|
|
The New Domesday of Landownership, 1876
| England lagged behind much of Europe, including Scotland, in registering land. A national registry was set up only in 1925 and even today around one-third of all land is unregistered. This led to claim and counterclaim about who owned what land, and in the 1870s the government sought to answer the question definitively through a survey which was colloquially known as the New Domesday to distinguish it from the original Domesday of 1086. This paper looks again at the findings of the New Domesday, in relation to the ownership and occupation of land, and the way in which the findings of the survey were manipulated for political reasons. It asks to what extend did the findings fuel the debate about ownership and land reform in late Victorian England, and how far did they confirm, or not, the claims of those who believed they reflected an effective monopoly of ownership by the aristocracy? And, finally, the paper asks to what extent claims based on the New Domesday findings led directly to the collapse of the great estates, and how far was this collapse inevitable as a result of the prevailing economic conditions across Europe in the period 1870-1914.
|
|
|
|
