1. What is a Manorial Lordship?
1.1: Introduction
1.2: Importance of Solicitors
1.3: Taxation
1.4: British and overseas owners and death
1.5: Land Registration Act, 2002 (LRA)
1.6: Scottish baronies
2.1 Property: Real and Incorporeal
2.2: Treasury Solicitor (BV)
1.2: Importance of Solicitors
1.3: Taxation
1.4: British and overseas owners and death
1.5: Land Registration Act, 2002 (LRA)
1.6: Scottish baronies
2.1 Property: Real and Incorporeal
2.2: Treasury Solicitor (BV)
1.1: Introduction
UNDER the laws of real property in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic, Lordships of the manor are known as ‘estates in land’ and in Courts, where they may crop up in cases to do with real property, they are often simply called ‘land’.
They are ‘incorporeal hereditaments’ (literally, property without body) and are well glossed from the English and Welsh point of view in Halsbury’s Laws of England, vol viii, title Copyholds, which is available in most solicitors’ offices or central reference library.
Manors cover an immutable area of land and may include rights over and under that land, such as rights to exploit minerals under the soil, manorial waste, commons and greens. While it has always been the case that manorial rights can sometimes have a high value, this is rare because the rights are frequently unknown and unresearched (or are just not commercial). There is no value in owning mineral rights if there are no commercially exploitable minerals, such as granite or aggregate. If such benefits were routine, then asking prices by agents would be considerably higher to reflect this. However there may be future value in minerals trespass, where developers must dig down below the surface to put in footings for buildings or roads. Evidence for ownership of minerals rights is largely dependent on the individual administration of the manor and what records may be in the public domain. The Land Registry require robust proof of ownership and the Society would always recommend that Lords use a professional researcher to undertake such work, which can be expensive.
We are sometimes asked whether Lordships are a ‘good investment’ to which the answer is, ‘what goes up can also come down.’ The average price of a Manor was about £300 in 1955; about £600 in 1976; about £2,500 in 1981; about £10,000 in 1989; about £7,000 in 1992, during the last recession; about £12,000 in 1998, and about £7,000 now. Some Lordships command a premium price because of their names: Stratford Upon Avon and Wimbledon, sold respectively in 1993 and 1996 for £110,000 and £171,000. These are exceptional. At sales, some Manors will go higher or lower than the average, depending on the current financial climate. If you should enjoy a capital gain, then treat it as serendipity.
1.2: Importance of Solicitors
Like any other real property (known as real estate in the United States), Manorial Lordships belong to some one and are conveyed in precisely the same way as you would convey a house. Just as you would not contemplate the purchase of a house without legal advice, so you would be unwise to contemplate the purchase of a Manor without legal advice and you should appoint an independent solicitor/attorney. Agents such as Manorial Services and Strutt & Parker have panels of solicitors who are well versed in this arcane area of property law and will advise, but an intending purchaser is free to appoint any solicitor of his or her choice.
Solicitors will be looking principally for one thing: whether the person or company selling is the legal owner. ‘Legal owner’ is an important expression in law, and is quite different from a similar expression in law ‘beneficial owner’ (eg such as a beneficiary under a Will where the legal owner is the Executor or Trustee). The solicitor will also make inquiries with the seller’s solicitors about any rights that may be passed. He will also make Land Searches at HM Land Registry.
Once you have made your offer and it is accepted, your solicitor will ask the vendor’s solicitor for what is known as an Epitome of Title: ie proof of ownership over not less than 15 years (20 years in Ireland). With Lordships, in practice in the Civil Law, title is generally traced back 50 or more years. Proof of ownership is sometimes found in family or estate documents: viz Assents, Probates, Wills, Mortgages, Settlements. Statutory Declarations are common, the latter supported by persuasive exhibits from secondary sources. In effect, they are similar to the authentication of an unsigned painting, unmarked porcelain or furniture. They are as good as the person making the Declaration and the evidence adduced in exhibits. The legal expression that will appear in a Conveyance or wording very similar, in such Conveyances is ‘All and Singular that Manor or Lordship or Reputed Manor or Lordship of X, in the parish of Y, in the County of Z...’
