[snip]
Legal rights for something as important as land ownership change incredibly slowly. There's a lot of English land law which has been there since Anglo-Saxon times. And that's after significant simplification in the 20th Century. It's so bad that parliament daren't try and consolidate the legislation into a series of acts. They just repeal bits and pieces when a particular issue gets sufficiently problematical.
The current issue is certain farmland which has a duty to maintain the local parish church. In one case major repair work is going to cost more than the farmland is worth.
-- Donald Oddy http://www.grove.demon.co.uk/ ------------------------------------ By way of a wholly non-Gloranthan diversion based on the above, the situation about land being saddled with obligations to repair the parish church dates from the time after tithing.
In many parts of England, an alternative system of funding parish priests was adopted under which land was given to the village church. The income the church derived from this land was supposed both to support the priest and to pay for the maintenance of the church buildings. Though if the land was bad, or the priest wasn't a very good farmer it didn't always work that well (e.g. the village priest in the early chapters of Hardy's Jude the Obscure).
Later on, the church sometimes sold this land to a private buyer, provided the new owner of the land accepted the existing obligation to pay for the maintenance of the church buildings (and the landowner became known as the "lay rector" of the parish, i.e. the person responsible for paying for the maintenance of the church, even though they weren't a priest).
Whilst rooted in a much earlier system of law, the law which retained the obligation to repair the church roof was actually passed by Parliament some years after the partial clean-up of land law in the mid-1920s (and (coincidentally?) not long after the final abolition of tithing). The problem is not just that medievalism isn't abolished -- it is also that sometimes the abolition of medievalism is fudged.
The modern legal controversy concerned whether the obligation imposed on a private landowner to repair church buildings infringed the landowner's right not to have a government body interfere with her ownership of private property and/or freedom of religious belief. (These only became positive rights in English law in 2000 with the passing of a Human Rights Act, so such a challenge based on fundamental principles could only have been made in recent times).
The landowner's claim failed because the rights and duties in relation to the ownership of land were not connected to religious belief, and because the decision of the local church council to demand that the landowner pay for the repairs to the church roof was considered to be more like a private action between two landowners than the exercise of state power against a private citizen.
The modern practise is to make sure before you buy land that this isn't an issue, or if it is, to take out insurance against getting a large bill from the church.
I wrote about the case for The [London] Times when it first broke, hence my anorakish interest in the subject.
Richard Hayes [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
Powered by hypermail