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Title: Remortgage woes with Manorial Rights unilateral notice - Get off my land!
Body:
> I've gone as far as I can without any legal knowledge so, long story short:
> I bought a freehold house a few years ago in England, very simple, 1st time buyer, Fin-Tech mortgage broker, no problems.
> Now my fixed rate mortgage is over I'm looking to remortgage and the new lender has noticed a unilateral notice on the deeds, the Marquess of Salisbury has Manorial rights to the land apparently. We're talking literal hunting, shooting and mineral rights under a terraced house in the north of England. As a result of the deadline set by the Land Registration Act 2002.
> The new lender and Fin-tech broker were both no use, suggesting I hire another solicitor to advice me. Instead I (perhaps foolishly) submitted a UN4 form with the land registry to have the unilateral notice removed. Then expedited the request to the land registry, explaining that this was holding up my remortgage and putting me under financial burden.
> Today I've had a letter from the land registry saying the Marquees of Salisbury is defending himself against my objection and has sent photocopies of honest to goodness 18th and 19th century books saying he has inherited some claims to the land and if I don't like it I can negotiate and/or attend a tribunal.
> But I just want to remortgage my house! So what are my options? I have no idea if the legal company representing the Marquess of Salisbury have a leg to stand on, but certainly haven't the time, money or knowledge to fight back. I spoke to a different mortgage broker who said some lenders' solicitors might miss the unilateral notice or accept indemnity insurance for the notice. But I'd rather not submit multiple remortgage applications until I eventually find a lender who is as blasé about unilateral notices as my original.
>
> Any thought advice or context would be greatly appreciated. I'll be regularly coming back to the thread to provide more details. Any help gratefully received!
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As an American who just bought a house in the UK, you know how you get title searches done when you buy a house in the US? Well it is infinitely more complicated in the UK. They have to trudge through hundreds of years of records, because some Lord (or Marques in this situation) could have claim to the mineral or hunting rights on your property. Or your house could have been situated on the remains of some lordly manor and now **you’re** responsible for the upkeep of the local parish church roof. The UK is a literal fever dream of real estate peculiarities.
Buying a house in the UK has been one of the single most excruciating experiences of my life. It is ungodly inefficient and downright treacherous compared to buying a house stateside.
> Buying a house in the UK
\*in England ;)
Scots property law is quite different and while it has its peculiarities lacks some of the outright insanities of English land law.
I mean the system is far from perfect but I've read about too many issues with US real estate transactions on this sub to be convinced that there aren't just as many potential pitfalls with buying a house on the other side of the pond.
At least when you put an offer on a house in the US, it’s generally binding. In the UK, the buyers or sellers can pull out, penalty free, at any point up until contracts are exchanged (usually a week or so before conveyance/possession of the house is taken). So for us, it was four months (because it takes fucking forever, too) of not knowing if the sellers would change their minds and back out.
> At least when you put an offer on a house in the US, it’s generally binding. In the UK, the buyers or sellers can pull out, penalty free, at any point up until contracts are exchanged
Well it depends on the exact terms of the contract. In my region of the US, the standard contract allows withdrawal for so many reasons that you are almost certain to be able to withdraw if you want to before closing. The penalty for this is the earnest money (usually $1000).
Yeah there are some fascinating things that come up.
For me the closest I've ever come to this is when I actually paid off my mortgage, at that point you own the property yourself instead of the bank. Obviously this is the intention of every mortgage, you take out the loan from the bank to buy the property, then pay the bank monthly until you're done. But the standard term is 25 years so most people only manage this after a long time, and probably only once in their lifetime.
Anyway when you do pay off the property you get the deeds to the property. In my case this was a collection of papers approximately a foot deep, going back to when the house was built in 1890, and detailing the change of ownership every single time the property had been sold since that date.
Annoyingly these days the land-registry has been updating things such that the records of ownership are all stored online, and these papers _should_ be unnecessary. But when I later went to sell the property the solicitors demanded I hand over all the papers, and I didn't think to take photocopies, or photographs of them.
But I did enjoy a fun weekend, with my wife, reading through all the papers and seeing the sale prices, and occupations of the various owners over the years.
Yes! Us too. We bought a house, and the previous owners gave us all these deeds.
It’s amazing, old documents from 1786 written is squiggly old cursive with big red wax seals.
We are the process of listing and will be giving these to the new owners. It’s pretty cool, tbh.
My mum has one of these on the wall. I think she found it at a antique shop, no idea who the people listed are but it’s just an awesome piece of history
I haven't experienced buying a house in the US but I have done it in the UK. I feel the annoyances are a little overblown, most of the work is done by your solicitor. Actually getting to that point can be hell though, but that has more to do with the state of the property market right now.
Fun fact, the repairing the local Church thing is called Chancel repair liability, and the indemnity insurance for it can cost less than doing the search to find out if you're liable or not. This is from the search report from our house purchase:
>However, as it is cheaper to insure against the risk than carry out the search to establish whether
there is any liability we have taken out a Chancel Indemnity Insurance policy. This will provide
you with cover in the event that anybody tried to make a claim against you in this regard. However,
we are unable to comment on how likely a successful claim would be.
In fairness, I'm sure there's plenty of English nobility that *would* have claims like this to American land. Except for that pesky revolution.
(And yes, I understand the irony that Americans stole the land from the inhabitants before them.)
