Who Owns England?

One upcoming test of whether the Church venerates morals above Mammon will be whether it makes use of its extensive mineral rights to profiteer from fracking. In recent years, the Commissioners have been busily laying claim to 585,000 acres of underground deposits of stone, metals and minerals. The Church has explained, reasonably enough, that it’s simply re-registering ancient rights as part of an updating process mandated by the Land Registry, and that it has few active plans to exploit such rights with new mines or quarries. But with ongoing efforts by shale gas companies to frack across large swathes of northern England, there are fears the Church could seek to cash in. Rights to oil and gas were nationalised long ago, but the Commissioners could still profit by charging companies wanting to drill through mineral layers belonging to the Church. And though the C of E has divested itself of all investments in coal and tar sands, citing climate-change concerns, it still argues that fracking can be ‘morally acceptable’ if properly regulated. In 2016, the Church Commissioners gave permission to a fracking firm to carry out underground seismic surveys on their Ormskirk Estate in Lancashire, the first step towards fracking.

The other major test facing the Church over the use of its land is how it responds to the ongoing housing crisis. Warm words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are all very well; but, having allowed vast swathes of land to be sold off, what can the Church practically do about it?

It could make a start by confessing to its past sins – by submitting to a searching inquiry into how it permitted its glebe to be flogged off, and how its investment policies have exacerbated the housing crisis by gentrifying key parts of London. Next, the Church Commissioners, having invested heavily in digitising maps of their landholdings in recent years, should publish these maps as a resource for housing associations and local authorities seeking to find local land. Lastly, it should work closely with councils to earmark land for affordable housing, and stipulate that a decent percentage of its land be sold cheaply, at existing use value. At a time when church pews are emptier than ever, the Church needs urgently to engage in some more soul-searching, and show that it retains a social role in modern England.

Old institutions die hard, especially in a conservative country like England. Long after the Crown and Church lost most of their formal powers, they continue to hold sway – kept alive, in part, by their landed wealth. Understanding how these archaic, quasi-feudal pillars of the Establishment operate is crucial to grasping the nature of power in modern Britain, and critical to comprehending why land ownership in England remains so unequal.

The efforts of the Duchies and the Church to evade full scrutiny by Parliament and the public tell us something profound about how privilege tries to perpetuate itself. And the way that both Crown and Church have avoided trying to disclose their landholdings is telling, too: because the concealment of wealth from prying eyes is also critical to preserving it.

These ancient organisations have survived into the modern world by transforming their landed estates from medieval baronies into capitalist property portfolios while still trying to avoid public accountability and wider social responsibility. Some would like to see the Anglican Church disestablished, and the monarchy abolished outright. Personally, I’m ambivalent about that. But on the question of the land they own, it’s clear that the estates of the Crown and Church ought to be made to better serve the public interest.

Most of all, the Crown and Church still matter because of the wider Establishment they helped to create. Without William the Conqueror’s division of conquered lands to his loyal barons, and without the Church’s tacit moral blessing for this unequal hierarchy, England would have no landed elite.

4

OLD MONEY

Once, when asked to give advice to young entrepreneurs on how they could succeed in modern Britain, the now-deceased 6th Duke of Westminster had some sage words. ‘Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror,’ he said.

Class runs deep in English society. Many of the aristocratic families who continue to thrive, prosper and own great swathes of the British Isles can date their bloodlines all the way back to the Norman Conquest. Indeed, 1066 was the making of them: some of the largest landowners in England today owe their territorial empires to the patronage of William the Conqueror a thousand years ago.

The Dukes of Westminster are a case in point. Their family name, Grosvenor, derives from Hugh Le Grand Veneur, the ‘great huntsman’ of King William’s court. Disgruntled commoners took to calling the portly Hugh the ‘fat huntsman’, or ‘gros veneur’, and the nickname stuck. A statue of the first Marquess of Westminster in Belgrave Square, one of the London estates now owned by the family, bears the proud declaration: ‘The Grosvenor family came to England with William the Conqueror and have held land in Cheshire since that time.’ Today, the Duke of Westminster is consistently found towards the top of the annual Sunday Times Rich List, the inheritor of a £9 billion fortune made from owning a vast, 130,000-acre estate in land and property, built up over centuries.

