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 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