death of Diana; although thirty years on from the Queen’s annus horribilis, those still calling for the abolition of the monarchy must feel like they’re ploughing the loneliest of furrows. Two royal weddings, a diamond jubilee and several more grandchildren have helped restore the royal family’s public standing.
The point of this chapter isn’t to persuade you to become a republican. But it is intended to show you how the monarchy continues to shape how power and ownership are exercised in the UK. It seeks to outline why the royals – alongside that other great Establishment survivor, the Church – still own so much land after many centuries of existence. Most of all, it explains how the Crown is partly to blame for why land ownership in England remains so unequal today.
The smart-arse answer to the question ‘who owns England?’ is a simple one: the Crown. All land is ultimately owned by the Crown, and freehold and leasehold titles to land are technically ‘held of the Crown’, and therefore derived from it. The Crown is ‘lord paramount’, with land titles held on its sufferance. If you die without a will, any land you owned reverts to the Crown through the law of bona vacantia.
In practice, owning a freehold in land nowadays means you can do pretty well what you like with it. No marauding monarch is going to come and take it from you. But that hasn’t always been the case.
It was William the Conqueror who declared that all land in England belonged ultimately to the Crown, straight after the Norman Conquest of 1066. At William’s instigation, titles in land henceforth would be derived from the Crown. The king sat at the top of this feudal pyramid, and the whole country was now his to carve up as he pleased: a giant cake to be cut into slices and handed out to his cronies.
It’s this that lies at the heart of why land ownership remains so concentrated and unequal in England today. William the Conqueror’s land grab and system of patronage set the stage for the following thousand years. The king parcelled out land to a small coterie of barons, whose families would continue to inherit such lands for centuries afterwards. By dealing out the pack of cards so unfairly, William skewed the game from the outset. A large part of the blame for the resulting pattern of land ownership has to be levelled squarely at the Crown.
‘The public do a very good job of mentally separating the Royal Family from the rest of the aristocracy, but that is not the reality,’ admitted one peer with remarkable honesty during a House of Lords debate in 2013. ‘The Royal Family is the core of the aristocratic system.’ As Andy Wightman argues, ‘Private landownership in Scotland remains a small, inter-related and privileged club which is proud to have the Queen as a member.’ The same could be said of England.
Of course, William the Conqueror didn’t claim ownership of the whole of England only to immediately hand it out again to his barons. He also kept a very large chunk of land for the Crown itself. According to records in the Domesday Book, the king and his family owned around 17 per cent of England in 1086 – perhaps some 5.4 million acres. Nearly a thousand years later, the Crown in its various institutional guises still owns around a million acres of land in England and Wales, or half a million acres if you exclude the areas comprising foreshore and riverbeds. Looked at from one perspective, that represents a major loss of land over time. But from another angle, it’s an incredible tale of territorial survival. How have the fortunes of this vast estate changed over time, and how has it managed to survive into the twenty-first century?
If anything, the extent of Crown lands increased in size for a couple of centuries after the Norman Conquest. In particular, the Norman kings acquired lots of land to indulge their love of hunting. Another of William’s innovations, besides feudalism, was forest law. Nowadays we think of a forest as being composed of trees, a large woodland. But ‘forest’ is actually a legal construct – a term given to an area of land, whether wooded or not, where hunting privileges were restricted to the king. William and his successors established vast royal forests, including the New Forest and the Forest of Dean, where the hunting of deer and boar was outlawed for anyone save the king and his favoured courtiers.
Since English common law had created a customary right for hungry commoners to feed themselves by hunting wild game, this was a frightening new encroachment on the rights of ordinary people, in a kingdom already straining under the Norman yoke. Punishment for poaching in royal forests was severe. The Rime of King William, a furious poem written a year after William’s death by a disgruntled courtier, records that the king ‘established many deer preserves, / and he set up many laws concerning them, / such that whoever killed a hart or a hind / should be blinded.’
By the time of Henry II’s reign (1154–89), it’s reckoned that royal forests covered somewhere between a quarter and a third of all England – a vast area of land subjugated to the private pleasures of one individual at the expense of the public. Royal forests weren’t all strictly owned by the Crown – some were established on land belonging to other landowners – but the constraints and privileges enacted by forest law were so stringent that the Crown might as well have owned the land outright.
The royal penchant for game also inspired many barons to set up their own deer parks and hunting grounds. The thrill of the hunt is still recorded today in place names like Cannock Chase or Cranborne Chase, where nobles took their cue from the king in applying the principles of the royal forest to their own lands. Just as the Crown’s division of the spoils of conquest had established a landowning elite, so its act of closing off previously public lands for private gain set a dangerous precedent. In centuries to come, the aristocracy and gentry would begin the process of enclosure, stealing land once held in common and converting it into farmland for private profit.
But the Crown’s land grabs didn’t go unchallenged. Everyone today has heard of Magna Carta, the contract forced upon the Crown in 1215 by barons fed up with a despotic monarch. Most people have forgotten, however, about the Charter of the Forest, the ‘poor man’s Magna Carta’ which simultaneously pressed the Crown to respect rights customarily held by commoners.
As the historian Peter Linebaugh recounts, ‘There were two charters forced on King John at Runnymede. Beside the great charter with which we are all vaguely familiar, there was a second charter in 1217 known as the Charter of the Forest. Whereas the first charter concerned, for the most part, political and juridical rights, the second charter dealt with economic survival.’ The Charter ordered that ‘all woods made forest … shall be immediately disafforested’ – which is to say, removed from royal jurisdiction. The rights of commoners to the fruits of the earth – rights which were later to be savagely abused by the aristocracy – were accepted and codified by the Crown. Thereafter, royal rorests and forest law started to shrink in extent and influence. Edward III ‘disafforested’ the whole of Surrey in 1327, and by 1350 only 15 per cent of England lay under forest laws.
The decline of the royal forests didn’t end the Crown’s love affair with hunting, of course. Fashions simply evolved as nature’s larder was depleted. The last wild boar in England was killed in the seventeenth century. The Hanoverian kings had more of a taste for landscape gardening and hobby-farming, particularly George III, who earned the nickname ‘Farmer George’. But under Queen Victoria, the Crown’s sponsorship of bloodsports revived in a big way – only this time, the fashion was to buy a keepered grouse moor and blast away at birds with a shotgun. Today, the Queen owns a huge grouse moor estate around Balmoral and another in the North York Moors via the Duchy of Lancaster, as well as hosting pheasant shoots at Sandringham. Once again, the Crown has acted as a trendsetter in the ownership and misuse of land, shaping aristocratic tastes and causing hundreds of thousands of acres of upland England and Scotland to be converted into sporting estates.
Between the Black Death and the Civil War, the story of the Crown lands – as much as is known about them – seems to be one of financial mismanagement and decline. For a time, the monarchy’s landed estates had provided adequate income for the royal household to live within its means. But fighting endless foreign wars of aggression,
