Читать книгу Who Owns England? - Guy Shrubsole - Страница 9

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 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 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 for about £250 million in today’s money, going some way towards settling Parliament’s civil war debts. Many of the buyers were existing landed gentry; others belonged to Cromwell’s officer class. They didn’t get to enjoy their new possessions for long, however: the collapse of the Republic and restoration of the monarchy in 1660 led to the immediate return of all lands to the Crown.

The restored monarchy soon found its freedom to manoeuvre hemmed in by constitutional restraints put in place by a Parliament determined never to have to go to war with the Crown again. When the Stuarts once more proved too big for their boots, MPs invited first the Dutch and then the Germans to come and have a go at wearing the crown. The Hanoverian dynasty proved much more compliant with the wishes of Parliament. In 1760, George III agreed to give up the income from his Crown lands in exchange for an annual stipend called the Civil List. The lands would still technically be his, ‘in right of his Crown’, but the revenues would flow to the Treasury and they would be managed by an organisation answerable to Parliament – later called the Crown Estate.

It was a sweet deal for the king, as the Crown lands were in a pretty shambolic state at the time. Revenues remained low, and land holdings had continued to be filched for bribes and the enrichment of court favourites. The Civil List, by contrast, handed the royal family a guaranteed fixed income. And over the next century, the Crown Estate’s fortunes were to revive. Staffed with an increasingly professional civil service, its holding of land doubled in size from around 106,000 acres to 220,000 acres over the course of Queen Victoria’s reign. More importantly from the government’s perspective, revenues grew immensely, bringing in millions of pounds for the public purse. The development of London made some Crown lands stupendously valuable – such as Regent Street, built to link the Prince Regent’s mansion on Pall Mall with Regent’s Park in the north. And when it was forced to hand over the remaining royal forests to the Forestry Commission in 1924, the Crown Estate quickly made up the lost acreage by investing in farmland instead.

Over the last century, the Crown Estate has become a fully commercial institution, managing its enviable property portfolio with ruthless efficiency. Its holdings have expanded still further to cover 336,000 acres of England and Wales, with huge tracts of prime farmland in Lincolnshire and the Fens, on Romney Marsh, and along the Holderness shore. Comparing maps of what the Crown Estate owns with agricultural land classification maps, you can see that nearly all of its farms are on top-quality Grade 1 and 2 farmland. It also benefited from receiving £366,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies in 2016.

Still, nowadays, there’s much more money to be made from Apple iPhones than from apples. The Crown Estate gets more rental income from Apple’s flagship store on Regent Street than it does from its entire agricultural estate. And though it still bears responsibility for managing the Crown’s traditional stamping grounds – Windsor Great Park, for instance – its modern capitalist instincts mean it always has an eye out for new ways to boost its earnings. Where the Crown’s landed interests once lay in castles and deer parks, the Crown Estate now prioritises investment in shopping centres and retail parks. That may sound like a moan about creeping commercialisation, but frankly, I’d rather the Crown generate proceeds for the public purse than, say, own a forest for a monarch’s exclusive right to hunt boar. The Crown Estate’s ownership of the UK seabed has also made it a champion for renewable energy and addressing climate change: what was once an effectively worthless asset has become highly lucrative with the UK’s development of offshore wind, which the Estate now has a vested interest in promoting.^fn1

The Crown Estate’s motto, ‘brilliant places through conscious commercialism’, may be a rather nauseating PR slogan, but its contribution to the Exchequer’s coffers nowadays is considerable: £329 million in 2017. Subject to Freedom of Information law and with its finances fully open for public scrutiny, the modern Crown Estate’s professionalism is a world away from the sloppy venality with which the Crown’s lands were managed for many centuries. Still, its transformation into a corporate property agent has its pitfalls: some of the properties it looks after risk succumbing to the overriding imperative for high returns. The Laxton Estate, for instance – the last example of a medieval open field system in England, which has been owned by the Crown Estate since 1981 – was earmarked for sale in early 2018 because it doesn’t turn enough of a profit.

Then there’s the matter of the reorganisation of the royals’ finances in 2012, when the then Chancellor, George Osborne, ended the Civil List and replaced it with a new Sovereign Grant. This new system re-established the link between the health of the Crown Estate and what the royal family receives in income. Now its annual funding is 15 per cent of Crown Estate revenues – so if the Estate posts higher turnover, the Queen and her family get more money. In fact, during the most recent review of the grant, MPs voted to increase the index to 25 per cent of revenues for the next decade, to cover repair works to Buckingham Palace. Not everyone was happy, understandably: as the Labour MP Alex Cunningham pointed out, ‘I have always respected the fact that we have a royal family, but I know they also have vast wealth and I don’t know what sort of contributions they will be making towards this project.’

Because the Crown’s wealth doesn’t actually stop with the Crown Estate. There’s also the small matter of the other two property empires it owns: the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster.

Down a side alley off the Strand, behind the Savoy Hotel, with its cucumber sandwiches and champagne and top-hatted doorman, is an ancient church. This is the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy, and it harbours a well-kept secret. It lies at the heart of the Duchy of Lancaster, one of the oldest property empires in England, and a little-known moneyspinner for the monarchy.

When I visited it, the cool air of the chapel was a welcome relief from the sticky heatwave that had been slow-roasting London. Stepping into the sepulchral gloom, I felt the urge to tiptoe: though only yards from one of the capital’s busiest shopping districts, the building’s thick stone walls muffled all external sound. Blue satin cushions covered empty pews upon a chequerboard floor. Every surface seemed suffused with heraldry. Armorial plates plastered the wood-panelled walls, the coats-of-arms of bygone Knights Commander and Grand Masters of this or that Order. Translucent lions and crosses shone from the stained glass windows; above the altar, one gothic arch framed a depiction of the Holy Grail. It was all very Dan Brown.

Except here, the secret societies and ancient bloodlines are all real. The Savoy Chapel is not only the Queen’s personal place of worship, complete with regal throne at the back of the nave. It’s also the church for the Royal Victorian Order – an obscure, dynastic order of knighthood that rewards personal service to the monarch. More portentous still are the names that adorn the vaulted ceiling. Commemorated in azure and gold is the royal lineage of the Lancastrians, stretching back to one of the most Machiavellian and capricious bastards in English history: John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, and founder of the Duchy. The chapel is built from the rubble of his luxurious mansion, the Savoy Palace.

Gaunt was the power behind the throne of his teenage nephew, Richard II: the archetypal evil uncle and scheming Grand Vizier par excellence. He was also stupendously rich, the largest landowner in England, with vast estates in every county. In 1381, Gaunt was up north hammering the Scots when the Poll Tax rebellions erupted in Kent and Essex. Peasants and townsfolk alike marched upon London, demanding that the king’s evil advisers should be hanged – Gaunt chief among them. When the young king refused to hand them over, anarchy ensued. The rebels descended upon the Savoy Palace and began systematically dismantling the wealth of their feudal masters. Tapestries were wrenched off walls, furniture thrown out of windows, and a vast bonfire made of Gaunt’s riches. Rather than engage in looting and be written off as mere thieves, the rebels instead opted to smash up the tyrant’s vast stash of gold plate so it couldn’t be reconstituted. The Savoy – which had cost £35,000 to build, a third of the estimated annual wage bill for the entire English army – was ground to dust.

But Gaunt’s ducal lands remained intact. After defeating the Peasants’ Revolt, Gaunt was determined to see the House of Lancaster prosper for ever. So when his son, Henry Bolingbroke, murdered Richard II and usurped the throne, his first act was to declare the Duchy to be his and his male heirs’ estate for ever more, held separately from other Crown lands. The Duchy of Lancaster has remained the monarchy’s personal fiefdom ever since.

Today it runs to 45,674 acres, including five ‘rural surveys’, which span grouse moors in north Lancashire, moorland in North Yorkshire, dozens of farms near Burton-upon-Trent, and entire villages in Cheshire. In addition, it owns the foreshore along most of the Lancashire coastline, and extensive mineral rights, including valuable gypsum mines. Looking through the Duchy’s entries in Land Registry data, the estate’s ancient hold over certain areas comes through clearly in the place names: Duchy House, Savoy Road, Lancaster Farm. The Duchy’s Savoy Estate in central London, though tiny in extent, rakes in rents from retail, as well as hosting the estate’s headquarters at Lancaster House, just around the corner from the Chapel of the Savoy.

