The Occupy London protest outside St Paul's Cathedral in 2011. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid / Getty
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The Church of England is rich. Fabulously rich, according to its critics. And such wealth sits uncomfortably with all that stuff about camels and eyes of needles. It’s an easy hit. But is it a fair one?
A new book by Guy Shrubsole Who Owns England? sheds some light on this longstanding question. There is a familiar assumption that floats around in the cultural ether, that the C of E is a massive landowner. But it turns out not to be totally true. Roughly, the Church of England owns 0.5% of England. And given that, through the parish system, the church has a presence in every community in this country, this doesn’t sound a lot to me. Especially when compared to the aristocracy, which owns a whopping 30% of it, for instance.
What fascinated me about Shrubsole’s findings was not how much land the church owns, but how much land it has lost – and relatively recently. According to his figures, the church owned some two million acres of glebe land (an area of land within an ecclesiastical parish used to support a parish priest) in 1873. By 1976, this figure had plummeted to 111,628 acres. And Shrubsole does his best to make this sound suspicious. “The mystery of who stole the church’s land is a whodunnit worthy of a Brother Cadfael novel,” he writes.
It’s an interesting approach. For if there is a question of theft here, it is how the church came by its land in the first place. Glebe was given to the Church of England by Henry VIII as a sort of baptism present at the Reformation. It became the principal endowment of the church. This was mostly land, perhaps four million acres, that was stolen – and I don’t think that is too strong a word – from the Roman Catholic church, along with the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. Forget Henry’s headline sexual peccadilloes, this theft of land is the really dirty stuff – the original sin of the Church of England.
And this theft shaped our society in many and unexpected ways. For as well as giving millions of acres to the church, a great deal of stolen land was sold off cheap by the crown to aristocrats as a bribe for their support. Little wonder there was no enthusiasm amongst the establishment for the return of the Roman church under, say, Bonnie Prince Charlie: the return of the Roman church would have meant a return of stolen land.
After much digging and a certain amount of guess work, Shrubsole calculates that about 70,000 acres of glebe land are now left in the church’s ownership. So where did the rest of it go? Well, according to Savills, the estate agents, “glebe land is usually situated within a settlement, with a high chance of it being zoned for development”. And this “can make the land very valuable”. Surely there’s our answer.
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SubscribeAs a current victim, along with others in Devon, the Church received land by donation for charitable uses, which when no longer needed should in law return to the original heirs of the donees. Also there are restrictions on what was unregistered land. Now the current victims in Devon, over land that had been sold, leaving an issue with easements that burden the land, and has not returned to original donees heirs, these strips of land end up hidden in offshore private trusts. I have made a Freedom of Information request to the Church asking for how much land has been returned. Apparently they claim they do not have to comply. The victims are innocent purchasers for value, who end up with dirty titles, have shared easements, and estate contracts, which are in our paper title deeds, but disappear on electronic registration.