Читать книгу Who Owns England? - Guy Shrubsole - Страница 10

Once, when asked to give advice to young entrepreneurs on how they could succeed in modern Britain, the now-deceased 6th Duke of Westminster had some sage words. ‘Make sure they have an ancestor who was a very close friend of William the Conqueror,’ he said.

Class runs deep in English society. Many of the aristocratic families who continue to thrive, prosper and own great swathes of the British Isles can date their bloodlines all the way back to the Norman Conquest. Indeed, 1066 was the making of them: some of the largest landowners in England today owe their territorial empires to the patronage of William the Conqueror a thousand years ago.

The Dukes of Westminster are a case in point. Their family name, Grosvenor, derives from Hugh Le Grand Veneur, the ‘great huntsman’ of King William’s court. Disgruntled commoners took to calling the portly Hugh the ‘fat huntsman’, or ‘gros veneur’, and the nickname stuck. A statue of the first Marquess of Westminster in Belgrave Square, one of the London estates now owned by the family, bears the proud declaration: ‘The Grosvenor family came to England with William the Conqueror and have held land in Cheshire since that time.’ Today, the Duke of Westminster is consistently found towards the top of the annual Sunday Times Rich List, the inheritor of a £9 billion fortune made from owning a vast, 130,000-acre estate in land and property, built up over centuries.

Nor are the Grosvenors alone in having such an ancient pedigree. Travel to sleepy Arundel on the edge of the South Downs, and in the middle of the town square you’ll find a copper plaque affixed to a wall. ‘Since William rose and Harold fell,’ runs the inscription, ‘There have been Earls at Arundel.’ Raise your eyes skyward, and the colossal grey towers and crenellated walls of Arundel Castle loom over the town. The earls, since elevated to become Dukes of Norfolk, continue to lord it over this part of Sussex.

Sitting for a pint in a nearby pub garden overlooking the River Arun, with the Duke’s fortress silhouetted against the skyline and the wind hissing gently through the reeds growing on the floodplain, it seemed to me as though little had changed in the past millennium. Feudalism lived on; deference had never died. In the words of that Victorian celebration of the social hierarchy, ‘All Things Bright And Beautiful’:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them high and lowly,

And ordered their estate.

A fawning display in the local museum confirmed the impression. ‘When the 15th Duke stood on the battlements of his newly repaired keep in 1910’, it read, ‘he would have had the satisfaction of knowing that almost everything he could see in all directions belonged to him.’ Although the Norfolks’ estate is thought to have diminished a little in size since then, it’s still said to span some 16,000 acres.

Or take Ralph Percy, the current Duke of Northumberland. His ancestor William de Percy appears in Domesday as the owner of a hundred manors in the north of England. Nowadays, the Duke is the second-largest private landowner in England, with at least 100,000 acres in his possession. He runs his estate from Alnwick Castle; local residents complain that it feels like the whole county is run by him.

Such examples give the lie to the widespread notion, perpetuated by scholars, journalists and aristocrats themselves in recent years, that the aristocracy have been consigned to the dustbin of history. In fact, though their wealth and power has waned since their heyday, their stubborn resilience is one of the great success stories of recent English history.

The genteel image of the aristocracy today, epitomised in costume dramas and tea and cakes in country houses, masks an early history that was written in blood. The Norman Conquest was brutal: William’s seizure of land was absolute, and he brooked no challenges. Rebellions by the English against their new masters were quickly crushed; the Harrying of the North laid waste huge tracts of northern England. This was one of the most brazen land grabs in history. Four thousand Anglo-Saxon thegns were replaced by less than two hundred Norman barons and clergy, and they achieved supremacy through force of arms.

Domesday gives us some idea of how concentrated land ownership became under the Conqueror. The figures are staggering: twenty years after the Conquest, along with the king’s 17 per cent, the bishops and abbots owned some 26 per cent of the landed wealth of England, and the 190-odd barons roughly 54 per cent. Even within this elite there was an elite: a dozen of the leading barons controlled about a quarter of the kingdom. One, Alan Rufus – a close relative of the Conqueror – is estimated to have owned about 7 per cent of England’s landed wealth on his own, and was one of the richest men who has ever lived.

William and his barons were a tight-knit circle, whose experiences of fighting side-by-side were now being rewarded in the handing out of spoils. Perhaps the best modern analogy is the mafia boss and his cronies, who depend on one another’s loyalty and give each other gifts, and will readily spill blood to protect the syndicate’s honour. William, the Norman Don Corleone, summoned the nation’s biggest landowners to his court upon the completion of the Domesday Book, and is thought to have had them swear oaths of fealty to him as he sat on his throne. The symbiotic relationship between Crown and aristocracy, between monarchical patronage and noble fidelity, has continued ever since.

