‘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, from the Crusades to the Hundred Years War, proved expensive; and soon kings were summoning their barons to plead for more cash. Parliament, the setting for such negotiations, at first delivered the goods – even when it proved ruinous. The levying of the vastly unfair Poll Tax in 1381 sparked a colossal revolt by peasants and labourers that threatened to topple feudalism in its entirety. The revolt was quashed and the landowning order maintained. But increasingly, even landowner-dominated Parliaments came to view the excesses of the Crown with disdain.
Throughout this period, successive kings and queens flogged off and gave away Crown lands with scant thought for the longer term. With the exception of the two duchies – which we’ll turn to later – the monarchy’s lands were frittered away, handed out to favourites at court rather than managed to maximise incomes. Most profligate of all were the Stuart dynasty, whose thirst for cash resulted in the selling off of land, the creation of new peerages, demands for higher taxes and then, when MPs refused to levy them, the dissolution of Parliament. In fact, the Stuart kings cocked up their finances so badly, it led to civil war and Parliament’s execution of Charles I.
For eleven years, England had no Crown. Determined to run things more efficiently, Cromwell’s Parliaments carried out an extensive survey of Crown lands. But rather than keep hold of them as an ongoing source of revenue for the nation’s finances, they too decided to sell them off. The reason was simple: Cromwell’s army was massively in arrears, and its unpaid footsoldiers were getting restless. The Crown lands were sold