View source for England Land and Property

=== Introduction  ===

Following the Norman Conquest in 1066 all the land of England was technically owned by the Crown. Under the feudal manorial system which subsequently developed, the Crown made grants of land to earls and barons who in turn granted smaller areas to knights in return for the provision of a set period of active military service in the field called ‘knight service’. Over the years this service was slowly commuted to a money payment called ‘scutage’ and it had practically disappeared by the end of the thirteenth century, though feudal tenure was not finally abolished until 1660. These people were not Knights in the modern sense and would remain esquires unless they paid the heavy fees for knighthood (something that they were supposedly obliged to do after 1306 if their property was worth more than £40 a year). 

Someone who held land in this way direct from the Crown was a ‘tenant-in-chief’ and if a tenant-in-chief held several villages he might sublet one or more of them to other men in return for similar services. If he and the recipients held administrative courts for their villages then those villages were called manors. Estates that had been no more than a farm or an agricultural unit thus became a jurisdiction, the lord being responsible for the good behaviour of his tenants. A landholder might hold several manor courts for his different villages and large landholders might hold land in the jurisdiction of several different manorial courts. By the end of the thirteenth century the manor court was used to enforce and regulate the labour services of the ‘villeins’ or subtenants who held their small amounts of land by agricultural service, produce or cash, according to ‘the custom of the manor’. 

The lord of the manor usually had two courts, a court leet which dealt with petty law and order matters and a court baron which dealt with land leased from the manor by copyhold (i.e. a copy of the entry of the court rolls) the villeins having, by 1500, become the copyholders of the manor. Courts leet continued to play a part in the local administration of justice in the Tudor period, prior to the growth of the Courts of Quarter Sessions. However, an important but slowly diminishing area of copyhold manorial land continued to be administered by the lord’s court baron. The remnants of manorial jurisdiction continued into the twentieth century but by a slow process of sale and enclosure of land, and a transition from tenant service to monetary payments of rent or for a lease, the importance of the manor had greatly diminished by the early seventeenth century. 

In early times the usual method of transferring freehold land was by ‘livery of seisin’, a symbolic act of transfer of a piece of the property, usually a turf or clod of earth, witnessed by the community. The copyholder would similarly deliver a rod or wand to the lord of the manor or his steward who would pass it to the new tenant. No writing at all was strictly necessary, but it became common to provide evidence of these transactions by means of a deed of feoffment (possession) or, in the case of copyhold, by an entry on the court rolls. It was difficult to escape the fees payable to the feudal lord following such a public act and so, prior to 1660, people regularly looked for ways in which land might be conveyed secretly though it was also important, by some means or other, to place on record a ‘title’ to any property obtained. 

The legal documents that proved a person’s ownership and/or rights to land in England or Wales came to be called their title deeds. Anyone selling, mortgaging or transferring land to another person or institution transferred with it the title deed(s) by which he or she had first acquired that land. Over the years, a growing chain of documentation was thus built up that was produced and transferred at each sale or mortgage of the property. A typical bundle of title deeds would consist of former conveyances, deeds of bargain and sale, copies of entries on manor rolls, probate copies of wills, marriage settlements, mortgages, perhaps a summary of the most important records called an ‘abstract’ of title, and sometimes other miscellaneous papers that might include earlier descriptive sale particulars of the property or auctioneers catalogues. 

In 1925 an Act of Parliament decided that those to whom property had been conveyed within the last thirty years did not in future need to provide evidence of their title going back more than thirty years. For many properties these bundles of title deeds, many stretching back hundreds of years, were thus overnight made redundant for all practical purposes. Many thousands were destroyed, the parchment being frequently used to make lamp-shades, but many thousands more (if they survived the destruction of the Second World War) eventually found their way into county record offices and may today, if they have been catalogued, be traced through the nationwide catalogue Access to Archives (A2A), covering about 400 record repositories and accessed at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/a2a. 

Although the authorities in the City of London and of many other borough towns recorded transfers of land from early times and there were other attempts to introduce some form of deeds’ registration, only the counties of Yorkshire (the West Riding from 1701, the East Riding from 1707 and the North Riding from 1735) and Middlesex (from 1708) had registries of deeds such as were known from early times in Scotland and in Ireland from 1708. England and Wales did not introduce a national registry until 1862 and even then registration was voluntary. Compulsory registration began only in 1899 and is still far from complete. 

It is thus frequently a major problem to trace the ownership, descent and transfer of land in England and Wales. As well as by outright sale, mortgage or lease, land might pass from a parent to a child in a manner determined by common law (a freehold passing to the common law heir), by manorial custom, by previous arrangement or ‘settlement’, or by will. Records of the collection of local and national taxes, such as the Hearth Tax and the Land Tax, and of church tithes (all described below), may to some extent indicate who owned what, and there are other records which evolve from ownership, but the overall picture that emerges is patchy, varying greatly from parish to parish. 

Wills, for instance, are a poor indication of a testator’s land-holdings. They were usually drawn up when the testator was ill or dying. Arrangements about the land may have been made earlier. If a few pieces of land are mentioned, these are likely to be recent purchases, indicating only that the testator was prospering. Valuations for probate will not normally include the land, though the value of leaseholds is occasionally included. Early wills are often striking in the manner in which they show land scattered across several parishes and in the types of holdings that are mentioned. 

Freehold land, that can be bought, sold or bequeathed at any time, may appear alongside land that is leasehold or rented for a fixed number of years (usually a multiple of seven, or for a fixed number of stated lives) and alongside copyhold land held from the lord of a manor by a copy of the entry on the court roll. The nature of these holdings should always be noted as in each case they may lead to other records.