A purchaser’s solicitor will check also by Searches that the seller is not a bankrupt or (if a company) where it is incorporated and not struck off or in receivership.
A solicitor will also check that the Manor is purchased ‘unencumbered’ (ie that there are no unexpected costs, such as the duty to repair the chancel of the local church, known as the ‘lay rectorship’, or ‘lay improprietorship’ or to maintain the village green).
1.3: Taxation
It is not a very complicated job, but it is worth spending about £400 with a solicitor who will ask the right questions of the seller’s solicitor and to get the correct paperwork. We mentioned commercial rights and capital gains on the asset: do not forget that if by chance there were potentially valuable rights on the Manor, the first thing you need to prove any legal entitlement to them is good title and conveyancing.
Value Added Tax (VAT) does not apply to the Lordship or Barony/Honour itself, but VAT on commissions paid to the agents will attract VAT at the prevailing rate (presently 20% in the UK) to all purchasers within the European Union. All other purchasers are exempt, as they are if they buy most goods in the UK.
Other taxes, such as Capital Gains or any income from a Lordship (eg mines and minerals, manorial waste) may well apply in the national jurisdiction of the owner. Owners should consult a tax accountant if need be.
1.4: British and overseas owners and death
A Lordship has a value and for all Lords of Manors, it will count as an asset at death, unless a lifetime arrangement has already been made. If you are domiciled outside the UK and your Lordship is your only UK asset, you will still need a Probate Certificate, even though the value is very likely to be well below the threshold for Inheritance Tax. This is usually a formality - an important one - and the solicitor who helped you to acquire the Lordship can do this for a deceased estate inexpensively. A Probate Certificate is important where the beneficiary wishes to sell the Lordship for a cash amount, as a purchaser’s solicitor will want evidence that it was transferred lawfully: ie that no tax was due on the death of the Testator. The Probate Certificate confirms that tax was not due, or if it formed part of a larger portfolio of assets in the UK, that took the value of the estate above the Inheritance Tax threshold, that it was included as part of the entire deceased estate in the UK.
1.5: Land Registration Act (LRA) (2002)
Lords of the Manor in England and Wales were given until 13 October 2013 to register any rights they may have in the Manor against properties on the register. Registration of rights against unregistered properties and those which have not been sold since 2013 can still be made. Registration can therefore continue indefinitely BUT if they weren’t registered when the freehold is re-registered they lapse on re-registration. However the change in law did not affect freehold rights such as manorial waste, which is by definition freehold belonging to the manor and this can still be registered if sufficient evidence to satisfy the LRA can be presented. The LRA does not oblige owners to register their rights, and non-registration does not mean that the Lordship or its rights are lost. It just means that the traditional paper conveyancing continues, as opposed to electronic conveyancing today. The LRA has a goal of registering everything in the next 30 years so it might be worthwhile considering research before this deadline.
An advantage of rights registration, however - especially if an owner does not live on the spot, enabling him or her to see what is going on - is that a solicitor to a landowner, developer, or house owner, mineral excavation company, wind farm operator, and so forth, where manorial rights might apply, will make a search of the Land Registry as a matter of course. Your name and address, or the address of your solicitor, will be available on the certificate and one of you will receive a letter from a solicitor acting for some one who may need to come to an arrangement on manorial rights with the Lord. This is known as First Registration.
NB: not being registered does not affect your ownership of manorial rights, but it is better to be registered as anyone seeking changes of use of land where the Lord of the Manor may be involved will come to you. You do not need to find the developer or other individual or company if your rights are registered.
You should also note that claims to manorial rights are not retrospective. For example, if you discover that a developer has used a route across the manorial waste or Common, known as a ransom strip, to gain access to a number of houses he has built, and the houses have been built, the Civil Courts of England will not entertain a ‘late claim.’ The Courts will take what is known as the ‘balance of convenience:’ ie if you did nothing about a ransom strip before building, or other activity, took place (regardless of whether you knew about it or not), you are most unlikely succeed in such a claim.
