The Land Is Ours

a landrights campaign for Britain

LAND ESSAYS 2
2. Land Ownership

CONTENTS(click any row of trees to return here)

The Domesday Book 2000, Roger Heape Peasants, Sam Smith

Land Essays 2 Index Essays and Research Index TLIO Homepage

The Domesday Book 2000 by Roger Heape

In the next 800 years there were significant changes in land ownership. The church and monasteries acquired vast swathes of the country. The dissolution of the monasteries in the middle ages transferred much land to noble families and friends of the King.

By the mid-nineteenth century land ownership had become a political issue - 'the land question'. Following the 1861 census the radical, John Bright, claimed that 'fewer than 150 men own half the land of England'.

The idea of a new Domesday Book in the form of a national inventory of land, was first raised by the statistician FP Fellowes when addressing the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1871. In the Lords a year later Lord Derby, responding to political pressure on the land question, proposed compiling a Domesday Book. Lord Halifax, on behalf of the government, declared a readiness to publish such a return based on parish valuation lists.

Four years later information had been gathered from 15,000 parishes and 5 million parochial assessments. This was arranged by county with owners listed alphabetically giving the extent of land and estimated gross rental.

In 1876, 710 landowners owned one quarter of England and Wales...

Since Bateman's work there has been no further inventory of land ownership. Individual ownership has become veiled in secrecy. Government agencies, private companies, local authorities, successful business men and foreign investors have joined the ranks of the aristocracy as significant landowners. The prevailing wisdom is that land ownership is now much more diverse. Yet, who really knows?

Obtaining such information is difficult. The Land Registry has details of who a particular piece of land is owned by if it changed hands in the last 70 years. But there is no easily available record of total land owned by an individual.

The year 2000 presents a superb opportunity to produce another Domesday Book. Such a project would give a fascinating insight into the social power structure of Britain today. It would give vital information to organisations like The Land is Ours for campaigning purposes. Historians would be able to compare patterns and individual ownership with both Bateman's late nineteenth century book and the original Domesday Book itself.

How can such a project be carried out? There is, in fact, a project underway called Domesday 2000. This is being sponsored by Capital and Counties plc and carried out by Professor Peter Dale of University College, London. This aims to set up a national land information system. It will be possible for a person to refer to any piece of land and find out who owns it, linking in to the land database of Her Majesty's Land Registry.

However, it will not normally be possible to see all the land belonging to a Mr X, since this is deemed personal information and may be covered by data protection acts.

Surely a project as significant as a new Domesday Book would justify such access. Failing this it is even possible that landowners would want the prestige of appearing in such a publication.

Who would carry out such a study? Academic institutes clearly are the ideal places. Universities such as East Anglia have already produced publications on Norfolk land ownership.

To help fund such a venture the Millennium Fund itself could be approached. A modern Domesday Book would be a fitting publication to have at the end of the twentieth century and the end of the millennium.

Peasants by Sam Smith

If such are their policies, then my sympathies lie with the French and German governments. I have to say immediately that both countries' policies grew from a very different historical background to that of Britain's.

People living and working in the countryside are not kicking their heels, or somebody's granny, in a decayed inner city.

Every civilisation is an artificial self-generating creation. Should any civilisation lose contact with the land then its own reality loses its context. French and German politicians once, happily, realised this, and then they artificially maintained their peasantry.

However that peasantry is maintained, its value remains the same. A peasantry also, being useful as a base measure, makes social sense. People living and working in the countryside are not kicking their heels, or somebody's granny, in a decayed inner city.

So let's go to it - my utopian answer to all of Britain's ills.

We have never really had a peasantry in Britain. We went from the feudalism of Lords and Squires to enclosures, industrialisation, and on to the dump that is Tory Britain today. Thus the British have always seen owned space as a static measure of riches. Appearances are always pred ominant in Britain. Those prestigious countryside acres were used to create riches so that their owners could purchase large city properties with which they could impress other city slickers.

The exploitation and neglect of their distant estates eventually led to the formation of Agricultural Colleges where, initially, 'good husbandry' was extolled. By the 1950s though, land management had become the 'agricultural industry'; and the profitable exploitation of all remotely arable land became its manager's priority. Even in the late 1980s Sunday supplements continued to carry adverts showing a green pastoral scene with the caption 'The Factory Floor'.

...all county councils with a minimum of so many acres under cultivation would have to purchase a fifth of that land and convert it into 15 acre lots

Last September, in Somerset, I watched a 'farmer' spray his potato crop with some chemical to deliberately kill off the green tops. This would make it easier for another of his machines to harvest the crop, which would then be sprayed to stop sprouting while in store. I decided then and there that the world had truly lost its senses.

