[kulahan]

England has some weird (to me) property privacy laws. IIRC, you cannot be charged for simply walking through someone's property as a shortcut. There's nothing they can do about it, you just can't linger on the property. I mean, it seems fine, I just haven't seen anything like it before.

[toyg]

It's the system throwing a bone to the general populace in order to maintain an extremely unequal order. Aristocratic landowners mostly do what they want, and there has been no land reform for centuries, so a few concessions were thrown in to allow peasants to make a living somehow.

[psunavy03]

Well cutting across someone's yard != walking through their house. My friends and I growing up would sometimes cut through neighbors' backyards to go somewhere, and while we didn't have formal permission, no one cared because we knew each other.