Glastieve

Republic of Glastieve
Motto Glory to the Independent
Anthem TODO
Capital city	None, but administrative centres include Crockern Tor, Watchet Hill Cottage and the Haven Road Centre (in the UK)
Official language(s)	None, but English used for administrative purposes
Official religion(s)	State secularism Glastieven mythology (as a cultural tradition rather than a belief system)
Demonym	Glasteiven
Government	Democratic republic led by the Cabinet of Glastieve
- Executive Councillors	Tom McMillan Robert Catcheside Joe Bradstreet John Matthews Will Campbell William Allen Isabella Wall Alfie Knowles Caitlin Perry
- Last election	- 1 January 2018
Established	23 February 2017: Founding of the Glastieve Cultural Association 1 January 2018: Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Glastieve
Population	10 citizens
Currency	Luach (GLL) Pound Sterling (GBP)
Time zone	Glastieven Standard Time (GST; UTC-2 in winter and UTC-1 in summer)
National sport	Undertale (unofficial)
National dish	State Ice Cream (unofficial; triple scoop or triple cone with with mint chocolate chip, vanilla and honeycomb
National animal	Liger Peacock
http://www.glastieve.org/

Glastieve, officially the Republic of Glastieve, is a self-declared micronation-state on the Atlantic Archipelago in Western Europe, considered by the wider international community to make up part of the United Kingdom (UK). The country is situated on Dartmoor and is surrounded by the constituent country of England within the UK, from which it formally seceded in January 2018, although some Government business takes place within the nearby British city of Exeter. Glastieve is a member of the MicroWiki sector, and in March 2018, the Government stated that Glastieve achieved a score of 4.0 with Linden's Revised System of Classification; micronation-states with scores between 3.1 and 4.9 are considered "the most significant micronations". In June 2018, the Glastieven legislature enacted legislation creating the Intermicronational Association, an intermicronational organisation (within which Glastieve is only a member state) with the goal of supporting the development of micronation-states from cultural groups.

Archaeological evidence suggests human settlement in the region that would later become Glastieve began in the late Neolithic period. Glastieven recorded history before independence is divided into the Stannary Period (1156–1786), the Post-Industrial Period (1786–1951) and the British Contemporary Period (1951–2018). Unique legal arrangements have existed for the region since the 1100s, including unusually broad commoners' rights and exemption from the legal jurisdiction of the English courts for tin miners or workers and their families, which necessitated the existence of a regional legislature, the Stannary Convocation of Devon, and special stannary courts (which were eventually abolished in 1896). The British Army began using the wilderness of Glastieve for training exercises in 1875 and continue to this day with special permission from the government, and Dartmoor National Park was established in 1951. Factors that led to Glastieven independence include the emergence of Acteriendia (2014–2018), a cultural group that merged with the existing regional identity to become the Glastieven nation, and the existence of the Glastieve Cultural Association for nine months in 2017.

Governed as an elective republic, authority is vested in the Cabinet of Glastieve, which is a committee of ten Executive Councillors (ECs), although at present there are only nine, who collectively fulfil the responsibilities of a head of state by behaving as the collective decision-making body of the executive. The Cabinet is also the legislature, and delegates much executive responsibility to civil servants who collectively make up the Government of Glastieve. All members of the citizenry are entitled to automatic membership of the General Assembly of Glastieve, which is used as a constitutional mechanism for direct democracy. The Assembly convenes annually to pass non-binding, advisory motions on state policy, and once every three years elects the Cabinet. The judicature comprises a single court, the Central Court of Glastieve, which is generally known within Glastieve as the Murus.

History

Main article: History of Glastieve

Although some largely self-contained projects such as the Kingdom of Skovaji, the various bodies responsible for Glastieven mythology and the Glastieve Cultural Association have at times made attempts to record their history, and although there have been several UK-based projects that have focussed on some aspect of the heritage of the wider Dartmoor region, the first true attempt to collate the information held by these disparate sources and present a coherent narrative for the whole of Glastieven history was started by the government of the Republic in January 2018. Articles detailing the history of the GCA and Glastieve have been the longest on MicroWiki since early 2017, and the Kingdom of Skovaji's history-focussed article was also the third-longest on the site in 2015-16; this tradition of recording history in great detail has been inherited by the modern government, although the density of this recording varies in a way that can give the mistaken impression of periods of inactivity. The historiography of Glastieve is a field in its own right and is sometimes the subject of significant modern-day political debate.

