Swanley Heritage No 2.2 - History of Land Ownership No 2 - Gavelkind and Inheritance

I have wondered how the Kent countryside might have looked different if customs and cultue of land inheritance and its concomitant death duties had been different. We will never know.

Inheritance of land in England have been bound by "primogeniture" and the laws of trusts. The prevailing custom has usually been that on the each owner's death the family estate passes successively to the eldest son, ie primogeniture. In the absence of a son the estate passed to the eldest brother or his successors; and so on.

Together with strategic marriages, primogeniture tended to ensure that over time a dominant family's successsive generations built substantial landholdings in one or mores areas of England.

Several trends probably mitigated against such a build-up for a particular family line, including:

• lack of a son - the estate passed to another branch of the family or, in the event of escheat, by bona vacantia to the sovereign personally (in former times, now to the Crown (state));
• by confiscation of the estate to the Crown or new regime, as punishment for choosing to side with a party who had a  failed attempt to take the crown  (or vice versa);
• an owner who used the wealth in an estate to generate funds for a lively high-living, eg by mortgages; 
• excessive taxation following the Finance Act 1896 when estate duty was introduced;
• in earlier less heavily regulated times, loss of the estate by the trustees of a family trust holding the estate in trust, ie they did not wisely administer the trust or simply divested the wealth for their own purposes.

Gavelkind:  At one time primogeniture was not the way of inheritance on the death of an intestate in Kent. Gavelkind was the law of inheritance - all the sons inherited the estate on the death of their father (if there were no sons all the daughters inherited.

Death Duties:  Although estate duty was abolished in 1972 there have been other death duties since, namely: capital transfer tax and then inheritance tax. However, this is an aside because the owners of substantial estates have found successive governments very supportive of their position under the seemingly harsh tax regime - numerous reliefs and exemptions are available to avoid the burden of tax by death duty. Such that it is perhaps the tax regime which now shapes the English countryside!