Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 315

What does it mean to own land? Jessel explores this apparently simple question over time, showing why it mattered to the landscape, for example because a tenant on a short lease is unlikely to invest in improvement, while a great estate in fee tail was legally incapable of being broken up. Although a relatively slim volume, this work delivers more than it promises and is priced at a level where there is no excuse for agricultural historians not to have it on their shelves. A worthy complement to his Law of the Manor (1998), the new book differs in its broadly chronological approach. Although Jessel argues that perhaps ‘the landscape changed more in the twentieth century than in all previous times put together’ (p. 169), the narrative is punctuated by other occasions when the land changed out of recognition, from Bronze Age field systems, to the rearrangement of the pre-Conquest landscape, to the parliamentary enclosures, and on to the more recent explosion of the suburbs.

Running parallel with this narrative is that of the law of the land. The landscape is largely a man-made thing. Change inevitably produces conflicts, which can only be resolved by negotiation, by violence, or by the law. The law has to be seen as fixed and certain if it is to be effective, yet has to evolve as well. This tension has led to a relatively small number of significant changes over the years, separated by periods when processes of increasing complexity grew up, allowing the law to bend with the winds of change. Jessel’s story really takes off with the emergence of the legal framework for feudal tenures, particularly after 1154 when the rule of law began to replace private conflict, while Magna Carta (1215) established that no one could be disseized other than by law. That broad framework lasted largely until the Tenures Abolition Act (1660), when military tenures were converted to socage, although copyhold was only abolished in 1925 (Law of Property Act), at which time manors ceased to have any meaning. However, much had happened in between, as the market for land, both freehold and copyhold, grew up, and as leases took on greater importance. Both required security and legal fictions were developed to provide that certainty, whilst the natural desire of people to leave ‘their’ land to whomsoever they pleased led to two major pieces of sixteenth-century legislation, the Statute of Uses (1535) and the Statute of Wills (1540).

Medieval and early modern historians might have appreciated a little more detail on the period 1348 to 1660, but then of course much has happened since 1660 too, so the balance is probably about right. One way or another, by the seventeenth century a clear idea of property had emerged, with few constraints as to what you could do, providing no nuisance was caused to the neighbours. The famous aphorism derived from Semayne’s Case (1604) reported by Coke, that an Englishman’s home is his castle, was not a figure of speech. This then was the high period of property, when the great estates remodelled much of the landscape. By the mid-eighteenth century, though, Parliament was increasingly taking it upon itself to override property rights in the public interest, whether for enclosure or for infrastructure. The nineteenth-century introduction of death duties and the impact of the First World War led inevitably to the break-up of the great estates, with perhaps a quarter of the farmland of England changing hands between 1915 and 1923 as tenants bought their freeholds. The ‘state’, a concept which had not previously existed, came to play a bigger and bigger role in the landscape and, during the Second World War, by its requisitioning of land and control of farming, came to rule in as absolute a manner as any Stuart monarch. Since then, legislation has allowed public access to private land, and forbidden certain farming practices in the interests of conservation, while the Town and Country Planning Acts up to and including the 2012 National Planning Policy Framework not only require permission for all forms of development, but even in certain circumstances prevent a landowner from cutting down trees on his own property without permission of the Town Hall. Arguably, we are today as far from allodium, the unfettered absolute ownership of land, as at any time in the previous thousand years. Indeed, legally we continue to hold our land of the Crown, as tenants in fee simple, in free socage. Meanwhile, the law continues to shape the landscape, as it always has done, and Jessel ends by suggesting that, in the same way as the rights of owners have become subordinated to the state, so the future may need legislation which transcends state borders, requiring new ways of making and enforcing such laws.