Half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. His figures reveal that the aristocracy and landed gentry – many the descendants of those Norman barons – still own at least 30% of England and probably far more, as 17% is not registered by the Land Registry and is probably inherited land that has never been bought or sold. What’s astonishing about his research is how little has changed in the last 1,000 years. Using complex datasets from the Land Registry, freedom of information requests, and other tools available thanks to EU environmental rules, he has managed to lift the veil of secrecy: “The long-term concealment of who owns England appears to me to be one of the clearest cases of a cover-up in English history.”įrom the Norman conquest, when William the Conqueror divided up the country among his barons, to the enclosure of 6.8 million acres of common land between 16 (“a land grab of criminal proportions”), Shrubsole shows how the land has been systematically stolen from ordinary people: “Today most of us are landless.” The aristocracy and landed gentry still own at least 30% of England and probably far more Guy Shrubsole, an activist for Friends of the Earth, has dedicated the last few years to uncovering who really owns the land. In England, land ownership is “our oldest, darkest, best-kept secret”. What’s more, the land the Diggers occupied is now dubbed “Britain’s Beverly Hills”, a gated estate of exclusive properties, of which 72 – worth £282m – are owned by companies registered in offshore tax havens.
Their freedom was short-lived and they were soon evicted. For the Diggers, the execution of the king that year was the symbolic moment when “the common people of England” cast off the “Norman yoke” and were liberated from the landowning elite that had enslaved them since the Norman conquest.
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