1.6: Scottish Baronies
Scottish Baronies are essentially what in England are called ‘manors’, but are called ‘baronies’. Indeed, Scottish Dispositions (Conveyances) routinely refer to the ‘manor place’ in barony documents going back centuries. Some land was still held feudally in Scotland until reforming legislation in the Scottish Parliament was enacted and came into force in November 2004. Purchasers should engage a Scottish solicitor (Scotland being a separate legal jurisdiction from England and Wales), and a seller will provide what is called an ‘Opinion’ or an ‘Advice’ from a lawyer or other land historian, who has made such things a speciality, as to the existence of a barony and the seller’s entitlement to sell. Its effect is the same as an English Statutory Declaration.
It should also be noted that Scottish baronies were stripped of all interests in land in November 2004. Rights, therefore, in superiorities, reversions, mines, minerals, solum (common and waste) were abolished, and the shell title ‘barony’ is all that remains. In England, a Lordship stripped of all its rights exists as a ‘Lordship in Gross.’ There is no comparable term in Scottish Law of which we are aware.
Conveyances in Scotland tend to be called ‘Dispositions’ and some legal words differ, but one acquires a barony in much the same way as a Lordship in England. It should be noted that Scottish solicitors are very much more expensive in these matters than English or Irish solicitors. It is wise to get a written quotation from a solicitor before committing.
2.1: Property: Real and Incorporeal
It is perhaps obvious to state, but for the avoidance of doubt, real property is property capable of physical possession, such as a house, a field, a wood, a painting, furniture, and so forth.
Incorporeal property is incapable of physical possession. As already noted, Lordships of the Manor (and Honours or Baronies) (all from now on in this advice called ‘Lordships’) are incorporeal property (‘incorporeal hereditaments’ - literally property without body). Other forms of incorporeal property, with which readers might be more familiar, are copyright, patents, intellectual property.
The important aspect of both forms of property ownership is that property belongs to some one come what may. The vast majority of Lordships belong to some individual or to trustees or might be held in a limited company, or a ‘corporation sole,’ such as the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City of London, who are Lords of the King’s Manor, Southwark, an Oxford College, a hospital charity, as Residuary Estate, and so forth.
Statute and recent Case Law is clear that incorporeal hereditaments (here meaning Lordships) cannot be claimed or prescribed: the Limitations Act (1980) and the Land Registration Act (2002), and Case Law in 2009.
2.2: Treasury Solicitor (BV)
However, one institution can lay claim to Lordships and other property.
It sometimes happens that there are no heirs to all sorts of property, including Lordships, or property is in a dissolved limited company or other defunct body. In cases such as these, this property passes to the British Treasury, in the person of the Treasury Solicitor BV (BV stands for bona vacantia, literally ‘good vacancy’) when the British Treasury becomes the owner. Since it was not the intention of Parliament to deny property to lost heirs or assigns, who may live at the other side of the world and be hard to locate, the Treasury does not normally seek to make sales of unclaimed property for 50 years, but maintains a friendly protective ownership in case an heir turns up within that period. Thereafter, the Treasury comes to market with the property. Lordships are no different, in this instance, from any other property and periodically Treasury (BV) Lordships come up for sale ‘on the instructions of the Crown.’
The conception of the Treasury Solicitor (BV) derives from an ancient word, ‘escheat.’ Escheat came into being in English from the French word ‘eschete’ from the verb ‘eschoir’ which itself originates from the Latin ‘escadere’ ‘to fall to the lot of So and So.’ Some members may find, in their conveyance, that they are said to have the right to escheat within their manor. In fact, the private ownership of escheat was done away with in reforming legislation many years ago, and transferred to the Crown (ie the British State), which had always enjoyed the right of escheat where there was no heir, or a family had been forfeited and their property escheated. That ‘escheat’ sometimes appears in conveyances of Lordships today is a legal solecism, usually included because it appears in earlier documents connected with the Lordship, and solicitors, quite rightly, add it to a modern conveyance because ‘you never know.’ There may be some loophole not yet tested in the Courts, unlikely to succeed as that must be.