In later centuries, seizures of land by the gentry continued with the enclosure of the commons. Little of this is remembered or taught in schools today. A powerful folk-memory of the Scottish Highland Clearances rightly persists, but the dispossession of England’s peasantry is mostly forgotten. Yet between 1604 and 1914, some 6.8 million acres of common land were enclosed by Acts of Parliament – a fifth of all England. This, of course, was at a time when few ‘commoners’ could vote to sway what Parliament did. John Clare, the nineteenth-century poet who went mad with grief after witnessing the fencing-off of his beloved countryside, wrote how ‘Inclosure came and trampled on the grave / Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave’.

Slavery and colonialism, too, played major roles in the formation of large English estates. Recent research by University College London has mapped over 3,000 British properties that once belonged to slave-owners or people who directly benefited from the slave trade. Large swathes of Bristol, London and Liverpool were built using the wealth that flowed from the sugar and cotton plantations of the Caribbean and North American colonies, where around three million Africans were transported and enslaved over three centuries. One example is Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, who inherited from his father a West Indian fortune which had included a slave plantation. From the proceeds, he had built for him Harewood House in Yorkshire, a vast Palladian mansion complete with parkland landscaped by Capability Brown. The Lascelles family went on to become one of the largest slave-owning families of their era, amassing 27,000 acres in Jamaica and Barbados and nearly 3,000 slaves, for whom life expectancy was a pitiful twenty-five years. Such suffering appeared not to elicit a hint of empathy or remorse from the 2nd Earl of Harewood, who campaigned against slavery’s abolition, declaring, ‘I, among others, am a sufferer.’ He was awarded over £23,000 in 1835 for his loss of ‘property’.

The role of violence in the acquisition of aristocratic estates is seldom acknowledged today in the placid displays you see in country mansions. But the stain remains. Gerrard Winstanley, the radical thinker whose group of Diggers sought to redistribute land during the Civil War, lambasted lords who tried to wash their hands of this bloody history. ‘The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword,’ he wrote. Or, as the anarcho-syndicalist peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail later put it, the violence was inherent in the system. An old joke, told by land reformers and socialists since the late nineteenth century, encapsulates the injustice. A lord confronts a poacher who is trespassing on his estate:

LORD: How dare you come on my land, sir?

POACHER: Your land! How do you make that out?

LORD: Because I inherited it from my father.

POACHER: And pray, how did he come by it?

LORD: It descended to him from his ancestors.

POACHER: But tell me how they came by it?

LORD: Why, they fought for it and won it, of course.

POACHER (taking off his coat): Then I’ll fight you for it.

But why own land at all? For centuries, of course, land was the primary source of wealth in England. As the source of food, fuel and shelter for an overwhelmingly agrarian nation, ownership of land conferred great riches – first as feudal dues, and later as monetary rents. But money was only part of the reason for having land; just as important was the power and status it conferred. The 15th Earl of Derby, the Victorian landowner who helped commission the Return of Owners of Land, listed five main benefits of land ownership: ‘One, political influence; two, social importance, founded on territorial possession, the most visible and unmistakeable form of wealth; three, power over tenantry; … four, residential enjoyment, including what is called sport; five, the money return – the rent.’

Moreover, owning land was a secure investment for the long term, a way of preserving wealth for posterity. Farming was rarely the means of earning a fast buck: it involved considerable outlays, and a poor harvest could cause a major loss of earnings. But in the long run, land would always appreciate in value. A country house and landed estate were the solid, lasting means by which a family’s name and fortune could endure down through the ages.

If conquest, enclosure and colonialism were important means by which the aristocracy first acquired their lands, equally important were the inheritance laws that meant they retained them. The crucial rule was male primogeniture – the custom that everything is inherited by the eldest son. This was vital to the maintenance of large estates, because it gave certainty about who was to inherit, and ensured that a lord’s landholdings remained intact: owned by one descendant rather than broken up between several. ‘If all the children shared the wealth, the properties would be divided and subdivided till the pomp and circumstance of the peerage would disappear,’ warned one American admirer of the gentry in 1885. ‘In order to retain its importance, the aristocracy must be kept small in numbers.’

The enforcement of male primogeniture has clearly influenced patterns of land ownership across much of England, keeping estates large. In Wales and in Kent, by contrast, estates tend to be smaller; here, and particularly in Kent, the older practice of gavelkind – dividing up land equally between all heirs – continued to hold sway. In eighteenth-century France, even before the Revolution sent aristocrats’ heads rolling, nobles’ estates tended to be smaller than those of their English contemporaries due to inheritance laws which stipulated the morcellation of land between all heirs. This gave many more men a stake in the land, though it failed to stop the eventual uprising against aristocratic privilege.

Male primogeniture is also, of course, fundamentally sexist. Occasionally, women have inherited aristocratic titles, and a few duchesses and countesses have become major landowners; but these are the exception rather than the rule. The early twentieth-century poet Vita Sackville-West, who wrote extensively about land and who is perhaps better known as Virginia Woolf’s lover, was dismayed not to inherit her family’s seat at Knole Castle due to these discriminatory laws of succession. But she struck back at her patriarchal father by buying up Sissinghurst Castle, after discovering the Sackvilles had once owned it. Other aristocratic women have been similarly disinherited. When the 6th Duke of Westminster died in 2016, his 26-year-old son Hugh inherited the entire family fortune over the heads of his elder sisters, making him the richest man under thirty in the world.

In 2013, a group of peers – both women and men – sought to bring an end to male primogeniture once and for all. An Act had recently been passed to change the laws governing royal succession, finally allowing the monarch’s eldest daughter to inherit the throne. This ‘set the hares running’ on whether the same reforms would now be made to noble inheritance, and a campaign group of aristocratic women calling themselves The Hares was formed. A number of peers tried to introduce legislation in Parliament to end male primogeniture. Dubbed the ‘Downton Law’, after the TV costume drama in which the eldest daughter is forbidden from inheriting the estate, the Equality (Titles) Bill got as far as its committee stage in the Lords.

But Lord Wallace, responding on behalf of the government, was having none of it, and kicked the Bill into the long grass. ‘We should take our time, look very carefully at the implications … and then perhaps consider further,’ he counselled, echoing the arguments of all those who have opposed change within the aristocracy for the past thousand years. Others were more vituperative in their opposition to equality. The Earl of Durham, locked in a dispute with his sisters over inheritance rights, railed against the campaign. ‘It is stupid in my view not only to be battling for something that could only possibly appeal to somebody’s pride and vanity,’ he spat, ‘but also something that affects about 0.0001 per cent of the population.’ It just so happens that this tiny percentage of people still own a large chunk of the country’s landed wealth.

Part and parcel of the aristocracy, and just as important to its formation as a select elite, is the system of hereditary titles. There are five ranks of the peerage, in descending order of importance: dukes, marquesses, earls, viscounts and barons. They’re created by the Crown without recourse to Parliament, through legal instruments known as letters patent. At present, there are around 800 hereditary peers: 24 dukes (not counting the various honorary dukedoms created for members of the royal family), 34 marquesses, 191 earls, 115 viscounts and 426 barons, as well as 4 countesses and 9 baronesses in their own right. Confusingly, peers can also hold multiple titles as they progress up the ranks, with their heirs adopting the subordinate honours: for example, the heir to the Marquess of Salisbury is styled Viscount Cranborne.^fn1 Life peers, meanwhile, are a separate, more recent creation, invented to help modernise the House of Lords, with none of the land and wealth associated with the ancient hereditary peerage.

The whole arcane system of titles has become underpinned over the centuries by byzantine institutions and insignia. Old families proudly bear coats-of-arms, bedecked with heraldic beasts, mottoes and crests recalling their ancestors; the whole flummery policed by the College of Arms – whose head, the Duke of Norfolk, we met earlier. Aristocratic elitism finds its apogee in the voluminous pages of Debrett’s and Burke’s Peerage, obsessively compiled lists of current honours and their ancient bloodlines, which read a little like stock-books of good breeding.

The ranks of the peerage may appear convoluted and archaic to outsiders, but their complex, jealously guarded hierarchies are key to keeping the aristocracy exclusive. Sometimes, the closed nature of this club has proven problematic to kings wishing to broaden their pool of supporters and, above all, their income streams. James I ended up creating an entirely new class of hereditary titles, the baronetcies, which he sold to the lesser landed gentry in a seventeenth-century cash-for-honours scandal. Baronets have lower social standing than members of the peerage, but their titles are also hereditary, and their landed domains can be just as extensive. As of 2017, there were 1,204 extant baronetcies in the UK – meaning that the hereditary, titled aristocracy overall consists of just 2,000 families. Below peers and baronets sit knights and squires: holders of non-hereditary titles (‘Sir’, ‘Dame’, ‘Esquire’), but nevertheless often significant landowners in their own right. The ‘squirearchy’ of the early modern period were often lords of the manor across large parts of rural England. In terms of classes of landowners, however, this is where definitions become more blurred, and it gets harder to distinguish between estates that have been inherited and those bought more recently.

But was this exclusive club in fact open to newcomers? Overseas observers of England during the early modern period often marvelled at its political stability, and the fact that it had never suffered a far-reaching social revolution. They attributed this to what they surmised to be England’s ‘open elite’, a ruling class that was willing to welcome the newly wealthy bourgeoisie, and absorb those of middling rank who might otherwise become disgruntled and try to challenge the whole system.