The affairs of the Duchy of Lancaster remain cloaked in mystery. Until recently, anyone wishing to look into what the Duchy currently owns had to make do with one grainy map on its website. That’s changed with the Land Registry’s recent release of more data on land owned by companies and corporate bodies. But in every other way, the Duchy of Lancaster seems to have deflected public attention from its affairs. It’s not subject to scrutiny by the National Audit Office, Parliament’s financial watchdog. It produces an annual report to Parliament and a Cabinet minister serves as Chancellor of the Duchy, a mostly symbolic role; yet the Duchy has avoided being made subject to Freedom of Information requests from the public. Nor does it pay corporation tax (although the Queen voluntarily pays tax on any income). The Duchy claims that it ‘does not receive any public funds in connection with its activities’, yet it received almost £38,000 in taxpayer-funded farm subsidies in 2016.

The Duchy is an unreformed anachronism, which owes its survival to the accretions of royal privilege over the centuries. But this archaic body continues to benefit from the modern surge in land and property prices. In 2018, the Duchy of Lancaster posted a £20 million profit – three and a half times larger than what it generated back in the year 2000, and on top of the £76 million received by the royal household thanks to the Sovereign Grant. It seems crazy that we continue to tolerate this set-up, meekly allowing the monarchy to keep a medieval cash cow with minimal oversight and exempt from the tax levied on other businesses. ‘Why are we throwing millions of pounds at the Queen,’ asks Graham Smith of campaign group Republic, ‘when that money could be spent on schools, hospitals and local communities?’ Why indeed?

A similar story can be told about the Duchy of Cornwall. It, too, was created in the 1300s, as the personal dukedom of the heir to the throne. Its lands were first gifted to Edward III’s son, the Black Prince, and today the Duchy belongs to Prince Charles in his capacity as Duke of Cornwall.

Like its sister body, the Duchy of Cornwall is one of the strangest beasts in England’s still quasi-feudal political economy. It’s not a company, and so doesn’t pay corporation tax. It’s neither a charity nor a public body – and it isn’t subject to formal parliamentary scrutiny or Freedom of Information requests, though it has to gain permission from the Treasury if it wants to sell off land. The Duchy has even successfully fought off attempts to make it subject to public requests made under the Environmental Information Regulations – something that sits uneasily alongside the Prince’s environmental credentials – in a bizarre case involving its ancient ownership of the Fal estuary and its right to allow oyster dredging over it. It is, in short, an anachronism – but one that has survived for nearly seven hundred years and continues to grow in size.

But try to investigate what the Duchy of Cornwall owns, and you’ll find it’s an even more opaque institution than the Duchy of Lancaster. Its annual reports give a flavour of the properties it possesses, but little by way of detail. The Land Registry, despite releasing data on properties owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, has decided to exclude the Duchy of Cornwall from its Corporate and Commercial dataset – seemingly because it’s considered to be the personal estate of one individual, the Duke of Cornwall.

I bought the land title to one of the Duchy’s properties, to check out exactly who it was registered to. You need to take a deep breath before reading out the name of the registered proprietor: it’s ‘His Royal Highness Charles Philip Arthur George Prince of Wales, Duke of Cornwall and Rothesay, Earl of Chester and Carrick, Baron of Renfrew, Lord of the Isles and Great Steward of Scotland’.

Welcome to twenty-first-century Britain, I thought. When I cheerfully emailed the Duchy asking for a map of what they owned, reply came there none. Well, it’s always worth a try. But then, concealing wealth is part and parcel of preserving it.

I had more luck leafing through back editions of National Geographic at my grandma’s house in Cornwall. There, in a feature on the Duchy written back in 2006, was a map showing the outline of its major possessions. That was my starting point for investigating further.

The Duchy does not, contrary to popular belief, own the whole of Cornwall – though it does possess nearly 19,000 acres of it. Its ancient manorial lands encompass the medieval castles of Tintagel, Launceston, Trematon and Restormel; prehistoric stone circles on Bodmin Moor; steep wooded valleys near Herodsfoot and Stoke Climsland; and dozens of idyllic mixed farms, their sunken lanes and high hedgerows as Cornish as clotted cream.