Nor are the Grosvenors alone in having such an ancient pedigree. Travel to sleepy Arundel on the edge of the South Downs, and in the middle of the town square you’ll find a copper plaque affixed to a wall. ‘Since William rose and Harold fell,’ runs the inscription, ‘There have been Earls at Arundel.’ Raise your eyes skyward, and the colossal grey towers and crenellated walls of Arundel Castle loom over the town. The earls, since elevated to become Dukes of Norfolk, continue to lord it over this part of Sussex.

Sitting for a pint in a nearby pub garden overlooking the River Arun, with the Duke’s fortress silhouetted against the skyline and the wind hissing gently through the reeds growing on the floodplain, it seemed to me as though little had changed in the past millennium. Feudalism lived on; deference had never died. In the words of that Victorian celebration of the social hierarchy, ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

A fawning display in the local museum confirmed the impression. ‘When the 15th Duke stood on the battlements of his newly repaired keep in 1910’, it read, ‘he would have had the satisfaction of knowing that almost everything he could see in all directions belonged to him.’ Although the Norfolks’ estate is thought to have diminished a little in size since then, it’s still said to span some 16,000 acres.

Or take Ralph Percy, the current Duke of Northumberland. His ancestor William de Percy appears in Domesday as the owner of a hundred manors in the north of England. Nowadays, the Duke is the second-largest private landowner in England, with at least 100,000 acres in his possession. He runs his estate from Alnwick Castle; local residents complain that it feels like the whole county is run by him.

Such examples give the lie to the widespread notion, perpetuated by scholars, journalists and aristocrats themselves in recent years, that the aristocracy have been consigned to the dustbin of history. In fact, though their wealth and power has waned since their heyday, their stubborn resilience is one of the great success stories of recent English history.

The genteel image of the aristocracy today, epitomised in costume dramas and tea and cakes in country houses, masks an early history that was written in blood. The Norman Conquest was brutal: William’s seizure of land was absolute, and he brooked no challenges. Rebellions by the English against their new masters were quickly crushed; the Harrying of the North laid waste huge tracts of northern England. This was one of the most brazen land grabs in history. Four thousand Anglo-Saxon thegns were replaced by less than two hundred Norman barons and clergy, and they achieved supremacy through force of arms.

Domesday gives us some idea of how concentrated land ownership became under the Conqueror. The figures are staggering: twenty years after the Conquest, along with the king’s 17 per cent, the bishops and abbots owned some 26 per cent of the landed wealth of England, and the 190-odd barons roughly 54 per cent. Even within this elite there was an elite: a dozen of the leading barons controlled about a quarter of the kingdom. One, Alan Rufus – a close relative of the Conqueror – is estimated to have owned about 7 per cent of England’s landed wealth on his own, and was one of the richest men who has ever lived.

William and his barons were a tight-knit circle, whose experiences of fighting side-by-side were now being rewarded in the handing out of spoils. Perhaps the best modern analogy is the mafia boss and his cronies, who depend on one another’s loyalty and give each other gifts, and will readily spill blood to protect the syndicate’s honour. William, the Norman Don Corleone, summoned the nation’s biggest landowners to his court upon the completion of the Domesday Book, and is thought to have had them swear oaths of fealty to him as he sat on his throne. The symbiotic relationship between Crown and aristocracy, between monarchical patronage and noble fidelity, has continued ever since.

In later centuries, seizures of land by the gentry continued with the enclosure of the commons. Little of this is remembered or taught in schools today. A powerful folk-memory of the Scottish Highland Clearances rightly persists, but the dispossession of England’s peasantry is mostly forgotten. Yet between 1604 and 1914, some 6.8 million acres of common land were enclosed by Acts of Parliament – a fifth of all England. This, of course, was at a time when few ‘commoners’ could vote to sway what Parliament did. John Clare, the nineteenth-century poet who went mad with grief after witnessing the fencing-off of his beloved countryside, wrote how ‘Inclosure came and trampled on the grave / Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave’.

