Who Owns England?. Guy Shrubsole

Black Rod to knock three times on the door of the Commons, to summon MPs to hear her speech. But the door is slammed shut in his face, symbolising the Commons’ independence. This crucial limitation of the monarch’s remit dates back to the Civil War. As political theatre, it represents Parliament’s subsequent armed rebellion, its execution of the king and imposition of a republic, and its later shaping of a constitutional monarchy. In short, it’s an assertion of Parliamentary sovereignty. And yet, it appears that the Queen still quietly asserts her claim to own Parliament.

      I discovered this when I chanced across an old parliamentary debate from the Swinging Sixties. The Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, having just swept to power on a modernising mission to unleash the ‘white heat of technology’ and update Britain’s tired old institutions, made a special announcement to Parliament in March 1965. The Queen, he declared, had ‘graciously agreed that the control, use and occupation of the Palace of Westminster and its precincts shall be permanently enjoyed by the Houses of Parliament’. Control of the building would pass to the Speaker. Wilson’s Cabinet colleague Tony Benn must have been pleased: as a diehard republican, he had refused to kiss the Queen’s hand when he joined the Privy Council.

      Intrigued, I decided to take a look at the Land Registry records for the Houses of Parliament – expecting to find the freehold registered to the Speaker.[fn2] But it wasn’t. Instead, there was simply a recent caution, similar to that for Buckingham Palace, lodged by the Crown Estate Commissioners, that ‘the Queen’s Most Excellent Majesty is interested in the land as beneficial owner … in right of Her Crown’. Wilson, it seemed, hadn’t taken back control at all.

      The confusion over who owns Parliament illustrates a broader truth about the muddle of British politics, and how interwoven our modern system of government is with the ancient institution of the Crown. The Crown’s formal powers may have withered, but its symbolic soft power remains strong – and its landed wealth is still extensive. Grappling with the archaic customs of the Crown remains essential to understanding land ownership in England today. Who owns the land on which the House of Commons meets is only a small, perhaps trifling part of that. But symbolism matters in politics. Brexit, we are told, is all about reclaiming parliamentary sovereignty. If that’s to be the case, why doesn’t Parliament first take back control of the land beneath its feet?

      If the story of the Crown has been one of territorial survival, the tale of what’s happened to the Church’s lands is one of almost complete collapse. Once the country’s largest and wealthiest landowner, the Church today is a shadow of its former glory. But what’s most surprising is how recently its possessions were lost. Even in the late Victorian period, the Church was the largest single landowner in England. Yet over the past century, it has lost around 90 per cent of its lands. Why? The mystery of who stole the Church’s land is a whodunnit worthy of a Brother Cadfael novel.

      The medieval Church enjoyed vast wealth. Domesday suggests that bishops and abbots owned over a quarter of the entire kingdom, around 8.3 million acres. By the Reformation, historians’ best estimates are that Church lands had declined somewhat, to around 4 million acres. But this was still a colossal area, and it brought in great riches in the form of tithes, rents and agricultural produce. Large areas of England had been settled by the monastic orders, who set to work on draining marshy ground and putting wilderness under the plough. The ordained clergy of priests and bishops also owned plenty of land, not to mention churches and outbuildings. Of course, some of this worldly wealth was reinvested by the Church into building ever-larger cathedrals, and redistributed to the poor in the form of alms. But the senior ranks of the Church seldom went hungry. Over the centuries, various nonconformist and heretical sects – from the Friars and mendicant orders to the Cathars, Lollards and Protestant puritans – poured scorn on the gilded wealth of the Church hierarchy, seeing it as a corruption of the holy poverty of true Christianity.

      Henry VIII’s decision in 1536 to dissolve the monasteries and seize their lands had no such spiritual motivation. Part and parcel of Henry’s break from Rome, it was also a land grab pure and simple, to bolster royal finances and fund foreign wars. A large chunk of the land that Henry took from the monasteries was quickly sold off or handed out to noble cronies. The Russell family, for example – later the Dukes of Bedford – were given the old monastic lands of Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire. It’s still their family seat today. For centuries afterwards, the beneficiaries of Henry’s land grab would remain staunch defenders of the Anglican settlement – terrified of losing their possessions should the Catholic Church ever be restored. One of the main reasons why Bonnie Prince Charlie – the Catholic pretender to the throne in the eighteenth century – never succeeded in becoming king was because of the aristocracy’s fear of losing their ‘Abbey Lands’ if he took power.

      But the newly created Church of England was hardly poor, either. Only the monasteries had been dissolved; the old bishoprics kept their lands, and the Anglican Church started out with an endowment of land that ensured it would remain very rich. By the time of the 1873 Return of Owners of Land, the Church still owned a vast estate of 2.13 million acres, making it the single largest landowner in England at the time.

      Most of this was in the form of land known as ‘glebe’ – land set aside for the upkeep of parish priests, the lowest and poorest rung of the Anglican clergy. It comprises the land on which vicarages and rectories are built, but also farmland to supplement vicars’ incomes. From the Reformation until the twentieth century, parish priests had three main sources of income: fees from performing baptisms, marriages and deaths; tithes, a form of Church taxation levied on other local landowners and farmers; and glebe land. Glebe could be farmed by the parish priest himself, or rented out to tenants.

      Equipped with this huge land bank, and bolstered by the Victorian surge in Christian piety, the Church could feel very secure. Its spiritual grip on the nation was matched by its earthly wealth. But then, over the next century, a quiet catastrophe appears to have overwhelmed the Church’s landholdings.

      In 1976, a new law, the Endowments and Glebe Measure, centralised the ownership of glebe land, transferring it from parish priests to the Diocesan Boards of Finance that administer to the Church of England’s forty-one bishoprics. The law passed without comment at the time. But what emerged much later, thanks to the careful investigations of historian Kevin Cahill and the MP Adrian Sanders, was that 90 per cent of all glebe land had disappeared over the intervening century. Only after a Parliamentary Question was lodged by Sanders in 2002 were the stats released. Having been masters of over 2 million acres in 1873, the Church’s glebe lands in 1976 amounted to a pitiable 111,628 acres.

      Where had all the Church’s land gone? The Church themselves were to prove exceptionally coy about the matter. For years, the subject has remained shrouded in mystery, with the Diocesan Boards of Finance often refusing to answer questions about it. Cahill wrote to every diocese requesting an explanation, but received useful information from less than half. Efforts by Exeter University to investigate the matter in 2012 drew a blank after a ‘very disappointing’ response rate from Church authorities. The Church is not subject to Freedom of Information laws, even though the C of E is England’s established religion and twenty-six bishops sit in the House of Lords making the laws that govern us. But uncovering what the Church still owns today has proved fiendishly difficult, until now.

      The Land Registry’s release of land ownership information on companies and corporate bodies in recent years means an updated stocktake of the state of Church lands is now possible, and it’s even worse than before. A 2015 Freedom of Information request to the Land Registry by Private Eye journalist Christian Eriksson elicited figures for the area of land owned by corporate bodies, including each of the Diocesan Boards of Finance. I’ve checked these figures against the stats on glebe land that a quarter of all dioceses now publish on their websites: in nine out of ten cases, the figures match up well. So, unless there’s a backlog of land out there that remains unregistered, we can pretty confidently say that the amount of glebe land has decreased still further over the past four decades. Just 70,000 acres remain. The slide has been universal: landholdings in Lincolnshire, for example, consistently at the top of the league, declined from nearly 100,000 acres of glebe in Victorian time to 20,000 in 1976; there are now just 12,000 acres left.

      The reason why has more to do with the lure of Mammon