Lordships, therefore, always belong to some one, and cannot legally be ‘claimed’ by third parties, which is what some websites assert.
UNDER the laws of real property in England, Wales, Northern Ireland, and the Irish Republic, Lordships of the manor are known as ‘estates in land’ and in Courts, where they may crop up in cases to do with real property, they are often simply called ‘land’.
They are ‘incorporeal hereditaments’ (literally, property without body) and are well glossed from the English and Welsh point of view in Halsbury’s Laws of England, vol viii, title Copyholds, which is available in most solicitors’ offices or central reference library.
Manors cover an immutable area of land and may include rights over and under that land, such as rights to exploit minerals under the soil, manorial waste, commons and greens. While it has always been the case that manorial rights can sometimes have a high value, this is rare because the rights are frequently unknown and unresearched (or are just not commercial). There is no value in owning mineral rights if there are no commercially exploitable minerals, such as granite or aggregate. If such benefits were routine, then asking prices by agents would be considerably higher to reflect this. However there may be future value in minerals trespass, where developers must dig down below the surface to put in footings for buildings or roads. Evidence for ownership of minerals rights is largely dependent on the individual administration of the manor and what records may be in the public domain. The Land Registry require robust proof of ownership and the Society would always recommend that Lords use a professional researcher to undertake such work, which can be expensive.
We are sometimes asked whether Lordships are a ‘good investment’ to which the answer is, ‘what goes up can also come down.’ The average price of a Manor was about £300 in 1955; about £600 in 1976; about £2,500 in 1981; about £10,000 in 1989; about £7,000 in 1992, during the last recession; about £12,000 in 1998, and about £7,000 now. Some Lordships command a premium price because of their names: Stratford Upon Avon and Wimbledon, sold respectively in 1993 and 1996 for £110,000 and £171,000. These are exceptional. At sales, some Manors will go higher or lower than the average, depending on the current financial climate. If you should enjoy a capital gain, then treat it as serendipity.
1.2: Importance of Solicitors
Like any other real property (known as real estate in the United States), Manorial Lordships belong to some one and are conveyed in precisely the same way as you would convey a house. Just as you would not contemplate the purchase of a house without legal advice, so you would be unwise to contemplate the purchase of a Manor without legal advice and you should appoint an independent solicitor/attorney. Agents such as Manorial Services and Strutt & Parker have panels of solicitors who are well versed in this arcane area of property law and will advise, but an intending purchaser is free to appoint any solicitor of his or her choice.
Solicitors will be looking principally for one thing: whether the person or company selling is the legal owner. ‘Legal owner’ is an important expression in law, and is quite different from a similar expression in law ‘beneficial owner’ (eg such as a beneficiary under a Will where the legal owner is the Executor or Trustee). The solicitor will also make inquiries with the seller’s solicitors about any rights that may be passed. He will also make Land Searches at HM Land Registry.
Once you have made your offer and it is accepted, your solicitor will ask the vendor’s solicitor for what is known as an Epitome of Title: ie proof of ownership over not less than 15 years (20 years in Ireland). With Lordships, in practice in the Civil Law, title is generally traced back 50 or more years. Proof of ownership is sometimes found in family or estate documents: viz Assents, Probates, Wills, Mortgages, Settlements. Statutory Declarations are common, the latter supported by persuasive exhibits from secondary sources. In effect, they are similar to the authentication of an unsigned painting, unmarked porcelain or furniture. They are as good as the person making the Declaration and the evidence adduced in exhibits. The legal expression that will appear in a Conveyance or wording very similar, in such Conveyances is ‘All and Singular that Manor or Lordship or Reputed Manor or Lordship of X, in the parish of Y, in the County of Z...’
A purchaser’s solicitor will check also by Searches that the seller is not a bankrupt or (if a company) where it is incorporated and not struck off or in receivership.
