Land Ownership in 18th Century England

Thus it is no surprise that the changing political and cultural tenure of English life during the 18th and 19th centuries was reflected in the meaning of land; the metaphors and significances associated with land both mirrored and in some measure created these political changes.

At the beginning of the 18th century England (like other European nations) was marked by extreme distinctions of wealth, with a very large distance between rich and poor, powerful and impotent and cultured and uneducated. These distinctions were in many ways defined and maintained by the different relationships that the different classes had to land. Those who owned large estates were not only wealthy, but they constituted the governing classes both in terms of those who were legislators sitting in Parliament and passing laws and those who served as magistrates sitting in local courts enforcing them. Moreover, as Mingay notes, the culture of the wealthy landed class diverged sharply from that of the unlanded peasantry.

The culture of the wealthy, embracing art, literature, architecture, music and drama, and not least manners and the arts of polite conversation and correspondence, contrasted sharply with the unsophisticated country lore and confined h

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f land during the 19th century, and the landowning class itself was reduced in power by successive reforms of the franchise and by the arrival of new representative institutions in local government . Much of the shifting relationship between power and land that occurred during the 19th century was reflected in the battles fought over various Corn Laws -- those forms of legislation that had been used for hundreds of years to regulate the price of grains as well as to ensure the adequate supply of food for the country. During the 19th century wage controls, high wheat prices, and resultant high bread prices placed a heavy burden on the mass of the population. The Corn Laws thus perpetuated the economic distinction between the classes and were a source of continuing discontent. In other words, the Corn Laws helped maintain traditional distinctions between landed and landless people in an era in which those distinctions were becoming increasingly archaic and the subject of growing social unrest . While the Corn Laws had at different times in English history been modified or amended to serve different interests, on the whole, the condition of the English farmers and workers was not improved. This was certainly true during the econom
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Approximate Word count = 1915
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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