Yet though Cornwall is the heart of the Duchy, its landholdings are spread far and wide. Its biggest possession by far is a 70,000-acre slice of Dartmoor in Devon – most of it leased out to the Ministry of Defence for army training. Further afield, the Prince of Wales has his private home and gardens at Highgrove Farm in Gloucestershire. Some acquisitions are ancient: the Iron Age hill forts of Maiden Castle in Dorset and Ham Hill in Somerset, or the Manor of Inglescombe to the west of Bath. Some are more recent: the Duchy bought the 11,000-acre Guy’s Estate in Herefordshire from the insurance company Prudential in 2000.

Nor is it all bucolic farming. Prince Charles has always expressed strong views on architecture, ever since decrying a proposed modernist extension to the National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle’. Much of the public shares the Prince’s taste for old-fashioned classical designs; the difference is that he has the land and money to put such ideas into practice.

Poundbury, on the outskirts of Dorchester, is the Prince’s answer to building homes that people want to live in – lots of red brick, green open spaces and plenty of Farrow and Ball paintwork. It’s certainly pleasant and well-designed, but perhaps just a little too perfect, like something out of Noddy or Trumpton. Elsewhere, the Duchy’s properties include housing estates in Kennington – with clues as to the landlord contained in street names like Black Prince Road, and a nearby pub called the Prince of Wales – and the crown jewels of the Oval Cricket Ground. Still, the Duchy owns a few carbuncles of its own: a Holiday Inn in Reading, a Waitrose distribution centre in Milton Keynes and a quarry in Gloucestershire all number among its possessions.

All told, the Duchy today owns around 130,000 acres of land across England and Wales, nearly twice as much as it did in the Victorian period. This alone is enough to make the Prince of Wales the single largest private landowner in England – even without the additional 100,000 acres of foreshore, 14,000 acres of estuaries and riverbeds, and extensive mineral rights that the Duchy also lays claim to.

By all accounts, the Prince is a well-respected landowner, who’s taken a prescient interest in climate change and other environmental issues, and put his money where his mouth is when it comes to long-term estate management. But it’s important to distinguish Prince Charles as a person from the Duchy as an institution, just as with Queen Elizabeth and her Duchy of Lancaster.

Both duchies are medieval anachronisms, whose attempts to dodge corporation tax and avoid being subjected to public sector norms of financial accountability and transparency are, essentially, tedious attempts to preserve feudal privilege. The lands owned by the duchies were acquired through the same mix of conquest and confiscation as all the other Crown lands: and yet, where most of these lands today are vested in the Crown Estate, with their revenues flowing into the public purse, the duchies remain private piggy banks for the monarch and heir to the throne. Let’s not forget that the Sovereign Grant handed the royal family £76 million in 2017: the duchies brought in £41.9 million on top of this – not to mention the £695,000 in taxpayer farm subsidies handed to the Queen for her Sandringham Estate. And while the Queen and Prince of Wales voluntarily pay income tax on these earnings, future monarchs could readily seek to waive such an arrangement. This is the enduring problem of our uncodified constitution: it’s ripe for abuse by changes in personnel. After all, the Prince might respect the traditions of estate management, but he’s broken the royal convention of not engaging in political lobbying on multiple occasions, as was revealed with the publication of his infamous ‘black spider letters’ to ministers.

Surely the time has come for the Duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall to be abolished, and their lands merged with those of the Crown Estate. The Crown Estate has proved itself to be an exceptionally able manager, generating huge profits while being open to scrutiny and mindful of the long term; so why should it not administer the Duchy lands, too? Their revenues would then flow directly to the public purse. MPs could then decide whether to vote for a corresponding increase in the Sovereign Grant – or whether the extra money would be better spent elsewhere, on things like schools and the NHS. The Duchies, being past masters at surviving, would of course put up a fight. Feudalism dies hard: John of Gaunt would be turning in his grave. But there really is no place for it in the modern world.

Before we move on from the Crown, there’s just one issue left: the surprisingly vexed question of who owns the royal palaces and parks. ‘We all know who owns Buckingham Palace,’ states a recent article in Time magazine. But do we? The Daily Express, admittedly never the most reliable of sources when it comes to the royals, blithely asserts that it’s ‘owned by the Crown Estate’. But it isn’t: their asset maps omit both Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.

