Downton Abbey Background: Part 2

19 Thursday Jul 2012

Tags

Anglophile, Crawley, Downton Abbey, England, Fee tail, inheritance, Jane Austen, land, Peerage, period drama, To Kill a Mockingbird

So much of the drama of Downton Abbey rests on the entail. If you’ve read Jane Austen or To Kill a Mockingbird, you’ve heard about these mysterious legal arrangements. Last night at the local library, I learned for once and for all what an entail is and what their history was.

Any Downton Abbey fan knows that Lord Grantham can’t leave his estate to his daughter because of the entail. It must go to the oldest male heir and that heir died on the Titanic. A distant cousin, Matthew will inherit the massive house, all its furnishings and grounds. That information can suffice, but as we’ve go to wait till January for our next Downton Abbey fix and since the library had a historian speak on Downton Abbey background, and since I’m geeky enough to dash off to such an event, I can now illuminate this entail business.

Get out some No Doze and here we go!

Way back when in England everyone who helped out the powerful got parcels of land and the poor could work as farm hands and use the commons for pastures. The problem that soon surfaced was that as the father died all the sons would get a divided parcel of land. Well, that would mean in a few generations people would be living on like one acre. That’s no good. Land meant wealth, power and status.

So when the Normans invaded they were bright enough to be careful that the parcels of land they confiscated and doled out remained intact. So land was passed down by primogenator, i.e. to the eldest living son. This method gave the British aristocracy a lot of power. In fact, by the 18th century the aristocracy in England had more power than the monarch. (That wasn’t the case in France so I guess they did things differently over there.)

Women’s property and money was subsumed by the husband upon marriage.

Entails (Sometimes In tails)

According to LexisNexis, an entail means:

To settle property upon a person with limitations in respect of the succession. Precisely, to create an estate in tail, that is, a fee tail, in conveying or devising real property. To involve, e. g., the trial of a law suit “involves” much preparation.

But we figured that. Entails made this even more secure, power more consolidated. The land the nobles got in the Henry’s era weren’t all that big compared to what the Crawleys have. Why?

Enclosures

Small fields and forests got taken by a few families

Because of the Privatization and Enclosure Acts, which began in the 1600s, allowed people to petition Parliament to consolidate plots disenfranchising small farmers. Before you knew it 4 million acres in Britain were owned by 12 individuals (Ye Olde 1%). Enclosures allowed the rich to become richer. They also made farming more efficient for a time. Yet the small farmer sure got squeezed out.

Common Recovery document

An entail could be “smashed” as Violet periodically urges and even by Jane Austen’s time they were becoming unpopular. One way to break an entail was this loop hole – when the legal son turned 21 he could turn the property over to fee simple (i.e. owning a land with a deed) that way the new owner could do with it as he pleased, will it to anyone, split it up, sell off parts.

There was also something called a Common Recovery whereby an owner could break an entail by creating this legal mess whereby the landowner transfers the land to an agent or lawyer and then some bogus chap John Doe, Richard Row, Moses Mill or such seems to take the land and sell it all so the owner can do what he wants with it. It’s all quite confusing and I have no idea why the owner could sell to an agent but not to someone else, but then these property laws are all about power and injustice when you start reading through some of these articles.

The Fines and Recoveries Act of 1833 put an end to this charade and allowed that a lease could trump and entail.

So it seems that Robert Crawley could have signed away his entail at age 21, but if he was a serious sort who liked tradition, he wouldn’t have felt the need to. Most 21 year olds probably figure they’ll have at least one son. He still could . . . we’ll have to see what happens in January.

Commoners try to keep the commons

Downton Abbey Background, Part 1 (smkelly8.com)
The Next Big Thing in Asia: Butlers (newsfeed.time.com)
A Short History on Enclosures (The Land Magazine)
Is Downton Abbey pushing up stately home prices? (gateway-homes.co.uk)
Current Dispute in Wales over Enclosure (BBC)
Feudal Origins of Land Titles (Institute for Economic Democracy)
Law, Land and Love (A great, readable article on Pride & Prejudice and entails)
Brief History of Allotments, i.e. How the Small Farmers & Co. Lost so Much

Downton Abbey Background, Part 1

15 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by smkelly8 in Television

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Tags

Charles Spencer-Churchill 9th Duke of Marlborough, Consuela, Consuelo Vanderbilt, Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, Lord Randolph Churchill, Peerage, Winston Churchill

Thursday my local library offered a lecture on the background of Downton Abbey, the popular period piece from across the pond. The speaker was Barbara Geiger, a landscape historian. I didn’t know there was such a job. She teaches for ITT and specializes in late 19th and early 20th century history.

I’ll share the detailed explanation of British property law for later. Now I’ll briefly introduce three women who, like Cora on Downton Abbey, were American brides imported to infuse cash into the coffers of British aristocracy. These women had dramatic lives and I can see adding their biographies to my reading list.

Consuelo Vanderbilt

Consuelo Vanderbilt (of “the” Vandrbilt’s) must have had envied royalty or she wouldn’t dress like this. Obviously, she couldn’t marry a royal so the aristocracy would have to do. Her parents schemed to find a duke or lord for their daughter. Despite her protests, Consuela’s domineering mother manipulated her into marrying Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough. After producing “an heir and a spare,” Consuela and “Sunny” (Spencer-Churchill’s nickname) lived rather separate lives and eventually annulled their marriage. Later Consuela married a French aviator who worked with the Wright Brothers at one point. A biography on Consuelo is Glitter and Gold.

Jennie Jerome

Born in New York, Jeanette (“Jennie”) Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill. They were engaged within three days of meeting. Lord Randolph was known to be rather unruly and wild, quite a philanderer, drinker and gambler, hence the need to marry for money.

Rumors of the day suggest Jeanette subscribed to a “what’s good for the gander is good for the goose” and she had many affairs.

Her son was Winston Churchill and though he was primarily raised by nannies, he did have a close relationship with his mother. One controversy that’s alive and well in the Talk section of Wikipedia is whether Winston Churchill was born premature or whether he was conceived before his parents married. While the couple got engaged quickly, there was a long hold up as the families disagreed about the dowry. Thus the pair may have been impatient. That’s my guess.

I just put her biography, American Jennie: The Remarkable Life of Lady Randolph Churchill on hold at the library.

Also fond of tieras, Lady Almina

Almina Victoria Maria Alexandra Wombwell married the heir to Highclere Castle, Henry George Herbert, 6th Earl of Carnarvon. (Highclere is the castle where they film Downton Abbey.) She has a rather mysterious background as her mother was married to Captain Wombwell, but many believe her father was Alfred de Rothschild since he sent her to school and left her a fortune. Her biography is Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle.