Exploiting ancient manorial rights in Britain to go hunting, fishing and shooting over other people’s land, could soon be outlawed, MPs have suggested.
The continuing use of feudal powers, dating back to before the Norman conquest, that also control ownership of underground minerals and the holding of fairs, should be reviewed, according to a report published by the justice select committee.
Anyone who purchased the lordship of a manor in the hope of obtaining legal ownership of reserves of shale gas extracted by subterranean fracking stands to be doubly disappointed; the committee has ruled that manorial rights can never apply to gas. The crown and the coal authority are considered to have over-riding rights to oil and gas reserves.
Lordships of the manor can be bought and sold. Some titles are held by charitable and educational institutions. Many had been forgotten until changes to the Land Registration Act in 2002 required them to be recorded by October 2013 if they were not to be extinguished.
About 90,000 claims were registered in the year preceding the deadline, causing many people to discover for the first time that their homes and land were subject to rights owned by a third party.
Sir Alan Beith, the Liberal Democrat chair of the Commons justice select committee, said: “House owners were astonished to find manorial rights registered on their properties, and worried that this would affect them when selling the house or getting a mortgage.
“The lack of understanding of such rights, and the way the registration process was carried out and communicated, has led to understandable concerns and anxieties. We have had numerous representations, both from MPs on their constituents’ behalf, and from individual members of the public affected by registrations on their properties, most notably in Anglesey and in Welwyn Garden City. They all called for either the abolition of these rights or a review of the law.”
Among those who gave evidence were members of a campaign group calling themselves the Peasants’ Revolt. They described manorial rights as “a relic of a system designed over 1,000 years ago under William the Conqueror, a time when the king had absolute power and the lord of the manor could command serfs to work on his land without payment in return for using the land the rest of the time”.
Holders of manorial rights, however, have objected to calls for the abolition of the system.
In its conclusion, the justice committee recommended that the Law Commission conducted “a project assessing whether the law related to manorial rights should be changed, including the question of whether all or some categories should be abolished, and how legislation could appropriately address compensation and human rights issues in such an event”.
