Though most of the estates had significantly diminished in size since 1873, together these individuals still owned a combined 2.5 million acres across the UK. Perrott estimated that this sample represented ‘about one-seventh of those owned by the titled nobility’, and his definition of that elite totalled around 3,000 people. So, in the era of the Space Race, 0.005 per cent of the UK population still owned 17.9 million acres of the country, or 30 per cent of the total land area.
Drawing on Perrott’s work, the geographer Doreen Massey arrived at a similar extrapolation a decade later, concluding that ‘in spite of the decline which they have undergone this century, the holdings of the landed aristocracy have by no means been reduced to insignificance’. Stephen Glover’s 1977 survey of thirty-three large landowners found that they owned 667,410 acres, a drop of almost two-thirds from the 1,869,573 acres those same estates had owned in 1873. Even taking into account the reduced acreages, Glover concluded, these people ‘remain – on paper at least – very rich men’, all the wealthier thanks to the rapid rise in land prices that occurred in the 1970s.
More recent estimates, too, strongly suggest that the aristocracy have held their own against the tide of history. Kevin Cahill’s Who Owns Britain, which draws upon multiple newspaper reports, obituaries and rich lists, presents figures for the 100 largest landowners in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Altogether, Cahill reckons these select few own some 4.8 million acres. Still, this is only about 6 per cent of the land area of the two countries, and without figures for the rest of the aristocracy, it’s hard to conclude from Cahill’s research who actually owns the majority of Britain. Nevertheless, his figure for the land owned by the UK’s twenty-four non-royal dukes is startling. With a total of over 1 million acres between them, these remain men of very broad acres. Moreover, as we’ll see, the places they own have increased enormously in value, leaving many of the peerage extremely wealthy.
Or take the figures stated by the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who represent the landowning lobby in England and Wales; many aristocrats are known to be members. In a 2009 document, the CLA state that ‘Our 36,000 members own and manage over 50% of all of the rural land in England and Wales.’ A second CLA document from the same year clarifies that the rural land in their members’ possession totals five million hectares. So the 36,000 members of the CLA own 12.35 million acres, a third of England and Wales. Dan and Peter Snow, in their 2006 BBC documentary Whose Britain Is It Anyway?, came to the similar conclusion that the aristocracy and old landed families still own nearly a third of the UK overall.
Further confirmation that land remains in the hands of the few comes from agricultural statistics collected by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) on the number and size of farms. Counting the number of farm holdings isn’t quite the same as tallying up landowners: many farms are tenanted, and lots will be ultimately owned by companies and councils rather than the aristocracy. But these are still useful proxy figures. DEFRA’s 2017 data shows there are 218,000 farm holdings in the UK, covering 43 million acres – 72 per cent of the land area. Even this figure suggests that a tiny fraction of the overall population own the bulk of the land, and given that this includes tenanted farms, it’s likely a big overestimate. But the department also publishes statistics for England alone which give a more interesting breakdown of the total acreages owned by farms of different sizes. This allows us to see that the majority of English soil is farmed by a much smaller set of large farms: 25,638 farm holdings cover 16.5 million acres, or 52 per cent of England’s land area.
What’s more, comparing these with official statistics from 1960, now buried in the National Archives, shows that there are a lot fewer but bigger farms today than sixty years ago. When Thompson wrote about the decline of the aristocracy in the first half of the twentieth century, he described how smaller farmers had started buying up the land sold off by big estates. But since Thompson penned his book, the concentration of land ownership has, if anything, been increasing again.
Pinning down precisely what the aristocracy still own, and what’s now owned by the newly wealthy or by smaller-scale farmers, remains difficult. A definitive answer will remain elusive until the Land Registry is fully opened up. From the figures and estimates reviewed here, though, it seems a safe bet to say that around a third of England and Wales remains in the hands of the aristocracy and landed gentry – and that half of England is owned by less than 1 per cent of the population.
The aristocracy, in other words, have adapted, trimmed their sails – and survived. Their tenacity recalls Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’:
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are …
As the MP Chris Bryant puts it in his critical history of the aristocracy: ‘Far from dying away, they remain very much alive.’
That begs two further questions. What’s been the impact of so much land remaining in the hands of so few? And how have the aristocracy pulled off such a stunning feat of survival?
The image that most aristocratic estates present to the world is that of the grand country house, surrounded by beautiful parkland. From the yellow towers of the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle – used as a substitute for Windsor in Netflix series The Crown – to the golden limestone frontage of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, stately homes are the acceptable face of feudalism. Today, a ‘cult of the country house’ has grown up in England that rightly venerates their sumptuous architecture and historic art collections – though often omitting mention of how such wealth came to be amassed.
We now flock in our thousands to visit these mansions, stroll in their formal parterre gardens, and walk our dogs in their acres of parkland. Less than a century ago, of course, such public access would have been unthinkable. Aristocratic parks were created precisely to keep the masses out, and provide solace for their masters when they returned from the business of court or the hustle and bustle of the city. Many were created by the process of forcible enclosure, during which whole villages were evicted to make way for deer and specimen trees. Now that large swathes of parkland are open to the public for walking and cycling, that violent history has faded.
Aristocratic parkland has also changed our very concept of the English countryside. Much of that is thanks to one man, the individual who has perhaps had the single greatest impact on the English landscape: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. During the eighteenth century, Brown was the landscape gardener du jour; he worked on some 250 sites during his lifetime and his client list included the majority of the House of Lords. Brown literally moved mountains and diverted rivers to create the naturalistic vistas that he and his patrons desired. Graceful curving hillsides were moulded and stands of trees carefully pruned to lead the eye through the parkland towards a distant folly or the setting sun. John Phibbs, Brown’s biographer, estimates that he had a direct influence on half a million acres of England and Wales. ‘The astonishing scale of his work means that he did not just transform the English countryside,’ Phibbs writes, ‘but also our idea of what it is to be English and what England is.’ None of this, of course, would have happened without aristocratic cash.
Partly
