cannot grasp, I feel sure that it is because I have missed an opportunity to observe and experience some natural phenomenon. I am sad for the many poverty-bound children of Britain today who are deprived of this formative exposure to nature.
Nobody is good at everything. Each human ability is not present to the same extent in everybody. One individual is good at some things while a different individual is good at others. The wide variation in the degree to which each special ability or talent is present in any given individual gives each of us our somewhat unique aptitude profile.
Hands-on use of the family's hythe of land to produce the needs of life provides the ideal circumstances within which one's natural aptitudes and talents can develop. It provides those formative experiences on which a firm understanding of science, engineering, economics and even life itself can be built through formal education.
The acquired knowledge and skills resulting from this process can then be used to sustain a technology-based specialist artisanry within which innovation and sound engineering may flourish to the benefit of all.
Unfortunately, modern capitalist economics imposes upon us a wholly unnatural degree of specialisation. This is far too narrow and stifling to provide the individual with anything approaching an acceptable level of intellectual fulfilment or quality of life. How often have I eavesdropped on canteen conversations in which highly qualified engineers, scientists and managers have been expressing their idyllic dreams of living in the country on their own working small-holding while continuing also with their specialist work remotely, meeting only when necessary?
The indelible presence of this back-to-nature dimension in the universal human dream suggests that as well as possessing each his own special talents there are, lying dormant within each of us, those general abilities which enable us to extract our basic needs from nature. Indeed it seems that true human fulfilment can be achieved only by exercising both.
Unlike our modern capitalist market economy, a hythe-based economy would not only exercise one's general abilities to extract one's needs of life from nature, but also provide the space, resources and opportunity to develop and exercise one's natural specialised talents. So while being self-sufficient in the basic needs of life, one could at the same time also be an artisan providing a particular specialised product or service both for one's own use and to sell on to others through a true free market system.
The hythe of land is necessary for a complete and balanced human life.