Yet while there was a certain fluidity at the lower end, with merchants sometimes becoming members of the landed gentry, there was also great resistance to new money joining the peerage. Lawrence and Jeanne Stone, surveying the state of the aristocracy between the reign of Henry VIII and Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, concluded that ‘for 340 years, the elite maintained a highly stable social and political system’, in which upward mobility was enjoyed only by a comparative few. Just 157 ‘men of business’ bought their way into the landowning elite over these three centuries and were able to acquire estates of 2,000 acres or more. Throughout this period, ‘many of the same families still resided in the same seats’, and newcomers attempting to join the landed aristocracy had to overcome ‘infinitely resistant lines of snobbery’. Subsequent research has suggested that there were a greater number of wealthy entrants to landed society who succeeded in buying smaller estates of around 1,000 acres; but these were small fry compared to the vast landholdings of the dukes and earls of their day.

By the time of the Victorian Return of Owners of Land, the landed aristocracy was at the peak of its political power. A mere 4,217 peers, great landowners and squires owned 18 million acres of land – half of England and Wales, possessed by 0.01 per cent of the population. In a triumph for trickle-down economics, it had taken eight centuries for England’s landowning elite to broaden out from around 200 Norman barons to 4,200 Victorian nobles and gentry. ‘In terms of territory, it seems likely that the notables owned a greater proportion of the British Isles than almost any other elite owned of almost any other country,’ writes the historian David Cannadine.

What happened next to the aristocracy has often been portrayed as a catastrophe. Between Queen Victoria becoming Empress of India and the killing fields of the First World War, the sun appeared to set on the gilded world of inherited privilege. This perception owes much to the work of the historian F.M.L. Thompson in his 1963 book English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century, later popularised and embroidered in David Cannadine’s The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy. They recount how the entire aristocratic class experienced a sudden loss of territory, wealth and political power – plagued by death duties, assaulted by land reformers and Lords reform, and losing out to the nouveau riche. ‘The old order is doomed,’ bemoaned the Duke of Marlborough in 1919.

No one seriously disputes that the British aristocracy fell from grace after their Victorian heyday. But reports of the death of the aristocracy have been greatly exaggerated. This is particularly true when it comes to the land they own.

Thompson and Cannadine’s claims about the rapid territorial losses of the peerage in fact come down to one, rather shaky source. Cannadine states that ‘in the years immediately before and after the First World War, some six to eight million acres, one-quarter of the land of England, was sold by gentry and grandees’. Thompson likewise asserts: ‘it is possible that in the four years of intense activity between 1918 and 1921 something between six and eight million acres changed hands in England.’ For this startling figure, both relied on a single article in one edition of the property magazine Estates Gazette from December 1921.

That figure has recently been convincingly challenged by two statisticians, John Beckett and Michael Turner. They examined land sales data from the time and found that ‘much less than 25 per cent of England changed hands in the four highlighted years 1918–1921’. Instead, they concluded, it was actually more like 6.5 per cent, and that excitable estate agents at the Gazette had massively overstated the case.

Moreover, all sides agree that the highest echelons of the aristocracy were able to cling on to their landed estates with much greater success than the lesser gentry. As Thompson quietly admits in the final pages of his book, ‘The landed aristocracy has survived with far fewer casualties … Among the great ducal seats, for example … Badminton, Woburn, Chatsworth, Euston Hall, Blenheim Palace, Arundel Castle, Alnwick Castle, Albury and Syon House, Goodwood, Belvoir Castle, Berry Pomeroy, and Strathfield Saye are all lived in by the descendants of their nineteenth-century owners.’ That Thompson could say this half a century after his supposed ‘revolution in landownership’ is startling enough. It’s even more startling, then, that today, another half-century on, every single one of those ducal family seats still remains in the hands of the same aristocratic families.

What may have felt seismic at the time looks a good deal less drastic in retrospect. ‘When Thompson wrote in 1963, the great estate seemed to be in terminal decline,’ argue Beckett and Turner, ‘but the subsequent revival of the fortunes of landed society [have] brought seriously into question the whole business of just how bad things really were.’

At the same time as Thompson was performing the last rites on the aristocracy, another author found them to be in rude health, albeit rather leaner. The journalist Roy Perrott’s 1967 survey, The Aristocrats, surveyed the acreage held by seventy-six titled landowners. Though most of the estates had significantly diminished in size since 1873, together these individuals still owned a combined 2.5 million acres across the UK. Perrott estimated that this sample represented ‘about one-seventh of those owned by the titled nobility’, and his definition of that elite totalled around 3,000 people. So, in the era of the Space Race, 0.005 per cent of the UK population still owned 17.9 million acres of the country, or 30 per cent of the total land area.