Slavery and colonialism, too, played major roles in the formation of large English estates. Recent research by University College London has mapped over 3,000 British properties that once belonged to slave-owners or people who directly benefited from the slave trade. Large swathes of Bristol, London and Liverpool were built using the wealth that flowed from the sugar and cotton plantations of the Caribbean and North American colonies, where around three million Africans were transported and enslaved over three centuries. One example is Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, who inherited from his father a West Indian fortune which had included a slave plantation. From the proceeds, he had built for him Harewood House in Yorkshire, a vast Palladian mansion complete with parkland landscaped by Capability Brown. The Lascelles family went on to become one of the largest slave-owning families of their era, amassing 27,000 acres in Jamaica and Barbados and nearly 3,000 slaves, for whom life expectancy was a pitiful twenty-five years. Such suffering appeared not to elicit a hint of empathy or remorse from the 2nd Earl of Harewood, who campaigned against slavery’s abolition, declaring, ‘I, among others, am a sufferer.’ He was awarded over £23,000 in 1835 for his loss of ‘property’.

The role of violence in the acquisition of aristocratic estates is seldom acknowledged today in the placid displays you see in country mansions. But the stain remains. Gerrard Winstanley, the radical thinker whose group of Diggers sought to redistribute land during the Civil War, lambasted lords who tried to wash their hands of this bloody history. ‘The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword,’ he wrote. Or, as the anarcho-syndicalist peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail later put it, the violence was inherent in the system. An old joke, told by land reformers and socialists since the late nineteenth century, encapsulates the injustice. A lord confronts a poacher who is trespassing on his estate:

LORD: How dare you come on my land, sir?

POACHER: Your land! How do you make that out?

LORD: Because I inherited it from my father.

POACHER: And pray, how did he come by it?

LORD: It descended to him from his ancestors.

POACHER: But tell me how they came by it?

LORD: Why, they fought for it and won it, of course.

POACHER (taking off his coat): Then I’ll fight you for it.

But why own land at all? For centuries, of course, land was the primary source of wealth in England. As the source of food, fuel and shelter for an overwhelmingly agrarian nation, ownership of land conferred great riches – first as feudal dues, and later as monetary rents. But money was only part of the reason for having land; just as important was the power and status it conferred. The 15th Earl of Derby, the Victorian landowner who helped commission the Return of Owners of Land, listed five main benefits of land ownership: ‘One, political influence; two, social importance, founded on territorial possession, the most visible and unmistakeable form of wealth; three, power over tenantry; … four, residential enjoyment, including what is called sport; five, the money return – the rent.’

Moreover, owning land was a secure investment for the long term, a way of preserving wealth for posterity. Farming was rarely the means of earning a fast buck: it involved considerable outlays, and a poor harvest could cause a major loss of earnings. But in the long run, land would always appreciate in value. A country house and landed estate were the solid, lasting means by which a family’s name and fortune could endure down through the ages.

If conquest, enclosure and colonialism were important means by which the aristocracy first acquired their lands, equally important were the inheritance laws that meant they retained them. The crucial rule was male primogeniture – the custom that everything is inherited by the eldest son. This was vital to the maintenance of large estates, because it gave certainty about who was to inherit, and ensured that a lord’s landholdings remained intact: owned by one descendant rather than broken up between several. ‘If all the children shared the wealth, the properties would be divided and subdivided till the pomp and circumstance of the peerage would disappear,’ warned one American admirer of the gentry in 1885. ‘In order to retain its importance, the aristocracy must be kept small in numbers.’