In fact, both royal residences are under the management of the Royal Household Property Section, yet another part of the Crown’s byzantine structure. It, too, hasn’t changed much over the years. The 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica stated drily that ‘in its main outlines the existing organization of the royal household is essentially the same as it was under the Tudors or the Plantagenets.’ Aficionados of Netflix’s The Crown will be familiar with the hidebound traditions of the Royal Household’s management, customs that no doubt irk even the Queen at times. But it might be more accurate to say that no one owns Buckingham Palace – or at least, no one has actually registered ownership of it. I bought the Land Registry records to check: there’s no registered proprietor – only a caution from the Crown Estate Commissioners saying that the Queen is ‘interested in the land as beneficial owner’.

Who owns Hyde Park, Regent’s Park and the rest of London’s royal parks is an easier question to answer: it’s a charity that’s grown out of what used to be a government quango. The same is true for the royal residences that are no longer occupied by the royal family – which in England consist of the Tower of London, Hampton Court, Kensington Palace, the Banqueting Hall on Whitehall, and Kew Palace. They’re owned and managed by Historic Royal Palaces, a charity that’s taken on functions previously carried out by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In both cases, what was previously private splendour – enclosed deer parks and palatial homesteads – has now rightly been opened up for public enjoyment.

But strangest of all, and certainly most revealing about where sovereignty really lies under our archaic constitution, is the ownership of Parliament. Few people remember today that Parliament was once a royal residence: the Palace of Westminster. It occupies the site next to the tidal Thames where the Danish King Canute once demonstrated to his courtiers the limits of his regal powers by failing to hold back the waves. Canute built his palace on what was then the low-lying Thorney Island; Parliament was still succumbing to floods as recently as 1928.

For centuries, there has been a longstanding convention that no monarch is allowed to enter the House of Commons. At the annual State Opening of Parliament, the Queen sends her emissary 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 than with holy scripture. Before the 1976 law change, individual parish priests had the option of selling off their glebe land, alongside simply renting it out, as a way to make some extra cash. We can’t be sure, given the Church’s silence on the matter, but it seems that many vicars chose to make a quick buck by flogging off the land. After all, faced with the government’s abolition of tithes in 1936 (which took place as a result of rural workers’ and landowners’ campaigns in the wake of the Great Depression), and with dwindling church congregations in an increasingly secular society, some parishes must have felt the need to sell off their assets to make ends meet.

‘Stealing land is difficult to do,’ muses the land rights activist Gill Barron, who’s also looked into the loss of glebe land. ‘You can’t exactly roll it up in a carpet and carry it away. But … the undercover transfer of ownership of land is, in fact, incredibly easy in a country where the records of who owns what are a jealously guarded secret.’ And the Church has certainly helped keep the secret closely guarded.

Wresting control of glebe land away from vicars and handing it to dioceses was a belated attempt by the C of E hierarchy to shut the stable door after the horse had bolted. Yet the financial impetus to sell up has clearly remained – hence the continued decline in glebe since the 1970s. ‘Because of its original purpose, glebe land is usually situated within a settlement or close on the outskirts of the settlement, with a high chance of it being zoned for development,’ write the estate agents Savills. This, they state, ‘can make the land very valuable’.

You’ll probably have walked past a Glebe Close or Glebe Field near where you live: in some cases, the Church may retain ownership, but usually the site will have been sold on long ago for development. Some of this former glebe land even appears to have found its way into the hands of offshore companies based in tax havens. For example, Land Registry data lists land at Glebe Farm in Ruislip, West London, as now belonging to Blackfriars Holdings Ltd, based in the British Virgin Islands; while Glebe House in Bedford belongs to Glebe Ltd, registered in the Channel Islands. There are dozens more such examples, and likely countless other glebe fields that have been sold for shopping malls or buried beneath roads.

The loss of glebe lands tells us two things. First, it confirms the great cloak of secrecy that continues to envelop land ownership in England, and how our established institutions continue to promote this – in the case of the Church, perhaps out of embarrassment for what full transparency would reveal.

Second, it’s an early case study in the financialisation of land. The Church’s sale of glebe lands anticipated the great privatisation of public land later enacted by Margaret Thatcher’s government and her successors. In doing so, however, the Church wasn’t embarking on some ideological plan; rather, it simply succumbed to that oldest of sins, human greed.

