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.
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
