In the thousand years that have passed since the Domesday Book, those seeking to uncover who owns this country have faced obstacles at every turn. Physically and legally excluded from large swathes of the countryside, with debate about land airbrushed from mainstream economics and stymied within political circles by the lobbying of landowners, the general public have had to clamour and campaign for access to the land and for information about who controls it. But it’s now possible, at last, to ask questions about who owns England, and credibly hope for an answer.
THE ESTABLISHMENT: CROWN AND CHURCH
Somehow, I had expected the Queen’s private home to be different. Sandringham House was certainly grand: vast rooms, stuccoed ceilings, great expanses of polished hardwood. Gilded Swiss clocks ticked on marble fireplaces. A statue of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, stood in a gloomy corner of the entrance hall, dancing upon a vanquished enemy. Moth-eaten Union Jacks from doomed polar expeditions hung next to crystal chandeliers. And pinned to the walls were a startling arsenal of knives, scimitars and vicious-looking knuckledusters: the gift of fifty long-dead Indian princes from when Queen Victoria had been crowned Empress of India.
But the house was also curiously parochial. A book on gnomes lay on top of an old edition of the Guinness Book of Records. An endless array of mirror-backed cabinets, crammed with onyx carvings and jade elephants and dinner services, gave the place a cluttered feel. Chintz chairs jostled for space with comfy sofas, their padded upholstery perhaps still bearing the imprint of the royal behind. The heavily patterned, Victorian-style carpets looked well worn. This was, after all – as our waistcoated tour guide informed us – the family home of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip for many months of the year. It felt like a bizarre mix: at once an old lady’s living room, complete with its collections of china dogs and tea sets, and at the same time a regal residence, filled with the tribute of defeated kingdoms. But then, separating out the personal from the public functions of the Crown is always a tricky exercise, as I was to discover.
I had cycled to Sandringham with my flatmate Roger, after taking the train out to King’s Lynn. This part of Norfolk has royal connections going back centuries: out in the Wash, it’s rumoured, lies King John’s buried treasure, submerged in the mudflats when the royal baggage train was caught by incoming tides. But it wasn’t until 1862 that the royal family decided to make the area their home. Queen Victoria bought the house for her son, the Prince of Wales – and future King Edward VII – along with an estate that then comprised around 7,000 acres. Today, Sandringham has grown to be even larger: some 20,000 acres of Norfolk, taking in prime farmland, oak woods and landscaped parks.
The whole area is dominated by huge aristocratic estates. As we pedalled through the arid countryside, neighbouring landowners staked their territorial claims through KEEP OUT signs and heraldic carvings. The balustrade of a bridge we cycled over was embossed repeatedly with the letter ‘H’, denoting the property of Lord Howard of Rising. To the east of Sandringham lies the Marquess of Cholmondeley’s Houghton Hall, whose land is registered in the tax haven of Jersey, and who holds the hereditary post of Lord Great Chamberlain, an ancient officer of the Crown.
What makes the Sandringham Estate unusual is not just that it’s a royal residence. It’s unusual because it’s owned by the Queen in person, rather than by the institution of the Crown. When Queen Victoria acquired it, she registered it in the name of the Prince of Wales, to avoid it becoming part of the Crown Estate and thereby surrendering its revenues to Parliament. It’s his name that’s recorded as the owner of Sandringham in the 1873 Return of Owners of Land. The current land title for Sandringham states the registered proprietor to be ‘Her most gracious Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second’. But it omits the crucial line, ‘in right of her Crown’, which would make it Crown property. The only other royal residence to be owned personally by the royal family is Balmoral in Scotland, and that was bought by Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, before his untimely death. The subsequent Crown Estates Act allowed the royal family to inherit Balmoral and Sandringham as private residences thereafter.
If all that seems oddly arcane and complex, you’re starting to grasp how archaic the British constitution remains. And while this might at first appear an irrelevant quirk of history, the monarchy’s survival continues to shape how power is exercised – and how land is owned. But to understand fully, we need to go further down the rabbit hole.
Our tour of Sandringham passed from the kitsch comfort of the drawing rooms into a darkened corridor, hung with drawings of the royals out hunting and lists of the estate’s gamekeepers. To my surprise, the walls were lined with cabinets stuffed with dozens and dozens of shotguns. ‘This is a .450-bore double-barrelled breach-loading rifle,’ recorded one label, ‘shot by Queen Victoria.’
‘Are any of these used by the Queen currently?’ I asked our tour guide.
‘Aha, no,’ he said. ‘The Queen does occasionally go shooting. But under the Firearms Act, you can’t publicly display weapons which are in current use. Thanks to Magna Carta, not even the Queen is above the law of the land.’
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper, I thought. Sure, the monarchy nowadays is a shadow of what it once was, its powers tightly constrained, its status mostly symbolic. But when it comes to taxation, for instance, the Queen has a very different arrangement to those which bind her subjects. She has only paid income tax voluntarily since 1993. Up to that point, no monarch had paid taxes since the 1930s, a revelation that sparked a public outcry at the time – particularly as ordinary taxpayers had just been asked to foot the bill for repairing Windsor Castle after it had been gutted by fire. Support for republicanism soared during a decade that saw several royal divorces and the 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