Land Ownership: English Common Law, Past & Future

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Karin Altenberg, Separating Thine from Mine; A novel idea sprang up in 16th-century England: that an individual could own land outright, without obligation to earthly or heavenly masters or to tribes and families. Wall Street Journal, Dec 7, 2013
online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303670804579236063419368676
(book review on Andro Linklater, Owning the Earth; The transforming of land ownership. Bloomsbury USA, 2013)

Quote: "The idea of individual, exclusive land ownership has affected modern history more than any other—in Linklater's words, it has proved to be 'the most destructive and creative cultural force in written history.

Note:
(a) "'How much land does a man need?" Leo Tolstoy asked in his jewel of a story. Never quite satisfied with the plots of land allocated by the local commune, or mir, the peasant Pahom sets out to acquire ever more * * * Quite apart from its literary qualities, the fable of Pahom's temptation and greed was highly topical when published in 1886. Tolstoy, himself owner of the 4,000-acre Yasnaya Polyana estate, worked by 350 peasants, had once bought land off the Bashkirs. * * * Two decades before writing 'How Much Land Does a Man Need?' Tolstoy, with the rest of Russia, had experienced a great historical change in liberty and ownership, as all serfs were freed in the Emancipation Reform of 1861."
(i) How much land does a man need?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Much_Land_Does_a_Man_Need%3F
(an 1886 short story)
(ii) mir (n; Russian; First Known Use 1856): "a village community in czarist Russia in which land was owned jointly but cultivated by individual families"www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mir
(iii) Bashkirs
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bashkirs
(a Turkic people indigenous to Bashkortostan extending on both sides of the Ural Mountains; speak the Bashkir language[, one of] Turkic languages; mainly Sunni Muslims; There is no universally accepted etymology of the word "Bashqort")
(iv) topical (adj):
"1a :  of, relating to, or arranged by topics <set down in topical form> b :  referring to the topics of the day or place :  of local or temporary interest <a topical novel> <topical references>"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/topical
(v) Yasnaya Polyana
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasnaya_Polyana
(Russian: "Bright Glade;"  presently his memorial museum; At the end of the 18th century it was purchased by Prince Nikolai Volkonskiy, the [maternal] grandfather of the writer [Tolstoy, who received his surname from his father, of course])

* glade (n): "an open space surrounded by woods"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/glade
(vi) Emancipation Reform of 1861
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emancipation_reform_of_1861
(the first and most important of liberal reforms effected during the reign of Alexander II of Russia)

Quote: "By this edict more than 23 million people received their liberty. Serfs were granted the full rights of free citizens, gaining the rights to marry without having to gain consent, to own property and to own a business. The Manifesto prescribed that peasants would be able to buy the land from the landlords. Household serfs were the worst affected as they gained only their freedom and no land.

* Alexander II of Russia (1818-1881; reign 1855-1881; assassinated by revolutionaries) was grandfather ofthe last tsar Nicholas II.

(b)
(i) Andro Linklater (1944-2013; born Scot; died of heart attck while living in rural Kent, England)
(ii) Andro is the Croatian form of Andrew.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew(derived from the Greek Andreas, itself related to Ancient Greek aner/andros, "man" (as opposed to "woman" [or humankind]))

(c) "Present-day distinctions among governments and societies across the globe, Linklater argues, are the result of land ownership evolving along different lines. In one of these lines, the history of the modern Western world takes as its starting point a novel concept introduced in 16th-century England, toward the end of medieval feudalism: the idea that land could be owned individually, without obligations to earthly or heavenly lords and masters or to communities, tribes and families. This was a gradual process but well-developed by the 1540s, when Henry VIII sold off half of the land that he had confiscated from the monasteries, mainly to well-positioned courtiers. Within two generations some of this land had already changed hands as a new class of moneyed men—London merchants, sheep farmers and government officials—entered the property market."
(i) Dissolution of the Monasteries
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Monasteries
(1536-1541))

* Protestant Reformation
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation
(the date most usually given for the start of the Protestant Reformation is 1517, when Luther published The Ninety-Five Theses [in Wittenberg, Saxony], and for its conclusion in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia that ended the European wars of religion)
(ii) Henry VIII, Monasteries and Bible, in JP Sommerville, The Emergence of Britain (course 361). Department of History, University of Wisconsin, undated
faculty.history.wisc.edu/sommerville/361/361-09.htm
("The seizure of monastic land gave the Crown the possibility of complete financial independence. Had Henry VIII exploited it prudently, he and his successors might never have needed to call Parliament again. But from the very beginning, and particularly between 1543 and 1547, Henry sold most of the land to pay for extravagant wars with France and Scotland. The land was bought by merchants, by yeomen syndicates, by noblemen, and - overwhelmingly - by neighboring gentry families")
(iii) Elizabeth AR Brown, Feudalism. Encyclopaedia Britannica, undated.
www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/205583/feudalism

Quote:

"Feudalism and the related term feudal system are labels invented long after the period to which they were applied. They refer to what those who invented them perceived as the most significant and distinctive characteristics of the early and central Middle Ages.

"The terms feudalism and feudal system were generally applied to the early and central Middle Ages—the period from the 5th century, when central political authority in the Western empire disappeared, to the 12th century, when kingdoms began to emerge as effective centralized units of government. For a relatively brief period, from the mid-8th to the early 9th century, the Carolingian rulers, especially Pippin (reigned 751–768) and Charlemagne (reigned 768/771–814), had remarkable success in creating and maintaining a relatively unified empire. Before and afterward, however, political units were fragmented and political authority diffused. The mightier of the later Carolingians attempted to regulate local magnates and enlist them in their service, but the power of local elites was never effaced. In the absence of forceful kings and emperors, local lords expanded the territory subject to them and intensified their control over the people living there.