Drawing on Perrott’s work, the geographer Doreen Massey arrived at a similar extrapolation a decade later, concluding that ‘in spite of the decline which they have undergone this century, the holdings of the landed aristocracy have by no means been reduced to insignificance’. Stephen Glover’s 1977 survey of thirty-three large landowners found that they owned 667,410 acres, a drop of almost two-thirds from the 1,869,573 acres those same estates had owned in 1873. Even taking into account the reduced acreages, Glover concluded, these people ‘remain – on paper at least – very rich men’, all the wealthier thanks to the rapid rise in land prices that occurred in the 1970s.

More recent estimates, too, strongly suggest that the aristocracy have held their own against the tide of history. Kevin Cahill’s Who Owns Britain, which draws upon multiple newspaper reports, obituaries and rich lists, presents figures for the 100 largest landowners in the UK and the Republic of Ireland. Altogether, Cahill reckons these select few own some 4.8 million acres. Still, this is only about 6 per cent of the land area of the two countries, and without figures for the rest of the aristocracy, it’s hard to conclude from Cahill’s research who actually owns the majority of Britain. Nevertheless, his figure for the land owned by the UK’s twenty-four non-royal dukes is startling. With a total of over 1 million acres between them, these remain men of very broad acres. Moreover, as we’ll see, the places they own have increased enormously in value, leaving many of the peerage extremely wealthy.

Or take the figures stated by the Country Land and Business Association (CLA), who represent the landowning lobby in England and Wales; many aristocrats are known to be members. In a 2009 document, the CLA state that ‘Our 36,000 members own and manage over 50% of all of the rural land in England and Wales.’ A second CLA document from the same year clarifies that the rural land in their members’ possession totals five million hectares. So the 36,000 members of the CLA own 12.35 million acres, a third of England and Wales. Dan and Peter Snow, in their 2006 BBC documentary Whose Britain Is It Anyway?, came to the similar conclusion that the aristocracy and old landed families still own nearly a third of the UK overall.

Further confirmation that land remains in the hands of the few comes from agricultural statistics collected by the Department for the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) on the number and size of farms. Counting the number of farm holdings isn’t quite the same as tallying up landowners: many farms are tenanted, and lots will be ultimately owned by companies and councils rather than the aristocracy. But these are still useful proxy figures. DEFRA’s 2017 data shows there are 218,000 farm holdings in the UK, covering 43 million acres – 72 per cent of the land area. Even this figure suggests that a tiny fraction of the overall population own the bulk of the land, and given that this includes tenanted farms, it’s likely a big overestimate. But the department also publishes statistics for England alone which give a more interesting breakdown of the total acreages owned by farms of different sizes. This allows us to see that the majority of English soil is farmed by a much smaller set of large farms: 25,638 farm holdings cover 16.5 million acres, or 52 per cent of England’s land area.

What’s more, comparing these with official statistics from 1960, now buried in the National Archives, shows that there are a lot fewer but bigger farms today than sixty years ago. When Thompson wrote about the decline of the aristocracy in the first half of the twentieth century, he described how smaller farmers had started buying up the land sold off by big estates. But since Thompson penned his book, the concentration of land ownership has, if anything, been increasing again.

Pinning down precisely what the aristocracy still own, and what’s now owned by the newly wealthy or by smaller-scale farmers, remains difficult. A definitive answer will remain elusive until the Land Registry is fully opened up. From the figures and estimates reviewed here, though, it seems a safe bet to say that around a third of England and Wales remains in the hands of the aristocracy and landed gentry – and that half of England is owned by less than 1 per cent of the population.

The aristocracy, in other words, have adapted, trimmed their sails – and survived. Their tenacity recalls Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’:

Though much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are …

As the MP Chris Bryant puts it in his critical history of the aristocracy: ‘Far from dying away, they remain very much alive.’

That begs two further questions. What’s been the impact of so much land remaining in the hands of so few? And how have the aristocracy pulled off such a stunning feat of survival?

The image that most aristocratic estates present to the world is that of the grand country house, surrounded by beautiful parkland. From the yellow towers of the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle – used as a substitute for Windsor in Netflix series The Crown – to the golden limestone frontage of Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, stately homes are the acceptable face of feudalism. Today, a ‘cult of the country house’ has grown up in England that rightly venerates their sumptuous architecture and historic art collections – though often omitting mention of how such wealth came to be amassed.

We now flock in our thousands to visit these mansions, stroll in their formal parterre gardens, and walk our dogs in their acres of parkland. Less than a century ago, of course, such public access would have been unthinkable. Aristocratic parks were created precisely to keep the masses out, and provide solace for their masters when they returned from the business of court or the hustle and bustle of the city. Many were created by the process of forcible enclosure, during which whole villages were evicted to make way for deer and specimen trees. Now that large swathes of parkland are open to the public for walking and cycling, that violent history has faded.

