priest himself, or rented out to tenants.
Equipped with this huge land bank, and bolstered by the Victorian surge in Christian piety, the Church could feel very secure. Its spiritual grip on the nation was matched by its earthly wealth. But then, over the next century, a quiet catastrophe appears to have overwhelmed the Church’s landholdings.
In 1976, a new law, the Endowments and Glebe Measure, centralised the ownership of glebe land, transferring it from parish priests to the Diocesan Boards of Finance that administer to the Church of England’s forty-one bishoprics. The law passed without comment at the time. But what emerged much later, thanks to the careful investigations of historian Kevin Cahill and the MP Adrian Sanders, was that 90 per cent of all glebe land had disappeared over the intervening century. Only after a Parliamentary Question was lodged by Sanders in 2002 were the stats released. Having been masters of over 2 million acres in 1873, the Church’s glebe lands in 1976 amounted to a pitiable 111,628 acres.
Where had all the Church’s land gone? The Church themselves were to prove exceptionally coy about the matter. For years, the subject has remained shrouded in mystery, with the Diocesan Boards of Finance often refusing to answer questions about it. Cahill wrote to every diocese requesting an explanation, but received useful information from less than half. Efforts by Exeter University to investigate the matter in 2012 drew a blank after a ‘very disappointing’ response rate from Church authorities. The Church is not subject to Freedom of Information laws, even though the C of E is England’s established religion and twenty-six bishops sit in the House of Lords making the laws that govern us. But uncovering what the Church still owns today has proved fiendishly difficult, until now.
The Land Registry’s release of land ownership information on companies and corporate bodies in recent years means an updated stocktake of the state of Church lands is now possible, and it’s even worse than before. A 2015 Freedom of Information request to the Land Registry by Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson elicited figures for the area of land owned by corporate bodies, including each of the Diocesan Boards of Finance. I’ve checked these figures against the stats on glebe land that a quarter of all dioceses now publish on their websites: in nine out of ten cases, the figures match up well. So, unless there’s a backlog of land out there that remains unregistered, we can pretty confidently say that the amount of glebe land has decreased still further over the past four decades. Just 70,000 acres remain. The slide has been universal: landholdings in Lincolnshire, for example, consistently at the top of the league, declined from nearly 100,000 acres of glebe in Victorian time to 20,000 in 1976; there are now just 12,000 acres left.
The reason why has more to do with the lure of Mammon than with holy scripture. Before the 1976 law change, individual parish priests had the option of selling off their glebe land, alongside simply renting it out, as a way to make some extra cash. We can’t be sure, given the Church’s silence on the matter, but it seems that many vicars chose to make a quick buck by flogging off the land. After all, faced with the government’s abolition of tithes in 1936 (which took place as a result of rural workers’ and landowners’ campaigns in the wake of the Great Depression), and with dwindling church congregations in an increasingly secular society, some parishes must have felt the need to sell off their assets to make ends meet.
‘Stealing land is difficult to do,’ muses the land rights activist Gill Barron, who’s also looked into the loss of glebe land. ‘You can’t exactly roll it up in a carpet and carry it away. But … the undercover transfer of ownership of land is, in fact, incredibly easy in a country where the records of who owns what are a jealously guarded secret.’ And the Church has certainly helped keep the secret closely guarded.
Wresting control of glebe land away from vicars and handing it to dioceses was a belated attempt by the C of E hierarchy to shut the stable door after the horse had bolted. Yet the financial impetus to sell up has clearly remained – hence the continued decline in glebe since the 1970s. ‘Because of its original purpose, glebe land is usually situated within a settlement or close on the outskirts of the settlement, with a high chance of it being zoned for development,’ write the estate agents Savills. This, they state, ‘can make the land very valuable’.
You’ll probably have walked past a Glebe Close or Glebe Field near where you live: in some cases, the Church may retain ownership, but usually the site will have been sold on long ago for development. Some of this former glebe land even appears to have found its way into the hands of offshore companies based in tax havens. For example, Land Registry data lists land at Glebe Farm in Ruislip, West London, as now belonging to Blackfriars Holdings Ltd, based in the British Virgin Islands; while Glebe House in Bedford belongs to Glebe Ltd, registered in the Channel Islands. There are dozens more such examples, and likely countless other glebe fields that have been sold for shopping malls or buried beneath roads.
The loss of glebe lands tells us two things. First, it confirms the great cloak of secrecy that continues to envelop land ownership in England, and how our established institutions continue to promote this – in the case of the Church, perhaps out of embarrassment for what full transparency would reveal.
Second, it’s an early case study in the financialisation of land. The Church’s sale of glebe lands anticipated the great privatisation of public land later enacted by Margaret Thatcher’s government and her successors. In doing so, however, the Church wasn’t embarking on some ideological plan; rather, it simply succumbed to that oldest of sins, human greed.
Despite having allowed its clergy to sell off so much of the family silver, the Church today still boasts a property portfolio worth at least £8 billion. Its finances have been kept afloat by the Church Commissioners, a central body set up in 1948 to manage the Church’s property assets. The Church Commissioners own land totalling around 105,000 acres, on top of what the dioceses own – and in 2017 this land generated a whopping £226 million of income for the Church.
What remains, however, of the Church’s traditional commitment to using its resources to help the poor and homeless? ‘The Church of England remains a very large landowner,’ admitted Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview about the housing crisis. ‘We need to be committed to housing development, and, most of all, to community building.’
Welcome as the Archbishop’s commitment is, I’m sceptical that the Church will help solve the housing crisis after researching how its Commissioners have managed their estate. In contrast to the financial mismanagement that’s characterised the Church’s loss of glebe land, the centralised estate of the Church Commissioners seems to have been very efficiently managed over the last seventy years. But such business acumen has seen them take up the mantle of property developers, and sell off affordable residential housing in favour of more lucrative commercial developments.
‘The pressure to generate the investment income needed by the Church of England,’ argues housing expert Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at King’s College London, ‘has led to an increasingly commercial attitude towards their land and property investments.’ Although the Commissioners, he maintains, ‘retain a small residual social commitment to “housing the poor”’, their properties have ‘increasingly come to be viewed as an investment like any other’.
Back when the Church Commissioners were established after the Second World War, the