The enforcement of male primogeniture has clearly influenced patterns of land ownership across much of England, keeping estates large. In Wales and in Kent, by contrast, estates tend to be smaller; here, and particularly in Kent, the older practice of gavelkind – dividing up land equally between all heirs – continued to hold sway. In eighteenth-century France, even before the Revolution sent aristocrats’ heads rolling, nobles’ estates tended to be smaller than those of their English contemporaries due to inheritance laws which stipulated the morcellation of land between all heirs. This gave many more men a stake in the land, though it failed to stop the eventual uprising against aristocratic privilege.

Male primogeniture is also, of course, fundamentally sexist. Occasionally, women have inherited aristocratic titles, and a few duchesses and countesses have become major landowners; but these are the exception rather than the rule. The early twentieth-century poet Vita Sackville-West, who wrote extensively about land and who is perhaps better known as Virginia Woolf’s lover, was dismayed not to inherit her family’s seat at Knole Castle due to these discriminatory laws of succession. But she struck back at her patriarchal father by buying up Sissinghurst Castle, after discovering the Sackvilles had once owned it. Other aristocratic women have been similarly disinherited. When the 6th Duke of Westminster died in 2016, his 26-year-old son Hugh inherited the entire family fortune over the heads of his elder sisters, making him the richest man under thirty in the world.

In 2013, a group of peers – both women and men – sought to bring an end to male primogeniture once and for all. An Act had recently been passed to change the laws governing royal succession, finally allowing the monarch’s eldest daughter to inherit the throne. This ‘set the hares running’ on whether the same reforms would now be made to noble inheritance, and a campaign group of aristocratic women calling themselves The Hares was formed. A number of peers tried to introduce legislation in Parliament to end male primogeniture. Dubbed the ‘Downton Law’, after the TV costume drama in which the eldest daughter is forbidden from inheriting the estate, the Equality (Titles) Bill got as far as its committee stage in the Lords.

But Lord Wallace, responding on behalf of the government, was having none of it, and kicked the Bill into the long grass. ‘We should take our time, look very carefully at the implications … and then perhaps consider further,’ he counselled, echoing the arguments of all those who have opposed change within the aristocracy for the past thousand years. Others were more vituperative in their opposition to equality. The Earl of Durham, locked in a dispute with his sisters over inheritance rights, railed against the campaign. ‘It is stupid in my view not only to be battling for something that could only possibly appeal to somebody’s pride and vanity,’ he spat, ‘but also something that affects about 0.0001 per cent of the population.’ It just so happens that this tiny percentage of people still own a large chunk of the country’s landed wealth.

Part and parcel of the aristocracy, and just as important to its formation as a select elite, is the system of hereditary titles. There are five ranks of the peerage, in descending order of importance: dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons. They’re created by the Crown without recourse to Parliament, through legal instruments known as letters patent. At present, there are around 800 hereditary peers: 24 dukes (not counting the various honorary dukedoms created for members of the royal family), 34 marquesses, 191 earls, 115 viscounts and 426 barons, as well as 4 countesses and 9 baronesses in their own right. Confusingly, peers can also hold multiple titles as they progress up the ranks, with their heirs adopting the subordinate honours: for example, the heir to the Marquess of Salisbury is styled Viscount Cranborne.fn1 Life peers, meanwhile, are a separate, more recent creation, invented to help modernise the House of Lords, with none of the land and wealth associated with the ancient hereditary peerage.

The whole arcane system of titles has become underpinned over the centuries by byzantine institutions and insignia. Old families proudly bear coats-of-arms, bedecked with heraldic beasts, mottoes and crests recalling their ancestors; the whole flummery policed by the College of Arms – whose head, the Duke of Norfolk, we met earlier. Aristocratic elitism finds its apogee in the voluminous pages of Debrett’s and Burke’s Peerage, obsessively compiled lists of current honours and their ancient bloodlines, which read a little like stock-books of good breeding.

