Who Owns England?. Guy Shrubsole
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