less than an acre, leaving 269,547 who owned an acre or above. Even this, the clerks pointed out, was likely an overestimate, based on county-level figures: anyone who owned land in multiple counties would be double-counted.
It fell to an author and country squire, John Bateman, to interpret and popularise the return. In 1876 he published The Acre-Ocracy of England, in which he summarised the owners of 3,000 acres and above. It became a best-seller, going through four editions and updates which culminated in Bateman’s last work on the subject in 1883, The Great Land-Owners of Great Britain and Ireland. Bateman’s analysis confirmed the radicals’ worst fears: just 4,000 families owned over half the country. Meanwhile, 95 per cent of the population owned nothing at all. The landed elite had been exposed.
The return was swiftly buried because of its embarrassing findings. Landowners hated it. It was set upon by The Times, Tory in its politics, which declared that ‘the legend of 30,000 landowners has been found to be as mythical as that of St Ursula and her company of 10,000 virgins’. It was castigated by politicians, such as the MP George Brodrick, who criticised it for inaccuracies and double-counting, even though these errors had been easily corrected by John Bateman in his summaries. Radicals failed to fully capitalise on its findings; although a number of MPs stood in the 1885 election on a promise of ‘three acres and a cow’ for landless farmers, the most they achieved in terms of policy was the 1887 Allotments Act. The moment passed; time moved on; and the return was forgotten.
The third ‘modern Domesday’ was attempted a generation later. In 1906, the Liberals were swept to power in a landslide election victory, bringing to an end the Conservative hegemony that had dominated British politics since the mid-1880s. The New Liberalism of the twentieth century was committed to much greater state intervention than the laissez-faire policies of Victorian Liberals, including a greater willingness to introduce new taxes to pay for social welfare. One aspect of the New Liberalism was a fresh commitment to land reform.
By now land reform had won the support of two of the century’s greatest statesmen: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Churchill, then a Liberal MP, wrote in his 1909 book The People’s Rights about the ‘evils of an unreformed and vicious land system’. He railed against ‘the landlord who happens to own a plot of land on the outskirts or at the centre of one of our great cities, who watches the busy population around him making the city larger, richer, more convenient, more famous every day, and all the while sits still and does nothing’. Churchill’s solution to this social evil was to introduce a land value tax. A 20 per cent tax would be levied on the future unearned increase in land values. To do so, however, would require a full survey of the ownership and value of land across the country.
The Chancellor, Lloyd George, put forward such a tax in the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909, alongside hikes in income tax for the wealthy and a super-tax on the very richest. When the ensuing vote triggered a constitutional crisis over which chamber of Parliament held the upper hand, the government went to the country to obtain a fresh mandate; the Liberals were returned to power, albeit only with the support of Labour and Irish Nationalist MPs, and the People’s Budget was forced through the Lords.
In order to levy the new land value tax, current site values needed to be known; so a valuation survey was set up, dubbed ‘Lloyd George’s Domesday’. It took five years to carry out and involved the detailed mapping of land ownership across the whole country, using Ordnance Survey maps. This makes it an even more valuable resource than the Return of Owners of Land, which only noted the acreage owned, not where it was. It produced an astonishing volume of data: some 50,000 maps and 95,000 ledgers describing the owners and values of around nine million houses, farms and other properties.
The Liberals’ land value tax, however, came to a sorry end. Interrupted by the outbreak of the First World War, and with revenues from it outweighed by the costs of implementation, it was repealed in the 1920 Finance Act, under a government nominally still led by Lloyd George but dominated by the Conservative Party.
I spoke to Professor Brian Short, an academic who has researched the valuation survey extensively, and asked him whether any headline findings exist of who owned England at the time. ‘The 1910–15 survey remained unfinished at the start of the war, and stayed that way through to the repeal of the legislation after the war,’ he told me. ‘There was, unfortunately, no attempt to bring the massive amount of information to any summary conclusion – or at least none that I know of.’ He added: ‘I fear that the English have been very coy about landownership, and remain so.’
Scottish land reform campaigner Andy Wightman agrees, noting that ‘as the twentieth century wore on, people forgot that there had ever been such records. The public had never had access to them in any case and … their very existence was very effectively concealed from all but those working in the Inland Revenue and valuation profession.’ They were eventually declassified and remain in the National Archives, but have never been digitised.
Frustratingly, the moment was also a missed opportunity to rescue the floundering Land Registry, which continued to register land at a pathetically slow rate. The Land Registry’s own official history admits that in 1909, its chief registrar had suggested ‘the setting up of a “Domesday Office” – a merger of the Land Registry, Valuation Office and Ordnance Survey. The ownership records being compiled by the Valuation Office would have then been used to create a land register for the whole country … Lloyd George was in favour, but Lord Chancellor Haldane was opposed. Had the scheme been adopted, the Land Register would have been completed by now.’ Those words were written nearly twenty years ago.
The last and most recent of the modern Domesdays had a rather different aim. It sought not to tax the rich, but to ensure the country could feed itself in the face of total war. With shipping under assault from German U-boats and the country facing the threat of Nazi invasion, Britain embarked on ‘Dig for Victory’. The domestic side of this is well known: rationing, allotments, parks dug up for growing vegetables. Less appreciated today is the effort that went into identifying rural land that wasn’t being farmed, or had fallen into disuse during the agricultural depressions of the late Victorian period and inter-war years.
To this end, Churchill’s War Ministry mandated a National Farm Survey, overseen by the new War Agricultural Committees set up to direct farming. The initial survey was carried out in 1940–1, followed by a larger, two-year survey intended to inform post-war planning. This was seen at the time as a ‘Second Domesday’ – which tells you how quickly the other modern Domesdays had been hushed up or forgotten.
Though principally an investigation into land use, the National Farm Survey also interrogated ownership and tenancy. It covered all farms over five acres – around 320,000 farms in total – covering 99 per cent of agricultural land in England & Wales. However, as an academic paper on the 1941 survey notes, although the ‘results were intended to be for use by planners and agricultural advisors, the original records were not made available for general inspection’ until 1992. And while various historical studies have now been done using the National Farm Survey, the records remain on paper only, stored in the National Archives. A 2006 report made the case for digitisation of all the maps, but so far, no funder has been found.
What of the languishing Land Registry? Since its foundation in 1862 it had proved an embarrassing failure, and despite several further Acts intended to kickstart it – as well as the missed opportunity of 1909 – its progress remained glacial. Registration of land upon point of sale finally became compulsory after 1925, leading to an increase in activity. All information on who owned land, however, remained tightly guarded.
Incredibly, not even the police were allowed to access Land Registry records without the landowner’s permission, thanks to Section 112 of the 1925 Land Registration Act. This clearly hindered efforts to investigate corruption and money laundering. In the 1970s, the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the Land Registry pleading for greater transparency. In a document deposited