Prehistory, 4000 BCE–1155

From around 10,000 BCE to the beginning of proper human settlement in 4000 BCE, what would later become the upland moors in the south-west of the island of Great Britain were covered by high-altitude oak forest, a small area of which survives in Glastieve as Black-a-Tor Copse (or Black Tor Beare). There is some evidence, including stone tools and manufacturing waste, that small nomadic bands of Mesolithic humans ventured into these forests from the surrounding lowlands to search for food. Settlement of Dartmoor, including Glastieve, began in the Neolithic period at the same time as farming was adopted by local human communities. This marked the beginning of tree clearance, which was responsible for creating the moorland landscape (which was fully established by the start of the Stannary Period in 1156), and also saw the earliest ceremonial monuments constructed. The majority of the Neolithic sites on the moor are on the southern and eastern edges, with the wilder Glastieve less conductive to human settlement and the highly acidic peat difficult to dig through to build burial monuments, the main source of archeological evidence about Neolithic settlement. However, the tor enclosure at White Tor, which is still considered appropriate for official military use in Glastieve, was built some time in this period.

Stannary Period, 1156–1786

Main article: Stannary Period

The first period of recorded Glastieven history is termed the Stannary Period, after the tin mining that dominated the Glastieven economy and was the source of a number of the unique constitutional arrangements made for the region. From 1201, tin miners were not subject to the courts of England and had their own courts and jail, a system that was overseen by the Lord Warden and Vice-Warden of the Stannaries. Settlers moved back on to the moor, building longhouses, a number of which survive to this day. From 1497, the Stannary Convocation of Devon convened under the supervision of the Lord Warden or the Vice-Warden. Glastieven politics were dominated by tensions between peasant farmers, working tinners and the landowning class. The tinners wanted to resist the centripetal effects of the English government and resented rule both from Westminster and from the local nobles.

For a period, the Convocation was a battleground between the landowning classes, who wanted an end to or a commercialisation of the powers afforded to tinners, and the tinners themselves, who naturally supported the removal of restrictions to their own affairs and resisted centralisation by the Tudor government; at the Convocations of 1497, 1510, 1532, 1533 and 1552, not a single jurate was a knight or a gentleman. However, from the late sixteenth century onwards, the Crown started to abandon attempts to impose direct control on the stannaries and were content with allowing their officers to allow the landowning class to take over the Convocation; in 1574 there were twelve gentlemen and a knight at Convocation, in 1600 there were forty-seven gentlemen and four knights, and by 1688 there were only nine working tinners present. Tinners were allowed to establish tin bounds which let them mine on privately owned land without seeking permission from the landowner; in 1510 the Convocation declared it was "lawful for every man to dig tin in every place within the country of Devonshire where tin is found", but in 1574 the more nobility-biased Conovcation imposed significant restrictions on these rights, leaving Dartmoor the only major area of privately owned land that could be bounded.

In addition to their struggle against the tin miners, the landed classes in Glastieve and on Dartmoor as a whole were challenged by the difficulties of adapting feudalism to the region. In the 1200s, three classes of serf existed on the moor: inhabitants of the "ancient tenements", who were freeholders with significant rights, including the right to enclose land until roughly the end of the Stannary Period in 1796, who performed administrative duties; venville tenants who in return for a fee paid to the landowners were allowed to pasture cattle on what would become the commons; and "foreigners", who lived elsewhere in the English county of Devon and who had the right to bring their cattle to the Forest of Dartmoor to graze between May and October. This unique arrangement led to complex laws and customs developing in relation to the rights of the serfs, who continued to exercise these rights and pay fees long after the formal abolition of manorialism in the seventeenth century, eventually resulting in the unique legal arrangements made for the Dartmoor Commons in the 1980s.