Despite having allowed its clergy to sell off so much of the family silver, the Church today still boasts a property portfolio worth at least £8 billion. Its finances have been kept afloat by the Church Commissioners, a central body set up in 1948 to manage the Church’s property assets. The Church Commissioners own land totalling around 105,000 acres, on top of what the dioceses own – and in 2017 this land generated a whopping £226 million of income for the Church.

What remains, however, of the Church’s traditional commitment to using its resources to help the poor and homeless? ‘The Church of England remains a very large landowner,’ admitted Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in a TV interview about the housing crisis. ‘We need to be committed to housing development, and, most of all, to community building.’

Welcome as the Archbishop’s commitment is, I’m sceptical that the Church will help solve the housing crisis after researching how its Commissioners have managed their estate. In contrast to the financial mismanagement that’s characterised the Church’s loss of glebe land, the centralised estate of the Church Commissioners seems to have been very efficiently managed over the last seventy years. But such business acumen has seen them take up the mantle of property developers, and sell off affordable residential housing in favour of more lucrative commercial developments.

‘The pressure to generate the investment income needed by the Church of England,’ argues housing expert Chris Hamnett, a professor of geography at King’s College London, ‘has led to an increasingly commercial attitude towards their land and property investments.’ Although the Commissioners, he maintains, ‘retain a small residual social commitment to “housing the poor”’, their properties have ‘increasingly come to be viewed as an investment like any other’.

Back when the Church Commissioners were established after the Second World War, the Church had some 60,000 residential properties on its books. Much of its housing stock was of poor quality; some of its London estates around Paddington were even described as slums. But rather than redevelop its properties to provide better-quality accommodation for working-class residents, the Commissioners, finding they generated low profit margins, simply sold off vast swathes of housing. Ninety acres south-east of Paddington were retained and gentrified; house prices there today are an astonishing £11,000 per square metre. The Bishop’s Avenue, just north of Hampstead Heath, was put on the market by the Church in 1959: today, it’s a byword for empty mansions and offshore billionaires. By the 1970s, the Commissioners retained just a tenth of the housing stock they had first inherited.

To fund the upkeep of the clergy and their ageing buildings – like the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Lambeth Palace on the banks of the Thames – would take more than the usual church roof fund appeals, the Commissioners decided. This hard-nosed approach saw them diversify the Church’s asset portfolio into stocks and shares, and invest instead in commercial property. From the 1950s onwards, they embarked on a string of multi-million-pound redevelopment projects, using their valuable freehold land to build the Angel Centre in Islington, a shopping mall in Birkenhead, and office blocks on the Cartwright Estate near Tottenham Court Road, among other ventures.

Perhaps the biggest moneyspinner of all, however, was the rebuilding of Paternoster Square, next to St Paul’s – Church land since medieval times, whose name comes from the Latin for ‘Our Father’, the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer. In 1986, with the City of London booming in the wake of financial deregulation by Margaret Thatcher’s government, the Church Commissioners sold a 250-year lease on the land to a consortium of property developers. The deal was worth tens of millions to the Church, who also retained the valuable freehold. Goldman Sachs and the London Stock Exchange would later take up residence in Paternoster Square, transforming it from a place where monks once clutched their rosaries into a temple to modern capitalism.

But it wouldn’t be long before the square was filled with the sound of chickens coming home to roost. In the wake of the financial crash of 2008 – the inevitable consequence of City deregulation – Paternoster Square was where the Occupy movement of 2011 first tried to set up camp, before being forced to settle on the steps of St Paul’s. The resulting showdown with the Church authorities saw much soul-searching among the clergy over the Church’s accommodation with capitalism. The Canon of St Paul’s, Giles Fraser, who resigned out of sympathy with the protesters, spoke about the ‘very legitimate anger about the way in which wealth has been distributed and the way in which capitalism is currently seen to benefit just a very few people’. Ownership of land and property, of course, remains central to this chasm of inequality.