Aristocratic parkland has also changed our very concept of the English countryside. Much of that is thanks to one man, the individual who has perhaps had the single greatest impact on the English landscape: Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown. During the eighteenth century, Brown was the landscape gardener du jour; he worked on some 250 sites during his lifetime and his client list included the majority of the House of Lords. Brown literally moved mountains and diverted rivers to create the naturalistic vistas that he and his patrons desired. Graceful curving hillsides were moulded and stands of trees carefully pruned to lead the eye through the parkland towards a distant folly or the setting sun. John Phibbs, Brown’s biographer, estimates that he had a direct influence on half a million acres of England and Wales. ‘The astonishing scale of his work means that he did not just transform the English countryside,’ Phibbs writes, ‘but also our idea of what it is to be English and what England is.’ None of this, of course, would have happened without aristocratic cash.

Partly because of the scale of their influence, there is also a lingering sense nowadays that the aristocracy are the rightful guardians of our countryside. Many noble families profess their concerns about the environment on their estate websites, and act on them in their management plans. The motto of the Hussey family, inscribed on a crest above the front door of Scotney Castle in Kent, is Vix ea nostra voco – Latin for ‘I scarcely call these things our own’.^fn2

This notion of the aristocracy as stewards of the landscape is deeply rooted. There seems little doubt that the aristocratic preoccupation with lineage and inheritance gives them a long-term perspective when it comes to managing land. After all, it’s in the interests of a lord to look after his estate, because he knows his descendants will inherit it. But asserting you’re merely a steward of the land – ‘scarcely calling it your own’, when your family has in fact had outright possession of it for hundreds of years – can be a convenient excuse for owning so much. ‘It doesn’t feel to me as if I’m sitting here and owning vast tracts of land, because I obviously share it with hundreds of thousands of people,’ the Duke of Northumberland claimed in the 2006 BBC documentary Whose Britain Is It Anyway? ‘Yes, but – you’re the owner,’ pointed out an incredulous Peter Snow. ‘I am the ultimate owner, I suppose,’ the duke reluctantly admitted. There’s also a risk that the manicured parks and exquisite gardens of the aristocracy blind us to their wider environmental impact. As George Monbiot has argued, ‘they tend to be 500 acres of pleasant greenery amidst 10,000 laid waste by the same owner’s plough’. And that’s not the worst of it.

It was 5 a.m. on a freezing October morning, and I was locked onto a 500-tonne digger in an aristocrat’s opencast coal mine.

The coal mine in question had been dug on land belonging to Viscount Matt Ridley, a prominent climate change sceptic, Times columnist and member of the House of Lords. I was part of a group that had trespassed on his land in order to shut down the mine for the day, in protest at its contribution to global warming. But our direct action wasn’t just intended to highlight the millions of tonnes of coal that had so far been extracted from this gigantic pit. It was also to point out how Viscount Ridley had used his platform in Parliament and the press to cast doubt on climate science, while continuing to draw significant income from a coal mine on his land.

We had entered the vast opencast mine on Ridley’s 15,000-acre Blagdon Estate in Northumberland under cover of darkness, making sure we arrived before work started. After climbing up onto the gantry of one of the giant coal excavators, we’d locked ourselves to it with bike locks around our necks. The vast walls of the mine with their exposed seams of anthracite lowered over us. We felt like the hobbits in Mordor. It was around an hour later when we were discovered by security, who initially joked that they thought we were Sunderland supporters coming to rub it in after Newcastle’s recent defeat.

The police inspector who arrived later wasn’t so amused, particularly after we refused to unlock. We’d come to prevent coal being dug up, and we weren’t going to leave quietly. This mine, after all, was on land belonging to an aristocrat who’d stated that ‘fossil fuels are not finished, not obsolete, not a bad thing’, declared that ‘climate change is good for the world’, and who was still downplaying its importance just weeks before the opening of the Paris climate talks. Though Ridley admitted his financial interest in the coal mines on his estate, he had never disclosed the size of the ‘wayleave’, or rental income, that he received from leasing it to a mining company. Investigative journalist Brendan Montague has estimated it to be worth millions of pounds annually.

The arrangement illustrates two things about the aristocracy: their capacity to lobby politically for policies that align with their landed interests; and the way they use their monopoly over large tracts of land to extract rents. Indeed, many members of the peerage own extensive mineral rights across England, in addition to the land itself. The Duke of Bedford, for example, grew rich off the huge copper and arsenic mines that operated on his land at the Devon Great Consols during the Victorian period. The Duke of Devonshire is the only person in the UK to own the rights to any oil beneath his land, because he sank the first oil well on his estate at Hardstoft in Derbyshire before the 1934 Petroleum Act vested such rights in the Crown. He also has other mineral rights stretching far further afield: residents of Carlisle were surprised to receive letters in the post in 2013 notifying them that the Duke was staking his claim to metals and ores beneath their homes.

In fairness to them, many aristocrats nowadays are suspicious of letting extractive industries run riot on their estates. Plenty of large landowners have voiced their opposition to the fracking industry – such as Viscount Cowdray, who’s resisted efforts to explore for shale gas in the South Downs, and an alliance of baronets and earls who have refused fracking firm INEOS access to their lands in North Yorkshire.

But the prospect of a fresh source of rental income can be enticing to large estates. Renting out land, after all, requires little effort on the part of the landowner. As historian M.L. Bush argues, throughout its history the English aristocracy has remained ‘rigidly divorced … from direct production’ and ‘preferred the rentier role’ as a means of getting filthy rich without getting their hands dirty.

It’s this combination of inherited wealth and rent-seeking indigence that has drawn down much scorn upon the aristocracy in previous eras. ‘The rent of land is naturally a monopoly price,’ pointed out the classical free-market economist Adam Smith. ‘It is not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land … but to what the [tenant] can afford to give.’

John Maynard Keynes longed for ‘the euthanasia of the rentier’, noting that landlords need not work to obtain their income: ‘the owner of land can obtain rent because land is scarce’. It’s no coincidence that vampires were portrayed in Victorian gothic horror novels as being bloodsucking aristocrats, preying parasitically upon the lower classes. Indeed, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is not merely a count but a property magnate, buying up a string of big houses in London as places to leave his earth-filled coffins.

The most lucrative rental income, of course, went to aristocrats who owned land in central London. A 1925 campaigning postcard by radical journalist W.B. Northrop (see opposite) depicts a giant octopus labelled ‘landlordism’, its tentacles spreading through the streets of the capital. Each tendril curls around the boundaries of one of the ‘Great Estates’ that own London, listing their acreages and annual rents. ‘The Land Octopus Sucks the Lifeblood of the People,’ Northrop declared. Tellingly, nearly all of the aristocratic estates shown on the postcard still possess large swathes of the city today. Where they have lost land, they have more than made up for it in soaring property prices on their remaining acres.

You can walk from Sloane Square to Regent’s Park without leaving land owned by the aristocracy and the Crown. One hundred acres of Mayfair and 200 acres of Belgravia are owned by the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estate. The Duke’s property empire includes the most expensive street in the country, Grosvenor Crescent – average house price: £16.9 million – and Grosvenor Square, famous as the scene of the 1968 Vietnam War protests and, until recently, the base for the US embassy. The family inherited the land when it was merely swampy fields in the seventeenth century, as the wedding dowry of a marriage between the Grosvenors and infant heiress Mary Davies.

The octopus of ‘Landlordism’.

To the north of Oxford Street is the Portman Estate. Comprising 110 acres of properties in Marylebone, the estate was first acquired in 1532 by Sir William Portman, lord chief justice to Henry VIII, who bought it to graze goats. Like the other great estates, the bequest began as farmland and ended up as prime real estate, following a building boom in the Georgian period. Today, the 10th Viscount Portman is the inheritor of a £2 billion fortune, according to the Sunday Times Rich List. Next door is the Howard de Walden Estate, consisting of 92 acres of Marylebone and taking in famously fashionable Harley Street. It’s been owned by the de Walden family since 1710; the current head of the clan, Mary Hazel Caridwen Czernin, 10th Baroness Howard de Walden, is worth an estimated £3.73 billion.

To the south of Hyde Park is the Cadogan Estate, a 93-acre stretch of Kensington and Chelsea, inheritance of Earl Cadogan. This is the borough of the Grenfell Tower disaster, which left seventy-one dead and hundreds more homeless for months. It’s also a borough which, in 2017, had over 1,500 empty homes, many of which are rumoured to be within the Cadogan Estate, dubbed by journalists ‘the ghost town of the super-rich’. With an estimated wealth of £6.5 billion, Lord Cadogan’s family has a knowing motto: ‘He who envies is the lesser man’. Still, that fortune has been subsidised by the taxpayer and built off the back of ‘lesser men’: the GMB union calculated that in 2014 the Cadogan Estate had received £116,000 in housing benefit from less-well-off tenants.

