Landowners, Lawyers, and Land Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England 21 American Journal of Legal History 1977

21 Am. J. Legal Hist. 40 (1977)
Landowners, Lawyers, and Land Law Reform in Nineteenth-Century England

handle is hein.journals/amhist21 and id is 46 raw text is: Landowners, Lawyers, and
Land Law Reform in
Nineteenth-Century England
by EILEEN SPRING*
Between 1909 and 1912 the Duke of Bedford put half his great
ducal estates on the auction block. Many landowners were to follow
his example, selling all or large parts of their estates, and by 1921
over one-quarter of English land had changed hands. Such an
enormous and sudden transfer of land, a historian has remarked,
had not been seen since the dissolution of the monasteries in the
sixteenth century. Indeed... had probably not been equalled since
the Norman Conquest.' Not only was the transfer on an enormous
scale but it involved, more often than not, a new class of purchaser.
For the first time, estates tended not to be sold as entities or in large
sections but to be broken up and sold to their sitting tenant farm-
ers. In the phrase of the day, what had begun was the break-up of
the estate system: the disintegration of that aristocratic system of
landholding that had characterized England for centuries.
This break-up began amid talk of land nationalization, amid a
legislative attempt to tax land values, and amid an ensuing conflict
of classes that culminated in the Parliament Act. But these were
not causes sufficient to account for the break-up. Adequate causes
are indeed hardly to be specified, but lie simply in the broad trend of
English social and political life in the nineteenth century, a trend
that was politely but increasingly democratic and that involved
step by step a reduction in the power and prestige that attached to
land. The causes of the break-up are to be found in Reform Bills, in
the Repeal of the Corn Laws, in the opening of the universities and
the civil service to talent, in all those reforms that undermined the
aristocratic way of life and disheartened landowners.
Among these reforms is to be counted a reform in the land law.
In contrast to other reforms, however, this one is almost unknown.
The text-books scarcely mention it. Even scholarly discussions of it
are few, and have been limited in their focus.2 There are, to be sure,
* M.A. The Johns Hopkins University.
1. F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury (1963), p. 332.
2. A factual statement of the changes in the land laws is to be found in J.
40

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