To be fair to them, the Church Commissioners have always aspired to wealth redistribution – it’s just that their remit is to redistribute income between the clergy, rather than among society at large. One example is the fact that the Commissioners today own lots of land and property in County Durham and around Newcastle, stretching from the mouth of the Tyne all the way back to the foothills of the North Pennines. The reason is that the area had once been owned by the local bishop as part of the Palatinate of Durham, an ancient institution where the Church held huge sway outside the jurisdiction even of the Crown. For centuries, the bishop of Durham had been the region’s largest and richest landowner. Much of this land was later taken over by the Church Commissioners as part of their efforts to even out some of the inequalities in wealth that had grown up between different branches of the Church, and share out the proceeds from rich bishoprics to poorer ones.

But when it comes to any wider social role, the Commissioners’ efforts seem distinctly limited. For a time, the Church had ownership of the philanthropic Octavia Hill Estates, a set of social housing developments across London let out to low-income households for fair rents. Yet low profit margins prompted the Commissioners to dispose even of these in 2011, selling them off in a move that led one local MP to accuse the Church Commissioners of ‘putting profit before people’. ‘The sleepy old Church of England is a greedy, money-grubbing property tycoon,’ spits the journalist Harry Mount, arguing that a ruthless commercialism belies its otherwise affable reputation. Professor Chris Hamnett castigates the Church’s outlook as being one of ‘philanthropy at 5 per cent’: ‘While the Church Commissioners engage in a limited amount of what might be termed “social investment”, their activities in this sphere are marginal to their major objective of income growth.’

One upcoming test of whether the Church venerates morals above Mammon will be whether it makes use of its extensive mineral rights to profiteer from fracking. In recent years, the Commissioners have been busily laying claim to 585,000 acres of underground deposits of stone, metals and minerals. The Church has explained, reasonably enough, that it’s simply re-registering ancient rights as part of an updating process mandated by the Land Registry, and that it has few active plans to exploit such rights with new mines or quarries. But with ongoing efforts by shale gas companies to frack across large swathes of northern England, there are fears the Church could seek to cash in. Rights to oil and gas were nationalised long ago, but the Commissioners could still profit by charging companies wanting to drill through mineral layers belonging to the Church. And though the C of E has divested itself of all investments in coal and tar sands, citing climate-change concerns, it still argues that fracking can be ‘morally acceptable’ if properly regulated. In 2016, the Church Commissioners gave permission to a fracking firm to carry out underground seismic surveys on their Ormskirk Estate in Lancashire, the first step towards fracking.

The other major test facing the Church over the use of its land is how it responds to the ongoing housing crisis. Warm words from the Archbishop of Canterbury are all very well; but, having allowed vast swathes of land to be sold off, what can the Church practically do about it?

It could make a start by confessing to its past sins – by submitting to a searching inquiry into how it permitted its glebe to be flogged off, and how its investment policies have exacerbated the housing crisis by gentrifying key parts of London. Next, the Church Commissioners, having invested heavily in digitising maps of their landholdings in recent years, should publish these maps as a resource for housing associations and local authorities seeking to find local land. Lastly, it should work closely with councils to earmark land for affordable housing, and stipulate that a decent percentage of its land be sold cheaply, at existing use value. At a time when church pews are emptier than ever, the Church needs urgently to engage in some more soul-searching, and show that it retains a social role in modern England.

Old institutions die hard, especially in a conservative country like England. Long after the Crown and Church lost most of their formal powers, they continue to hold sway – kept alive, in part, by their landed wealth. Understanding how these archaic, quasi-feudal pillars of the Establishment operate is crucial to grasping the nature of power in modern Britain, and critical to comprehending why land ownership in England remains so unequal.

The efforts of the Duchies and the Church to evade full scrutiny by Parliament and the public tell us something profound about how privilege tries to perpetuate itself. And the way that both Crown and Church have avoided trying to disclose their landholdings is telling, too: because the concealment of wealth from prying eyes is also critical to preserving it.

These ancient organisations have survived into the modern world by transforming their landed estates from medieval baronies into capitalist property portfolios while still trying to avoid public accountability and wider social responsibility. Some would like to see the Anglican Church disestablished, and the monarchy abolished outright. Personally, I’m ambivalent about that. But on the question of the land they own, it’s clear that the estates of the Crown and Church ought to be made to better serve the public interest.

Most of all, the Crown and Church still matter because of the wider Establishment they helped to create. Without William the Conqueror’s division of conquered lands to his loyal barons, and without the Church’s tacit moral blessing for this unequal hierarchy, England would have no landed elite.