* Carolingian dynasty
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_dynasty
(The Carolingians were displaced in most of the regna [regions]of the Empire in 888)

Encyclopaedia Britannica set the time frame of the dynsaty 750-887, without explicit explanation.
* Pepin the Short
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepin_the_Short
(c 714-768; King of the Franks 752-768; the first of the Carolingians to become King; footnote 2: "He wore his hair short, in contrast to the long hair that was a mark of his predecessors.  Paul Edward Dutton, Charlemagne's Mustache: And Other Cultural Clusters of a Dark Age. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008")

(d) "Views on how individual rights to land are achieved or granted—and how they may be controlled—vary over time and across continents. When the Earl of Carlisle was granted Barbados by charter of King Charles I in 1627, the charter stated that the king had officially made the grant 'by our special grace, certain knowledge, and mere motion.' For the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, however, rights to the land required more than a 'mere motion' or a flick of the hand. Ownership, like their Puritan faith, relied on hard work and self-reliance. This argument for the concept of property as a natural right settled their consciences in regard to the native population, who were not tilling the land or building permanent homesteads."
(i) The "mere motion " was explained: "a flick of the hand"--or the signing of the grant.
(ii) Earl of Carlisle
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_of_Carlisle
(The second creation came in 1622 when James Hay, 1st Viscount Doncaster, was made Earl of Carlisle)

The Wikippedia pages for "Earl of Carlisle" and "Barbados" do not mention each other.
(ii) Barbados
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbados
(section 1 Etymology; independence from UK 1966)

Quote: "The first English ship, the Olive Blossom, arrived in Barbados in 1624. They took possession of it in the name of King James I. In 1627 the first permanent settlers arrived from England, and it became an English and later British colony.

(e) "A century later John Locke would argue, in a similar fashion, that the earth was common to all men but that 'every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his.' His labor could give him claim to land once thought communal. Locke's argument for natural, embodied rights to private property is neatly counterpointed by Hobbes's claim that ownership of the earth must be a creation of civil law enforced by a Leviathan-style state."
(i) John Locke (1632-1704; English)
(ii) Leviathan (book)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leviathan_(book)
(a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in 1651; "Leviathan ranks as a classic western work on statecraft comparable to Machiavelli's The Prince. Written during the English Civil War (1642–1651), Leviathan argues for a social contract and rule by an absolute sovereign"/  "The sovereign has twelve principal rights: * * * 7. 7.to prescribe the rules of civil law and property")

In the book, Mr Hobbes wrote "there be no propriety, no dominion, no ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ distinct, but only that to be every man’s that he can get, and for so long as he can keep it. * * * every man has a right to every thing, even to one another's body."

The review title comes from this.

(f) "There is something almost boyish about the execution and energy of this book, the way it races on makes the reader feel as if transported on a Phileas Foggian adventure through the history of ideas. We meet Chinese emperors and Russian czars, German Junker farmers * * *"
(i) Phileas Fogg
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phileas_Fogg
(the main character in the 1873 [French] Jules Verne novel Around the World in Eighty Days)
(ii) Junker
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junker
(section 1 Origins)

(g) "Occasionally in Linklater's eagerly meandering, almost impatient, narrative of historical ideas we are allowed to stop for breath while eavesdropping on a conversation being negotiated around a table somewhere, such as the meeting in Putney in 1647 where Oliver Cromwell and his son-in-law, Gen Henry Ireton, argued agitatedly with the Leveller Col William Rainsborough over who should be allowed to vote in the new elections: Only those men who owned or rented land, said Cromwell's side, whereas the Levellers tirelessly argued for the idea that the power of government should be derived from all people, regardless of property."
(i) Putney
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putney
(Putney appears in the Domesday Book of 1086 as Putelei)
(ii) Henry Ireton
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ireton
(iii) Levellers
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levellers
(a political movement during the English Civil War; section 1 Origin of name: In the Midland Revolt of 1607 [which took place in the MIdlands of England as a protest against the enclosure of common land], the name was used to refer to those who 'levelled' hedges in enclosure riots)
(iv) William Rainsborough, see William Rainsborowe
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Rainsborowe

(h) miscellaneous
(i) "It would be good to know more about the 100 women who, in 1839, each had more than $1,000 in her savings accounts in the bank at Lowell, Mass, or about the ideas of sociologist Harriet Martineau, who in 1837 tried to understand the rush to possess plots of newly surveyed land in the US as a general 'cure for all social evils' among men."

I can not find anything about those Lowell women. Harriet Martineau was English, whose 1837 book was Society in America, about her observations in her trip to US, which I browsed just now and saw nothing about land pursuit by American frontiermen.
(ii) photo caption: "Dry-stone walls dividing pastures in Swaledale, a valley in North Yorkshire, England. Some of the walls are ancient, but many date only to the era of the Enclosure Acts around the turn of the 19th century. Each plot has its own barn, to minimize travel to and from the field in harsh weather and over hilly terrain. © Steven Vidler/Eurasia Press/Co"
(A) Swaledale
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swaledale
(is the dale of the River Swale)
(B) Inclosure Acts
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts