boundary. A set of gateposts, previously remarkable only for the carved eagles perching atop them, takes on a new significance as a display of might: get off my land.
To see the world through the lens of land ownership is to survey a landscape of power. Many of England’s largest landowners have acquired their land through inheritance; an inheritance that has often been built on the back of conquest and enclosure. And landowners possess great power over how their land is used, for good or ill.
Ill fares the land, indeed. While our last wild habitats face collapse, many landowners continue to turn their land into chemical deserts or flog it off for development, traditional concepts of stewardship seemingly crushed by the lure of pound signs. In our cities, urban space is treated by landowners as an investment opportunity, with homes transformed into assets rather than being places to live in. Urban land is too often wasted, with properties left empty and vacant sites kept as land banks, as owners wait for their value to climb still higher before cashing them in. Shadowy offshore firms swallow taxpayers’ money to run horse-racing studs, and lords of the manor are elected to Parliament. Worst of all, the vast majority of people living in England today remain as landless as they have always been. I belong to England; I love its countryside and history. But does any of it really belong to me?
Ramblers and environmental activists, when they gather together around campfires, often sing the songs of the American folk musician Woody Guthrie. They console themselves with the heartwarming lyrics of his most famous piece, a paean to nationhood, land and belonging.
This land is my land, this land is your land …
But it isn’t true. This land does not belong to you or me.
There’s a huge reluctance to discuss who owns land in England. It’s seen as impolite, an expression of the politics of envy. Some of this is a hangover from an earlier era of deference, when the right of the local lord of the manor to his thousands of acres was as unquestioned as his hereditary seat in Parliament.
But there are also deeper ideologies at work. There’s a peculiarly English reluctance to debate land ownership, some of which has its roots in the work of the seventeenth-century moral philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that there was a natural right to the exclusive ownership of land, which permitted people to own land as private property just like any other possession. He admitted that ‘the earth … be common to all men’, but argued that any person who cultivated land ‘hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property’. Owning land, in Locke’s view, was just like a carpenter owning a chair he had made by hand.
Locke’s arguments lent a moral respectability to the actions of large landowners through the centuries, shutting down the space for debate. There was just one proviso: taking private ownership of land was only morally justified ‘where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others’. That seemed to be true in Locke’s day, when the world appeared vast and its population small. But it also provided a convenient excuse for the English gentry to carry on enclosing commoners’ land in the name of agricultural improvement, and for the early English colonists in the New World to seize ‘wasteland’ from Native American peoples. Locke ignored common forms of land ownership, the inherent scarcity of land on a finite planet, and how taking private possession of it becomes a zero-sum game.
Over the past century and a half, Locke’s detractors have grown in number, reopening conversations about land. ‘Land differs from all other forms of property,’ argued Winston Churchill in 1909, at the height of the Liberal Party’s push for land reform. ‘Land, which is a necessity of human existence, which is the original source of all wealth, which is strictly limited in extent, which is fixed in geographical position – land, I say, differs from all other forms of property in these primary and fundamental conditions.’ Churchill was clearly right about this, and it’s a view that is once more gaining traction. But it’s taken a long time for such ideas to obtain a hearing, and for land ownership to become a permissible topic of debate.
Who owns England has also been literally hidden from plain sight. Large landowners have built high walls around their estates, to keep out prying eyes. The English countryside still bristles with a profusion of KEEP OUT, PRIVATE PROPERTY signs. Rich businesspeople and celebrities live in gated communities protected by private security. For many decades during the Cold War, some Ministry of Defence sites were literally erased from maps.
No one doubts the right to privacy in one’s own home, nor the need for security around military bases. But England’s laws to protect private landed property go far beyond simply defending the old notion that ‘an Englishman’s home is his castle’. For many Englishmen whose homes are actually castles, their rights also extend far beyond their moats into hundreds of acres of parkland, woods and fields.
The civil offence of trespass means that anyone setting foot on land where no public right of way exists without the consent of the landowner is a trespasser, and can be prosecuted. While access to the countryside has been opened up considerably in recent years, the extension of Right to Roam remains unfinished business, and is a continual reminder that the English remain unwelcome in most of their countryside. And if you can’t see it, you’re less likely to ask questions about who owns it.
Parallel developments in the 1990s also showed lawmakers to be overwhelmingly on the side of the landowners when it came to dealing with people protesting about land issues. The 1994 Criminal Justice Act created a new, criminal offence – invented by the Major government to squash roads protesters and hunt saboteurs – of ‘aggravated trespass’, for cases where trespassers were deemed to be impeding the landowner from undertaking lawful activities. This, coupled with the more recent criminalisation of squatting, has closed down the space for taking direct action against unjust and unsustainable uses of land.
Land has also been airbrushed from modern economic theory. All the classical economists – Adam Smith, Karl Marx, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill – recognised land as a key factor of production, sitting alongside capital and labour as inputs to the economy. Land was different from capital and labour, however, in being of fixed supply, and in having no production costs: nature provided it for free. But neoclassical economists removed land as a separate factor of production, conflating it with capital. Land, despite being finite and thus a constraint upon economic activities, was no longer treated as such.
But most tellingly of all, public discussion of land ownership has been hampered and stymied for centuries by the near-impossibility of obtaining proper information on it. Accurate facts, figures and maps detailing the ownership of land in England are very hard to come by.
Charges of conspiracy are flung about wearyingly often in modern politics. But the long-term concealment of who owns England appears to me to be one of the clearest cases of a cover-up in English history. To understand its depths, we have to go back a thousand years, to Domesday.
The Domesday Book was the first comprehensive survey by any European monarchy of the owners and occupiers of land in their domain. It was, to put it bluntly, a swag list assembled by an acquisitive king. William the Conqueror commissioned Domesday in 1085, nineteen years after his conquest of England, in order to better understand who owned what, so he could tax them more in future. The anonymous scribe behind the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recounts that King William ‘sent he his men over all England into each shire; commissioning them to find out … what, or how much, each man had, who was an occupier of land in England,