These four aristocratic estates have a combined wealth of over £20 billion. Almost a thousand acres of central London remains in the hands of the aristocracy, Church Commissioners and Crown Estate. They own most of what is worth owning in central London. The character of the West End, argues the historian Peter Thorold, has been largely determined by the fact that ‘a small number of rich families held fast to their land over a long period of time.’ This level of aristocratic control has undoubtedly led to some well-planned squares and beautiful architecture. But even Simon Jenkins, the veteran defender of London’s historic buildings, admits this has come with its downsides. The Great Estates grew so powerful, Jenkins recounts, that they ‘managed for half a century to delay the introduction of a system of local government which might have mitigated the hardship it brought in its train’.

Crucial to the wealth of London’s aristocratic estates has been their ability to retain the freehold ownership of their land and properties. For most of their history, this was never in question. Each estate has hundreds of tenants, but they are sold their properties on long leases, so that the landlord retains ultimate control. In more recent decades, however, successive governments have sought to enact leaseholder reform, to allow long-term tenants to extend their leases and eventually buy from their landlords the properties they have lived in for decades. When John Major announced reforms to this effect in 1993, the Duke of Westminster resigned from the Conservative Party in disgust. But the Great Estates are very far from beaten. In a recent landmark court case, attempts to reduce the costs for leaseholders of buying out the properties they rent were quashed, in a victory for London’s aristocratic landlords.

While the aristocracy tend to make most of their money from their urban estates, where they spend it has an even bigger impact on the land. It’s in the English uplands where the influence of the landed gentry is most marked, and at its most malign: the vast acreages of our countryside given over to grouse moors.

The aristocracy have always engaged in bloodsports: from accompanying Norman kings to hunt deer and wild boar, to rearing pheasants for woodland shooting parties of the sort satirised in Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. Who gets to catch and eat the creatures of the forest has long been a bone of contention between the landed and the landless; for centuries, poaching by hungry commoners was viciously policed. The mantrap in which Danny’s father gets snared when out poaching pheasants one night was once commonplace. New Labour’s ban on fox hunting was widely seen as retaliation for Thatcher crushing the miners’ strike: you routed the working class, so we’re bashing the toffs. But though foxhunts and pheasant shoots raise questions about class warfare and animal welfare, neither has anything like the impact on the landscape itself of shooting grouse.

A staggering 550,000 acres of England is given over to grouse moors – an area of land the size of Greater London. But despite the enormous scale of the grouse industry, few are aware of it: until recently there were no public maps showing its extent, and most of the research into grouse is carried out by the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust and the Moorland Association, both funded by the owners of grouse moors. A few years ago, the Moorland Association quietly published a map on their website showing the approximate outline of grouse moors in England. After they refused to share the underlying data with me, I was able to extract it from their map with the help of a data analyst, sense-check it against aerial photographs, and publish the results on whoownsengland.org.

The management of driven grouse moors has had a profound and very visible impact on landscapes. Take a look on Google Earth at any of the upland areas of northern England, and you’ll soon spot the tell-tale patterns where the moorland heather has been slashed and burned to encourage the growth of fresh shoots favoured by young grouse. But to really appreciate the bleak devastation of a grouse moor, you need to visit one. An estate I walked across in the Peak District looked like a war zone: charred vegetation, scorched earth, deep gullies in the peat worn by rainwater flashing off the denuded soils. Studies by Leeds University have shown that the intensive management of grouse moors through heather burning can dry out the underlying peat, lead to soil carbon loss, and worsen flooding downstream. Residents of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire live in the shadow of the huge Walshaw Moor Estate, a grouse shoot so intensively managed that the RSPB lodged a complaint against it with the European Court of Justice. For years, the local residents had warned about the potential ill-effects of having such a degraded ecosystem upstream from them. In winter 2015, disaster struck, with intense rainfall pouring off the hills and inundating many homes, not just in Hebden but downstream as far as Leeds. Grouse moors may seem remote from the lives of most people, but they can still have an impact on those living far from them.

The ecological devastation wrought by grouse moors doesn’t stop there. Gamekeepers manage them in such a way as to create a habitat ideally suited to grouse. This has the beneficial side-effect of bolstering conditions for other ground nesting birds, too. But it means curtains for the species that would normally prey upon them. There should be 300 pairs of hen harriers in the English uplands; instead, thanks to illegal persecution by the gamekeepers of grouse moors, there are just four pairs left. Foxes, stoats, weasels and other natural predators of grouse are shot or caught in traps. Even beautiful mountain hares are exterminated, because the ticks they carry can spread disease to grouse.

All this land is owned and managed for the benefit of a vanishingly small number of people. There are only around 150 grouse estates in England. Even the Spectator calls grouse shooting ‘screamingly elitist’. Through a laborious research process, I’ve been able to identify the owners of some 500,000 acres of English grouse moors, and around half, by my reckoning, remain in the hands of the aristocracy and landed gentry. These include Baron Raby