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,