The Stannary Period is sometimes subdivided into the Medieval and early modern periods. The Middle Ages are defined in Glastieven terms as taking place between the first recorded collection of tin coinage in 1156 and the first convention of the Stannary Convocation in 1497. Glastieve's early modern period is defined as having been between the first convention of the Convocation in 1497 and the final convention under the Lord Warden of the Stannaries in 1786 (this was the last convention until the institution's revival in 2018, and the last recognised by the British government). The era within which the Convocation convened coincides almost entirely with the wider European early modern period, which historians generally consider to have begun in 1453, 1492 or 1498, and to have ended around the French Revolution in 1789. The definition of the European Middle Ages is significantly wider than the Glastieven Medieval period, however, which begins somewhere within the High Middle Ages (around 1000–1250).

Post-Industrial Period, 1786–1951

Main article: Post-Industrial Period

The period following the final convention of the Stannary Conovcation and before the creation of Dartmoor National Park is called the Post-Industrial Period, and was characterised by the gradual recognition of Dartmoor as an area of natural beauty to be preserved and the decline of traditional tin mining. Other dates that are sometimes used to mark the start of the Post-Industrial Period include 1789, when the European early modern period came to an end with the French Revolution; 1794, when the first Army rifle range was established; and 1796, when freeholders on the moor lost the right to enclose land. The British Army started to use what is now Glastieven territory as a training ground in the Post-Industrial Period, with a musket range being built in the Skaigh Valley close to the modern-day border in 1794. Regular training exercises on "north Dartmoor" began in 1875, and continue to this day. Authors including William Crossing (1847-1928), Eden Phillpots (1862-1960) and Beatrice Chase (1874-1955) wrote about the landscape and culture of Dartmoor. In 1883, the Dartmoor Preservation Association was founded to protect ancient commoners' rights and to call for the continued preservation of the moor. Enthusiastic Victorian tourists and historians took an interest in Glastieve, working to uncover and sometimes "restore" pre-historic and Medieval crosses, kistavaens and other sites of interest.

Although there is little written record of the decline of tin-mining, the eventual decline of the stannary institutions after several hundred years of independence from the central government

Steps to independence, 2014–2018

Main articles: Acteriendia, Glastieve Cultural Association, and History of the Glastieve Cultural Association

The modern-day Republic of Glastieve is a micronation-state that claims to derive its sovereignty from the people of Glastieve and its cultural distinctness from the UK as a micronation. Although a significant portion of the distinct culture of Glastieve was native to north Dartmoor before 2018, the cultural group Acteriendia is recognised as having merged into the micronation of Glastieve in March 2018, and its emergence in 2014 represented the beginning of the steps towards Glastieven independence. In addition, for several months in 2017 an organisation called the Glastieve Cultural Association (GCA) existed, becoming associated with Acteriendia and helping to develop the cultural identity, national insignia and institutional structures associated with the Republic; in the minds of most Glastievens, Glastieve was founded on 23 February 2017 when the GCA was created, and the Republic is a direct successor to the GCA.

The early Republic, 2018–present

Main articles: Vernal Period and Present Period

Politics

Main articles: Politics of Glastieve and Foreign relations of Glastieve

Glastieve has a democratic system of governance where the Cabinet of Glastieve is both the sole legislature and the collective decision-making body of the executive. The Cabinet appoints and leads the Government of Glastieve, the main executive, which is formally led by the Council of State, a largely ceremonial body composed of the highest-ranking civil servants, Lord High Chancellors and Lord High Commissioners. Every citizen of Glastieve is officially a member of the General Assembly of Glastieve, which convenes once a year to debate and vote on advisory motions, along with some other functions. At every third convention of the Assembly, ten Executive Councillors are elected to make up the Cabinet; by-elections can be held at other conventions of the Assembly to elect ECs that will remain in office until the next full election, and snap elections can be held between conventions of the Assembly to elect ECs that will remain in office until the convention of the Assembly, when they must be elected again by by-election. Judicial authority is vested in the Central Court of the Lord High Chancellor of the Murus, generally referred to internationally as the Central Court of Glastieve and domestically as the Murus.