The ranks of the peerage may appear convoluted and archaic to outsiders, but their complex, jealously guarded hierarchies are key to keeping the aristocracy exclusive. Sometimes, the closed nature of this club has proven problematic to kings wishing to broaden their pool of supporters and, above all, their income streams. James I ended up creating an entirely new class of hereditary titles, the baronetcies, which he sold to the lesser landed gentry in a seventeenth-century cash-for-honours scandal. Baronets have lower social standing than members of the peerage, but their titles are also hereditary, and their landed domains can be just as extensive. As of 2017, there were 1,204 extant baronetcies in the UK – meaning that the hereditary, titled aristocracy overall consists of just 2,000 families. Below peers and baronets sit knights and squires: holders of non-hereditary titles (‘Sir’, ‘Dame’, ‘Esquire’), but nevertheless often significant landowners in their own right. The ‘squirearchy’ of the early modern period were often lords of the manor across large parts of rural England. In terms of classes of landowners, however, this is where definitions become more blurred, and it gets harder to distinguish between estates that have been inherited and those bought more recently.

But was this exclusive club in fact open to newcomers? Overseas observers of England during the early modern period often marvelled at its political stability, and the fact that it had never suffered a far-reaching social revolution. They attributed this to what they surmised to be England’s ‘open elite’, a ruling class that was willing to welcome the newly wealthy bourgeoisie, and absorb those of middling rank who might otherwise become disgruntled and try to challenge the whole system.

Yet while there was a certain fluidity at the lower end, with merchants sometimes becoming members of the landed gentry, there was also great resistance to new money joining the peerage. Lawrence and Jeanne Stone, surveying the state of the aristocracy between the reign of Henry VIII and Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, concluded that ‘for 340 years, the elite maintained a highly stable social and political system’, in which upward mobility was enjoyed only by a comparative few. Just 157 ‘men of business’ bought their way into the landowning elite over these three centuries and were able to acquire estates of 2,000 acres or more. Throughout this period, ‘many of the same families still resided in the same seats’, and newcomers attempting to join the landed aristocracy had to overcome ‘infinitely resistant lines of snobbery’. Subsequent research has suggested that there were a greater number of wealthy entrants to landed society who succeeded in buying smaller estates of around 1,000 acres; but these were small fry compared to the vast landholdings of the dukes and earls of their day.

By the time of the Victorian Return of Owners of Land, the landed aristocracy was at the peak of its political power. A mere 4,217 peers, great landowners and squires owned 18 million acres of land – half of England and Wales, possessed by 0.01 per cent of the population. In a triumph for trickle-down economics, it had taken eight centuries for England’s landowning elite to broaden out from around 200 Norman barons to 4,200 Victorian nobles and gentry. ‘In terms of territory, it seems likely that the notables owned a greater proportion of the British Isles than almost any other elite owned of almost any other country,’ writes the historian David Cannadine.

What happened next to the aristocracy has often been portrayed as a catastrophe. Between Queen Victoria becoming Empress of India and the killing fields of the First World War, the sun appeared to set on the gilded world of inherited privilege. This perception owes much to the work of the historian F.M.L. Thompson in his 1963 book English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, later popularised and embroidered in David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. They recount how the entire aristocratic class experienced a sudden loss of territory, wealth and political power – plagued by death duties, assaulted by land reformers and Lords reform, and losing out to the nouveau riche. ‘The old order is doomed,’ bemoaned the Duke of Marlborough in 1919.

No one seriously disputes that the British aristocracy fell from grace after their Victorian heyday. But reports of the death of the aristocracy have been greatly exaggerated. This is particularly true when it comes to the land they own.

Thompson and Cannadine’s claims about the rapid territorial losses of the peerage in fact come down to one, rather shaky source. Cannadine states that ‘in the years immediately before and after the First World War, some six to eight million acres, one-quarter of the land of England, was sold by gentry and grandees’. Thompson likewise asserts: ‘it is possible that in the four years of intense activity between 1918 and 1921 something between six and eight million acres changed hands in England.’ For this startling figure, both relied on a single article in one edition of the property magazine Estates Gazette from December 1921.