A solicitor will also check that the Manor is purchased ‘unencumbered’ (ie that there are no unexpected costs, such as the duty to repair the chancel of the local church, known as the ‘lay rectorship’, or ‘lay improprietorship’ or to maintain the village green).
1.3: Taxation
It is not a very complicated job, but it is worth spending about £400 with a solicitor who will ask the right questions of the seller’s solicitor and to get the correct paperwork. We mentioned commercial rights and capital gains on the asset: do not forget that if by chance there were potentially valuable rights on the Manor, the first thing you need to prove any legal entitlement to them is good title and conveyancing.
Value Added Tax (VAT) does not apply to the Lordship or Barony/Honour itself, but VAT on commissions paid to the agents will attract VAT at the prevailing rate (presently 20% in the UK) to all purchasers within the European Union. All other purchasers are exempt, as they are if they buy most goods in the UK.
Other taxes, such as Capital Gains or any income from a Lordship (eg mines and minerals, manorial waste) may well apply in the national jurisdiction of the owner. Owners should consult a tax accountant if need be.
1.4: British and overseas owners and death
A Lordship has a value and for all Lords of Manors, it will count as an asset at death, unless a lifetime arrangement has already been made. If you are domiciled outside the UK and your Lordship is your only UK asset, you will still need a Probate Certificate, even though the value is very likely to be well below the threshold for Inheritance Tax. This is usually a formality - an important one - and the solicitor who helped you to acquire the Lordship can do this for a deceased estate inexpensively. A Probate Certificate is important where the beneficiary wishes to sell the Lordship for a cash amount, as a purchaser’s solicitor will want evidence that it was transferred lawfully: ie that no tax was due on the death of the Testator. The Probate Certificate confirms that tax was not due, or if it formed part of a larger portfolio of assets in the UK, that took the value of the estate above the Inheritance Tax threshold, that it was included as part of the entire deceased estate in the UK.
1.5: Land Registration Act (LRA) (2002)
Lords of the Manor in England and Wales were given until 13 October 2013 to register any rights they may have in the Manor against properties on the register. Registration of rights against unregistered properties and those which have not been sold since 2013 can still be made. Registration can therefore continue indefinitely BUT if they weren’t registered when the freehold is re-registered they lapse on re-registration. However the change in law did not affect freehold rights such as manorial waste, which is by definition freehold belonging to the manor and this can still be registered if sufficient evidence to satisfy the LRA can be presented. The LRA does not oblige owners to register their rights, and non-registration does not mean that the Lordship or its rights are lost. It just means that the traditional paper conveyancing continues, as opposed to electronic conveyancing today. The LRA has a goal of registering everything in the next 30 years so it might be worthwhile considering research before this deadline.
An advantage of rights registration, however - especially if an owner does not live on the spot, enabling him or her to see what is going on - is that a solicitor to a landowner, developer, or house owner, mineral excavation company, wind farm operator, and so forth, where manorial rights might apply, will make a search of the Land Registry as a matter of course. Your name and address, or the address of your solicitor, will be available on the certificate and one of you will receive a letter from a solicitor acting for some one who may need to come to an arrangement on manorial rights with the Lord. This is known as First Registration.
NB: not being registered does not affect your ownership of manorial rights, but it is better to be registered as anyone seeking changes of use of land where the Lord of the Manor may be involved will come to you. You do not need to find the developer or other individual or company if your rights are registered.
You should also note that claims to manorial rights are not retrospective. For example, if you discover that a developer has used a route across the manorial waste or Common, known as a ransom strip, to gain access to a number of houses he has built, and the houses have been built, the Civil Courts of England will not entertain a ‘late claim.’ The Courts will take what is known as the ‘balance of convenience:’ ie if you did nothing about a ransom strip before building, or other activity, took place (regardless of whether you knew about it or not), you are most unlikely succeed in such a claim.