There are no political parties in Glastieve and political alliances between members of the Cabinet are generally reasonably fluid and based on the issues being discussed. Matters of political contention in the micronation include the extent to which New Secessionism can justify activities not associated with mainstream model-country-style micronationalism being considered integral aspects of Glastieven culture and therefore under the jurisdiction of the state; the history of Acteriendia and the enduring legacy of controversies such as the Acteriendia and New Secessionism Crisis; and the role that the existence of state institutions has had to play in an alleged increase in the number of controversies and scandals since the era of Classical and Superstructure Acteriendia. With exceptions, the vast majority of the political beliefs held by Glastieven citizens are left-wing libertarian, with government policy reflecting a strong national belief in both egalitarianism and individual freedom. Traditionally, there has also been a firm belief in the importance of maiestas (a Latin word meaning majesty, dignity or prestige), although there has been a recent trend towards this being a point of political debate.

Law

Irishman's Wall, where the Murus (the Central Court of Glastieve) convenes. The wall itself is often used as a symbol of justice or the judicature in Glastieve, like the Supreme Court building in the United States or the Old Bailey in the United Kingdom.

Glastieve has a common law system based on English law, with limited recognition of the laws of the United Kingdom and the customs of Acteriendia before March 2018. The Central Court of the Lord High Chancellor of the Murus, generally referred to as the Murus and known in the some formal or international contexts as the Central Court of Glastieve, is the only court in Glastieve, presided over by the Lord High Chancellor of the Murus, a position appointed by the Cabinet. The current Lord High Chancellor of the Murus is William Allen. The Latin term Murus strictly refers only to the wall on which the court officials sit, which by convention has always been Irishman's Wall on Cosdon Hill. The term was first used in 2016, to refer to an Acteriendian Murus or wall court, as traditionally when members of Acteriendia met to settle disputes, they would do so with the mediators sitting on a wall facing those being questioned or presenting an argument.

Before March 2018, a hybrid legal system based on Scots law was used, but as part of the Second Phase Initiative the country transitioned to a fully common law system in order to recognise the law of the United Kingdom and improve continuity with the customs both of the north Dartmoor region and the Acteriendian cultural group. The primary source of law in Glastieve is legislation enacted by the Cabinet, followed by:

• Case law, which refers to the precedent set by previous decisions made by the Murus;
• Stannary law, which is given greater precedence than other laws of the United Kingdom and can be created by the Cabinet when it acts ex lapidem;
• Constitutional conventions, which it was established in Campbell vs McMillan can be derived from the GCA; and
• General customs, which includes "the consuetudinary law of Acteriendia before the Second Phase Initiative" and any laws of the United Kingdom.

Geography

Main article: Geography of Glastieve

Economy

Tom McMillan panning for tin to be sold commercially at the Vexsol extraction point of the Ivy Tor Tin Mine.

Main article: Economy of Glastieve

Glastieve has a market economy based on a modified version of the Glastieven Model, an economic system for micronation-states first proposed in April 2017. The currency of Glastieve is the Luach, a name which dates back to February 2017 and means "value" in the Irish language. Both private sector companies and state-run enterprises exist in Glastieve, although state-run enterprises are generally used only to finance the Government or to finance the import of goods that would otherwise cost Pounds Sterling into the Luach-based domestic economy. All private companies in Glastieve describe themselves as either partnerships, individual ventures or workers' co-operatives, although as each only has between one and three staff members, the only practical difference is in whether or not they are able to sell shares. The economy of Glastieve incorporates all three sectors: the extraction of raw materials (primary) through tin and clay extraction, manufacturing (secondary) through the working of extracted tin and the production and sale of some food products and jewellery, and services (tertiary) through a wide variety of services paid for in Luach.

