Who Owns England?. Guy Shrubsole
this process stepped Lieutenant Robert Dawson, a mapmaker with utopian dreams. Dawson was a cartographer who had been seconded to the Tithe Commission from the Royal Engineers. He knew that for the purposes of collecting tithes, fully accurate maps of land ownership weren’t strictly necessary. But Dawson saw this as an opportunity to push a much larger, more ambitious project – a detailed cadastral survey of the entire country.
The Tithe Commission was at first enthusiastic, and backed Dawson’s proposals. They implored the government to help fund the accurate mapping of landowners, writing to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who appointed a select committee of MPs to examine the matter. But while the committee was hearing evidence, ‘groups of landowners petitioned the House of Commons requesting that the tithe commissioners’ proposals for large-scale maps be defeated’. The English aristocracy feared that a full survey of land ownership might pave the way for new land taxes, as Napoleon’s cadastral surveys had on the Continent, or – worse – lead to social upheaval and even revolution. The committee concurred, and ‘an opportunity for a cadastral survey of the full kingdom was lost’. Many tithe maps were still produced, but their coverage was incomplete, and in many cases lacking in detail.
Others, however, continued to press for a public register of land ownership. In May 1848, Lord Brougham, a lawyer and former Lord Chancellor, made the case in Parliament for a Land Registry complete with cadastral maps. ‘I need hardly dwell on the benefits of a registry for securing titles and facilitating transfers of property,’ he told his fellow peers. ‘England is nearly the only country which is still without this advantage … Connected with a registry should be an authentic and detailed map, the result of a survey of each county or smaller district – what the French call a Cadastre.’
Brougham sought to appeal to the landed establishment, explaining that a register of land could ‘improve the security of its possessors, and … increase the facility of its transfer’. It was an argument he felt should appeal ‘to the Members of this House, peculiarly the lords, as you are, of the soil of England’. But his speech also hinted at support for land redistribution. ‘It was reckoned by Dr. Beke, in 1801, that there were not more than 200,000 owners of land in England,’ Brougham related, compared to many millions of small landowners in France: ‘No one can believe that the working of any system is good which confines landed property to so few hands.’
His was a lone voice, however, and he had to wait: a Land Registry was eventually established, but not until 1862. Moreover, for decades after its creation, it registered pitifully little land – registration was voluntary rather than compulsory – and it was not a public register.
In the absence of a proper public Land Registry, advocates of land reform had to make do with proxy figures. The 1861 Census provoked a commotion among radicals, as its records seemed to show there were just 30,000 landowners in a population of some 20 million people – although the census said nothing about how much each owned. This was grist to the mill of a new generation of radical liberals and socialists who wanted to see the grinding poverty of the Victorian slums redressed through a fairer distribution of wealth. It was also dynamite for democrats advocating an extension of the electoral franchise and the abolition of the ‘property qualification’ – the need to own land or capital in order to vote.
The 15th Earl of Derby – himself a major landowner, and the son of the former Conservative Prime Minister – sought to stamp out calls for land reform by disproving these claims. Addressing the House of Lords on 19 February 1872, he asked the Lord Privy Seal ‘whether it is the intention of Her Majesty’s Government to take any steps for ascertaining accurately the number of Proprietors of Land or Houses in the United Kingdom, with the quantity of land owned by each?’ An accurate survey would be a public service, Derby went on, for currently there was a ‘great outcry raised about what was called the monopoly of land, and, in support of that cry, the wildest and most reckless exaggerations and misstatements of fact were uttered as to the number of persons who were the actual owners of the soil’.
Viscount Halifax, responding for the government, agreed, opining that ‘for statistical purposes, he thought that we ought to know the number of owners of land in the United Kingdom, and there would be no difficulty in obtaining this information’.
Halifax duly tasked the Local Government Board with preparing a Return of Owners of Land. Unlike the original Domesday, this was not produced by sending out surveyors, but by compiling and checking statistics already gathered on land and property ownership for the purposes of the Poor Law. This in itself was no mean feat: as is noted in the preface to the return, ‘upwards of 300,000 separate applications had to be sent to the clerks in order to clear up questions in reference to duplicate entries’. No maps were made, but addresses were recorded.
The Return of Owners of Land was finally published, ‘after considerable but unavoidable delay’, in July 1875. Its initial conclusions gave heart to the landed governing classes: there were, in fact, some 972,836 owners of land in England and Wales, outside of London. Yet 703,289 were owners of less than an acre, leaving 269,547 who owned an acre or above. Even this, the clerks pointed out, was likely an overestimate, based on county-level figures: anyone who owned land in multiple counties would be double-counted.
It fell to an author and country squire, John Bateman, to interpret and popularise the return. In 1876 he published The Acre-Ocracy of England, in which he summarised the owners of 3,000 acres and above. It became a best-seller, going through four editions and updates which culminated in Bateman’s last work on the subject in 1883, The Great Land-Owners of Great Britain and Ireland. Bateman’s analysis confirmed the radicals’ worst fears: just 4,000 families owned over half the country. Meanwhile, 95 per cent of the population owned nothing at all. The landed elite had been exposed.
The return was swiftly buried because of its embarrassing findings. Landowners hated it. It was set upon by The Times, Tory in its politics, which declared that ‘the legend of 30,000 landowners has been found to be as mythical as that of St Ursula and her company of 10,000 virgins’. It was castigated by politicians, such as the MP George Brodrick, who criticised it for inaccuracies and double-counting, even though these errors had been easily corrected by John Bateman in his summaries. Radicals failed to fully capitalise on its findings; although a number of MPs stood in the 1885 election on a promise of ‘three acres and a cow’ for landless farmers, the most they achieved in terms of policy was the 1887 Allotments Act. The moment passed; time moved on; and the return was forgotten.
The third ‘modern Domesday’ was attempted a generation later. In 1906, the Liberals were swept to power in a landslide election victory, bringing to an end the Conservative hegemony that had dominated British politics since the mid-1880s. The New Liberalism of the twentieth century was committed to much greater state intervention than the laissez-faire policies of Victorian Liberals, including a greater willingness to introduce new taxes to pay for social welfare. One aspect of the New Liberalism was a fresh commitment to land reform.
By now land reform had won the support of two of the century’s greatest statesmen: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Churchill, then a Liberal MP, wrote in his 1909 book The People’s Rights about the ‘evils of an unreformed and vicious land system’. He railed against ‘the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing’. Churchill’s solution