If you happened to be in the emergency department at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto this week, one thing you didn’t see was the Pope lying on a stretcher in the hallway.

One doesn’t need to be particularly cynical about the perks of power to note that the Pope’s handlers would have gotten him to the front of the line if he had required any medical care — even if another old guy had shown up with equally serious medical problems. (This didn’t happen, so doctors at St. Mike’s, the Catholic hospital designated to care for the Pope during his Canadian visit last week, weren’t faced with these sorts of choices.)

Of course, the irony of the Pope supposedly championing the cause of the wretched of the Earth while living in lavish wealth and enjoying every conceivable perk and privilege is one we’ve long learned to live with. Still, the papacy’s long-standing claim of interest in the poor should at least provide us with an excuse to break through the usual indifference to the plight of the poor on streets all around us.

Just in case the organizers of World Youth Day weren’t planning to do this, a group of local anti-poverty activists turned the focus to homelessness and the rising number of poor people in one of the richest countries in the world.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty took over an abandoned building during the papal visit and converted it into a self-managed social housing unit and community centre.

Of course, abandoned buildings presumably belong to someone, so the activists are trespassing — that is, violating private property rights — which we can conclude is bad. Some media commentators probably consider them thugs. This is certainly an easy position to take when you have somewhere to live.

On the other hand, if you have nowhere to live, the morality of the issue might seem less clear-cut. It was just this sort of desperation that inspired a group, who called themselves The Diggers, to take similar action in the mid-17th century. Until then, ordinary people enjoyed something that we have trouble even imagining today — common property rights.

These rights, encoded in British law, guaranteed them access to common lands where they could graze cattle, gather nuts, berries, bracken, heather, willow sprouts and just about everything else needed for the typical late medieval lifestyle. People were poor but their access to the common land gave them a basic self-sufficiency.

All that changed dramatically when the rising entrepreneurial class triumphed in the English Civil War and used its new-found power in parliament to create a wide-ranging system of private property rights. These allowed entrepreneurs to enclose the common land for their own private use and profit.

As a result, land that had been available to the common people and their ancestors from time immemorial was suddenly blocked off, enclosed behind tough, sturdy hedges, and the full power of the state was used to prevent anyone else from gaining access to it. Such people were called trespassers.

To make things absolutely clear, the new elite also passed laws striking down the old common property rights. Philosophers and commentators of the time argued that the new private property laws were based on some kind of “natural law.” It was never explained why these private property laws were any more “natural” than the common property laws that had existed for centuries. Natural to whom?

One consequence of the change was the rise of widespread homelessness, as once self-sufficient peasant farmers and villagers lost access to the land.

For decades, people tried to resist the changes, tearing down hedges with their bare hands, shovels and pitchforks or, like the Diggers, trying to reclaim the land by digging it and planting on it. Digger leader Gerard Winstanley argued the powerful had no right to “lock up the treasures of the earth from the poor” and insisted the land belonged to whoever laboured on it.

You can call Winstanley an impractical dreamer, a guy who could never make it in the global economy, someone who would be an embarrassment to have around doing media interviews during the Pope’s visit, but it’s hard to think of him as a thug.

Needless to say, the Diggers lost their struggle, and were routed from their little digging colonies by uniformed men on horses enforcing the new private property laws. But, in a sense, the Digger predictions came true: The powerful did go on to pretty much lock up the treasures of the earth from the poor.

Which, in some ways, could be seen as even worse than trespassing.

Linda McQuaig

Journalist and best-selling author Linda McQuaig has developed a reputation for challenging the establishment. As a reporter for The Globe and Mail, she won a National Newspaper Award in 1989...