Many farmers are already seeing visible and undeniable evidence under their own noses - nitrate poisoning in streams; pesticide poisoning cases growing daily - and they are losing their wholly exploitative attitude to the countryside. But not all. Side by side are farms where one farmer still grubs up hedgerows and continues to use a pesticide a season, while his neighbour is trying other methods. He is planting tree windbreaks and wildlife corridors, is letting livestock out of the sheds and into the fields, and is actively seeking non-chemical methods of husbandry.

The latter farmers, however, remain in the minority. Most farmland, I believe, has therefore to be taken away from the banks and the chemical companies and returned to its proper status as a vital resource of the nation, its food basket and spiritual heartland.

Unfortunately the present crop of Parliamentary politicians are people without vision, mere defenders of sectional interests. Not one of their sectional interests is the land itself; and what is needed now is radical land reform.

Britain is already a land of gardeners. (Gardens too, are a measure of a civilisation, an indicator of its denizens' subconscious attempts to make reparation for the ravages caused by their civilisation.) What I propose though, is more than gardening. What I want to see is a peasantry created in Britain. It's not likely, because it would not only require politicians with nerves of steel, but also the capitalist heresy of compulsory purchase.

(I dismiss politicians, but the idea might well be attractive to them. Nationalist politicians have always made use of the peasantry. No one knows and loves/hates their bit of land more than a peasant, and no one defends their bit of land more zealously than a peasant. On the other hand, a capitalist government does have good cause to fear a peasantry. All the communist revolutions, in Russia, China and Cuba, were supported by the peasantry. That, I hasten to add, is not a direct result of having a peasantry, but of having a lousy government.)

No, I want the scheme directed at the urban unemployed ...

The face of any countryside given over to the new peasantry would be drastically altered. Sites of Special Scientific Interest and Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty would therefore be exempt from the acreage count.

On each of the 15 acre sites the commissioning County Council would be obliged to install a two bedroom mobile home, cesspit and power generator (wind or cesspit methane powered). The new peasants would then be given a basic set of tools, a choice of crops, and - on the equivalent of unemployment benefit - left to get on with it. (And it can be done. I did it. Covertly. Happily. For 5 years.)

I have no illusions about countryside living: most of the time it's wet and smelly and the only company is some red-necked yokels who want to kill things. I know, therefore, that co-operation among new peasants would be based, not on idealism but on necessity. Self-interest would have them banding together the better to market their produce, ferry their children to school, etcetera.

I would hope that, whilst not wanting to lay down too many preconditions, there would be proscriptions on what these new homesteaders would be allowed to do with their 15 acres. No chemicals, for instance, a limit to the amount of land under polythene or glass, strict limits on the size and number of outbuildings, no converting the holding to a holiday campsite or safari park, etcetera .

The initial result would be, I hope, that young couples and children would return to the countryside, and that village schools and shops would be reopened. The repopulated land, being revitalised, would attract others. And I don't mean those who would tastefully convert the barn and then commute to the nearest conurbation; but populated by people in working clothes, walking about the land, having even minor triumphs a la Balzac....

Nor would I be pleased if only middle class hobbyists dabbles in the scheme. I don't want to see yet more Home Counties, where the few fields are token fields - for the grazing of round bellied ponies or a few fat decorative sheep. Pastime places, with woodlands for playgrounds - Oh goody, lets play Pooh sticks.

No, I want the scheme directed at the urban unemployed, want to see the land worked again by people who will marvel yearly at the miracle of germination, by people with their fingers crumbling their own unique soil, hands in their backs looking with fulsome satisfaction upon an acre of newly turned earth....

In these new communities, craft workshops - studio, tap and stove - similarly subsidised, could also be instituted. People are happiest when making or growi ng things. And all these people will have friends and relatives back in the cities. So the message will be carried back there - being and doing are more important than having.

I do not claim that the cities will be depopulated by such a scheme, nor that every other of Britain's problems will be solved. (We're already two generations too deep in the excrement for single solutions.) The problems with this scheme itself will come when the first generation, the voluntary peasants, have passed, and their country children inherit the plot and its labours. By then though they'll be the ones seeking new solutions for new problems.

Could Britain create such a peasantry?

The first large step would require us, as a society, to put people first, to place them before the ownership of land, before the pursuit of riches or the following of economic dogmas. Were that to happen, we'd maybe have no need of a new peasantry; all would naturally follow.

Here though, I've just been considering only land reform; and I ask you finally, to just imagine a land, where the majority of people dwelt in the countryside and the cities were not places of dread, not dustbins of inadequates, but centres of excellence.

Dream on.

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