Now we've taken a basic introduction to looking at the definition of land law in the UK and the kind of things and the kind of things we're going to be discussing when we look at land law. What I want to do is talk about the history of land ownership in the UK and how this has really developed over, effectively over a thousand years of English history and why these historical implications still have a lot of relevance today because effectively the guiding principles, the basic principles of land law, go back to you know William the Conqueror and beyond and so we have to really have a basic understanding, only a basic understanding of these historical updates that have taken place before we can look at the the legal premises of land law, things like registered land and registered land, freehold, leaseholder states, these kind of things.
So as we established in the last lesson land law can be described almost as like a subset of property law, it's a very specific type of property law with where the property is land, where the property is land and we've discussed in the last lesson that the nature of land as a property as something you know that you can own or you know at least effectively you can own is something that's very different to say owning a laptop or owning a phone. There's a lot of yeah there's a lot the a huge number of differences if you want to go back to the last lesson I'll link it in this video because effectively the reason why we have land law, separate to property law, is because the law regulating land is very different to the law regulating other types of property and in reality this these regulations, these regulations come from history so the history of land law informs a lot of the concepts that we still accept today so it's important to spend some time discussing how these how the history developed land law rather than you know rather than beginning by looking at the legal principles themselves.
So the first thing we should know is that we do not own land, we own quote estates and interests in land and by we I mean you know people who are not general public so general population, general population, people who are not the monarchy effectively. Okay so this was briefly touched on in the introductory lesson but effectively the historical theological interpretation of land is that land is something that was a gift from God okay and thus this idea of land being a gift from God informs the um informs the interpretation as to who owns the land.
Now traditionally land is a gift from God to the crown of England so the crown of England and this relates to a number of guiding principles within the theology and the relationship between God and the king or queen of England and you know ideas such as the divine right of kings so the divine right of kings.
Now this is the general um theological interpretation and this theological interpretation existed before the 1200s however we start to see it more and more codified following the 1200s and so as such as we see this interpretation develop we see that the the monarch go from the king of the English people the original interpretation being that the monarch was the king of the people okay we go from that interpretation to the interpretation that the monarch is the king of the land king of England okay and now that that little shift in the in the nomenclature and the interpretations of how we understand the relationship between the king and with between king and England is informed by the fact that traditionally the land was a gift from God and this gift from God was gifted to the monarch and so since the 1200s all land effectively belong to the crown however we'll note that it should be noted that this um isn't there isn't a specific cut-off date where you have um this kind of interpretation taking place i can't name you a specific time in history because the history of land ownership is something that's been a very gradual process.
One of the processes that take place within the history of England and that date before even before the 1200s is the concept of feudalism and this is something that was imported from Europe following the nomen conquest of England so we know that um william the conqueror came to England in 1066 so it dates back even a few hundred years before this concept of England and the system of feudalism began to develop and we can understand why feudalism developed because of a number of factors so the first factor is that even before the 1200s the crown was seen as the sole owner of land okay it's just in the 1200s and beyond we start to see this develop this change developed linguistically as well.
The second thing we should we can mention is that when we're talking about creating um economic um progress you know creating um wealth from land this required labour and it still requires labour today however back in following the normal conquest and the medieval period of England uh labour was an inefficient task we didn't have any kind of coordination as such or industrialization that took place so labour was a labour intensive task and it was very inefficient as such what the king would do would be to allow people to use and occupy his land in return for the performance of certain services so you can toil the land that you um you're allowed to live on the land that you toil that you work on and it should be noted that it's very important that in this kind of relationship between the king and his people and the king allowing almost granting permission to um live on the land that they work in return for um you know for a certain service or or you know for certain goods um a transfer of land never took place so the king still owned the land um that they were working on so the king still owned the land the king still owned the land I mentioned king and not king and and queen because at the time the uh the vast majority of monarchs within England were um kings uh there's. some historical uh possible um you know it's the debate as to where who the first queen was but arguably mary the first um as late as the 1500s was the it was quick the first queen of England so we're talking about just kings and this process getting back to the the law this process of um almost allowing permission in return for a service uh was called a tenure so you would get around to the tenure and this doctrine of tenure this kind of principle that you uh the doctrine of tenure you are allowed to to live on the land that you work in return for um certain services this sort of contractual relationship between the king and his people um was not just limited to the king and his and his people so it was there wasn't just a limitation between just the monarch uh and this service being done to um his subjects once there has been once you know the doctrine of tenure um applies between the monarch and and some uh you know other person those who received that tenure from the monarch could then offer a tenure to somebody else okay and this was known as a system of in uh sorry of subinfudation so we have a system of subinfudation where it's effectively like a pyramid scheme so you have the monarch at the top who um offers and grants a tenure to um someone down below and they grant tenure to other people and then so on and so on and so on to the point where we have this almost you know spiral of of of tasks and services and economic relationships between all of these different people and at no point in any of this system of subinfudation do we see any land transfer from the monarch to the people it is just granted a tenure to that land and so that is a kind of thing that informs the modern day interpretation of land ownership today all land is still owned by the crown in england and thus one's relationship with land shouldn't be seen effectively as an ownership an ownership you don't own the land no matter what kind of rights whatever kind of proprietary rights you have over the land you don't own it the relationship with land should be one of either in a state in that land or an interest unless you're the monarch if the monarch is uh watching then this doesn't apply to you but the uh for anybody else for the rest of us uh mere mortals the relationship um we have with land is not one of ownership it's one of an estate or an interest and we're going to get into them obviously in a lot more detail because these are the legal relationships that we're going to be talking about so the legal relationships relationships no no we're going to be talking about the legal relationships and the proprietary rights that you have depending on the type of interest in land you have or a state in land we're going to be talking about the types of land that exist the ideas of of registered land and unregistered land so when we talk about states in land i'm just going to very quickly because this is what we're going to turn on to first when we're talking about land ownership in quotation marks you know in proprietary rights in land okay i'm going to try my best to not say land ownership because for some cases i a freehold estate then what you're doing is you've been given you know de facto ownership of our piece of land however you're not legally owner of the land because the owner of the land is still the monarch so like i've just mentioned you have different types of estate in land
Oopsie daisy i've just moved this around i'm going to move that back smooth oops there we go anyway so what we do have is two broad types of estate in land so you have a freehold estate or you have a leaseholder state now there are obviously different types of sub categories that we're going to talk about as well when we go into a lot more detail on these but as a as the sort of broad interpretation you have a freehold or a leaseholder state and when we talk about estates okay specifically a freehold estate you can be understood as having what we call de facto ownership of the land okay for all intents and purposes you own that land but it's still legally like i mentioned the land is still historically owned by the crown holding an estate in land whatever the kind of estate in land okay gives you what we call a quote slice of time during which you're entitled to possess and enjoy that land and the relative sort of temporal distinctions will distinguish the type of estate so the type of this slice of time is determined by the type of estate you have and so therefore and this also gives you a grand issue of other kinds of rights and so therefore um the as an estate in land is very important and which when we move on uh following these lessons we're going to talk about the different types of land that exists things like registered land and we talk about things like the land registry and then things like unregistered land but then when we move on to talk about in um proprietary rights in land proprietary interests things like an estate or an interest itself we're going to start by looking at states and we're going to start by looking at three holder states.