1.6: Scottish Baronies
Scottish Baronies are essentially what in England are called ‘manors’, but are called ‘baronies’. Indeed, Scottish Dispositions (Conveyances) routinely refer to the ‘manor place’ in barony documents going back centuries. Some land was still held feudally in Scotland until reforming legislation in the Scottish Parliament was enacted and came into force in November 2004. Purchasers should engage a Scottish solicitor (Scotland being a separate legal jurisdiction from England and Wales), and a seller will provide what is called an ‘Opinion’ or an ‘Advice’ from a lawyer or other land historian, who has made such things a speciality, as to the existence of a barony and the seller’s entitlement to sell. Its effect is the same as an English Statutory Declaration.
It should also be noted that Scottish baronies were stripped of all interests in land in November 2004. Rights, therefore, in superiorities, reversions, mines, minerals, solum (common and waste) were abolished, and the shell title ‘barony’ is all that remains. In England, a Lordship stripped of all its rights exists as a ‘Lordship in Gross.’ There is no comparable term in Scottish Law of which we are aware.
Conveyances in Scotland tend to be called ‘Dispositions’ and some legal words differ, but one acquires a barony in much the same way as a Lordship in England. It should be noted that Scottish solicitors are very much more expensive in these matters than English or Irish solicitors. It is wise to get a written quotation from a solicitor before committing.
2.1: Property: Real and Incorporeal
It is perhaps obvious to state, but for the avoidance of doubt, real property is property capable of physical possession, such as a house, a field, a wood, a painting, furniture, and so forth.
Incorporeal property is incapable of physical possession. As already noted, Lordships of the Manor (and Honours or Baronies) (all from now on in this advice called ‘Lordships’) are incorporeal property (‘incorporeal hereditaments’ - literally property without body). Other forms of incorporeal property, with which readers might be more familiar, are copyright, patents, intellectual property.
The important aspect of both forms of property ownership is that property belongs to some one come what may. The vast majority of Lordships belong to some individual or to trustees or might be held in a limited company, or a ‘corporation sole,’ such as the Lord Mayor and Corporation of the City of London, who are Lords of the King’s Manor, Southwark, an Oxford College, a hospital charity, as Residuary Estate, and so forth.
Statute and recent Case Law is clear that incorporeal hereditaments (here meaning Lordships) cannot be claimed or prescribed: the Limitations Act (1980) and the Land Registration Act (2002), and Case Law in 2009.
2.2: Treasury Solicitor (BV)
However, one institution can lay claim to Lordships and other property.
It sometimes happens that there are no heirs to all sorts of property, including Lordships, or property is in a dissolved limited company or other defunct body. In cases such as these, this property passes to the British Treasury, in the person of the Treasury Solicitor BV (BV stands for bona vacantia, literally ‘good vacancy’) when the British Treasury becomes the owner. Since it was not the intention of Parliament to deny property to lost heirs or assigns, who may live at the other side of the world and be hard to locate, the Treasury does not normally seek to make sales of unclaimed property for 50 years, but maintains a friendly protective ownership in case an heir turns up within that period. Thereafter, the Treasury comes to market with the property. Lordships are no different, in this instance, from any other property and periodically Treasury (BV) Lordships come up for sale ‘on the instructions of the Crown.’
The conception of the Treasury Solicitor (BV) derives from an ancient word, ‘escheat.’ Escheat came into being in English from the French word ‘eschete’ from the verb ‘eschoir’ which itself originates from the Latin ‘escadere’ ‘to fall to the lot of So and So.’ Some members may find, in their conveyance, that they are said to have the right to escheat within their manor. In fact, the private ownership of escheat was done away with in reforming legislation many years ago, and transferred to the Crown (ie the British State), which had always enjoyed the right of escheat where there was no heir, or a family had been forfeited and their property escheated. That ‘escheat’ sometimes appears in conveyances of Lordships today is a legal solecism, usually included because it appears in earlier documents connected with the Lordship, and solicitors, quite rightly, add it to a modern conveyance because ‘you never know.’ There may be some loophole not yet tested in the Courts, unlikely to succeed as that must be.
Lordships, therefore, always belong to some one, and cannot legally be ‘claimed’ by third parties, which is what some websites assert.