The market economy of Glastieve is broadly describable as a market socialist system, although can also be considered a micronational adaptation of capitalism that incorporates the left-wing views held by the vast majority of ECs. The the majority of companies are simply individual venturers or partnerships where all "workers" involved own the means of production and equally share profits, although there is also stock exchange (the Crockern Tor Stock Exchange), where some of these businesses are listed. Bonds are traded on the same exchange, and there is a private-sector casino. There are other examples of what can appear to be a discordant blending of the two systems that results from the small scale of the micronation, the desire to emulate the economy of the United Kingdom, and the peculiarities of the Glastieven Model. Support for systems that mix left-wing and right-wing ideas to create a functional (that is, not merely simulated) market economy in a micronation is sometimes referred to as Glastievenism.

Market and currency

Interpreted through the lens of the Glastieven Model, the Glastieven economy can be divided into four sectors: the three pillars, and the reliant sector. The first pillar represents the market value of the Luach, with a key feature of the economy being the free-floating value of the currency (as opposed to its being assigned such a random or desired value, as is a common practice in other micronation-states). The Government's role in helping to maintain this value is to promote reciprocity in the economy by adjusting public service salaries and levying taxes to ensure that citizens spend all that they receive. The second pillar of the strategy relates to supply-and-demand: the underlying basis of the Glastieven economy is that the Luach's value derives from its usefulness as a unit of account and medium of exchange for transactions that would ordinarily be both gift-based and reciprocal. The third pillar of the economy is the state's interaction with the wider British economy, through investment and fundraising events.

The reliant sector is an umbrella term for other transactions that take place in Luach, including the buying and selling of goods imported from the United Kingdom or the exchange of financial securities, such as stocks or bonds. The value assigned to the Luach through the first and second pillars and the introduction of assets into the economy that would cost Pounds Sterling facilitated by the third pillar allow for the reliant sector to exist. Primary industry in Glastieve, such as tin mining, generally contributes to the third pillar and not to the domestic economy, although on the occasions where Glastieven-made goods are sold using Luach rather than Punds Sterling this is included in the reliant sector, as the fact of the Luach having sufficient practical value to be considered a reasonable payment for these goods is still due to the first and second pillars.

Demographics

Main article: Demographics of Glastieve

Internet presence

www.glastieve.org, the official government website.

As a micronation-state without international recognition, Glastieve has no country-code top-level domain and unlike some other micronations does not use a substitute ccTLD, such as .gl (Greenland) or .gs (South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands); Government guidelines advise that businesses should aim to use neutral TLDs, such as .net, .com or .org, and should try to have their own web domain. The Government itself and The Glastieven, a newspaper, both follow these guidelines and use www.glastieve.org and theglastieven.com. Other companies, such as the Isotoniae Corporation, however, use free website builders that force the site to have domains such as .wixsite.com or .wordpress.org, including for internationally-facing sites like that of the Crockern Tor Stock Exchange.

The government owns and moderates two chatrooms for Glastieven use on Facebook Messenger, the Glastieven Lounge and the Grassy Hillside Club (Glasteive is a combination of the Anglicised placename elements glass and tieve, which are derived from the Irish glas and taobh that together mean grassy hillside). The Club is loosely-regulated, but in the Lounge the use of standard English is required. Theoretically, non-citizens are allowed to be members of these chatrooms, but on the rare occasions where citizens have had their citizenship rescinded this has coincided with a ban from the chatrooms. Internally, the government has a Slack workspace used for discussion and official communications.

Culture

Main article: Culture of Glastieve

Glastieven culture is a blend of that native to the region of Dartmoor before independence and the cultural group Acteriendia, which has existed in some form since 2014.

Literature

William Crossing (1847-1928), Eden Phillpots (1862-1960) and Beatrice Chase (1874-1955)

Mythology

Glastieven mythology, which came to Glastieve through Acteriendia, is older than the cultural group itself, with an early version of the BHH Cycle from which the rest developed having first developed in a recognisable form some time in 2012. Since independence, the Acteriendian mythological tradition has started to absorb and be influenced by the otherwise largely distinct folklore associated with the region of Dartmoor.

External links

• http://www.glastieve.org/ - the official Government website, branded as "www.glastieve.org"
• http://www.theglastieven.com/ - the website of The Glastieven, the country's main newspaper