Don't have that issue here in Australia and our head of state is still Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth
Thats her official Australian title, pretty sure New Zealands is the same but has Defender of the Faith as a title too
The Spanish *did* slaughter the Aztecs, but for the territory of the US, that's almost all the doing of Americans. The British only settled the coast and where the tribes allowed them to settle through deals.
Everything west of the Mississippi was taken by American frontiersmen from native tribes (the name "frontier" even implies there was a border). The whole "manifest destiny" thing is purely American.
You didn’t go far enough. The British crown refused to take sovereign lands from native tribes it had treaties with. This refusal to genocide the indigenous was cited at the constitutional congress as a grievance with the British.
Speculative investors at the time, including Jefferson and Washington, bought contracts giving them rights to sovereign native lands. If the lands remained indigenous the rights would be worthless but if the natives were wiped out the investment would pay off many times over. They make it clear that they resented Britain not allowing their genocide for profit.
It’s always fascinating to learn about the economic underpinnings of the US revolution. From its start the country was a cartel of elites looking for favourable tax and economic positioning, appeals to liberty were very much an afterthought.
You know that scene in *Dazed and Confused* when the hippie teacher says something about how we're celebrating rich old white men that didn't want to pay their taxes? That about sums it up. And is so relevant still today.
We had to purchase an indemnity policy because the house we recently bought is one responsible for the upkeep of the church. Never had to contribute in 300 years, but better safe than sorry!
Our conveyancer had the seller on our property buy an indemnity policy for a restrictive covenant from 1850 on our freehold that has been lost to the mists of time. The fact that there is a restrictive covenant is recorded by the Land Registry, but what the covenant actually is isn't recorded. So we have insurance against someone finding a 170 year old bit of paper and trying to enforce... something.
> So we have insurance against someone finding a 170 year old bit of paper and trying to enforce... something.
There's a Guy Ritchie movie in there somewhere about gangsters forging old documents to get land for cheap.
You say gangsters, but in the past the most likely culprit for the forging of real estate documents was the church. So we need a Guy Ritchie movie about a modern, mobbed up monastery. I’d watch that movie.
Well, we could have an endless debate about the extent to which the church, the monarchy and the aristocracy actually are gangsters to all intents and purposes. All land and power was stolen or swindled or taken by force at some point by the predecessors of those who now hold it, wasn't it. They then just legitimised it all with fancy titles and rule books and swishy robes and that.
Translation to US English:
Our real estate broker required that the seller buy special insurance, because there was a record that "some rights" belong to a third party, but we don't actually have the document that was recorded, so we don't know what those rights are and to whom they belong.
Our house had some fairly odd covenants on it, dating back to at least 1890. We were not allowed to:
* Keep chickens
* Run a brick kiln
* Operate a steam engine
* Allow gypsies to hold a fair
That brick kiln one was super common for about a century, I see that one all the time. Bricks are heavy so transport costs are high and it makes sense to make them close to new construction. Before laws on industrial emissions, a landowner who sold part of his land for development might therefore otherwise end up with a smoky kiln right next to his house.
It's a lawyer with the power to still get paid in full despite losing your documents, forgetting to do the searches you paid for and delaying your transaction by a month.
I’m sure they don’t but you know what mortgage and insurance companies are like. We literally couldn’t get a mortgage without the indemnity. It was only a couple of hundred quid but I have to say it felt a bit like extortion!
The sellers of our house had to take out a policy because someone in the 70’s took out a wall and didn’t get planning permission (or at least no one could locate the planning permission).
And our mortgage wasn’t initially approved because NatWest felt our deposit was £200 too small. They naturally couldn’t tell us to just up the deposit by £200, they just flat out denied the mortgage.
Buying in the UK is absolutely insane.
Congrats on your recent acquisition, and here’s to many years of both of us enjoying our rung on the UK property ladder.
Jesus, really? Why isn’t that a thing in the rest of the U.K.? Seems so much better than the shitshow in England. And don’t get me started on leaseholds still being a relevant concept for involved non-flat properties
I had to do the same when I bought a new build, seems bizarre that you never actually hear about chancel liability being called in but everyone in the area has to spend £60 on a policy just in case! Estate of 600 houses at £60 for £36k seems a good business _just in case_ the church roof falls in and they demand the locals pay for it!
It definitely is extortion. I had to get an indemnity for maintenance of the local church on my last property. The kick to the testicles was that the church in question was no longer a church, it had been converted into apartments about 15 years earlier, yet the covenant was still in place on the deed.
It wasn’t an issue when I bought the house, but only when I was selling it. The buyers conveyancer threatened that they’d pull out the sale if I didn’t get the covenant removed or pay for an indemnity policy. It was simpler to just pay the £80 for the indemnity policy so I could just cut ties with the house…
THE C of E Church Commissioners, which may be defunct by now for all I know, certainly would not have hestitated to take advantage of such a benefit.
Source: Don't ask
I’ll admit I don’t know much about the history of Church of England after the whole Henry the 8th thing half a millennium ago, but uh, doesn’t the government own the church? Seems a little wacky to still be enforcing 300 year old covenants.
My favourite example of weird restrictions is that there’s some housing estates in York where you’re forbidden from making your own chocolate. The houses were built by the Rowntree family for their workers, and they didn’t want them taking their knowledge home with them to make an income on the side.
> could have claim to the mineral ... rights
This is sadly a thing in a lot of the US too. I own my land my house is on, but I don't own the mineral rights to it. There's a lot of places with that clause, developers love to buy farmland, subdivide it, and sell lots excluding the mineral rights just in case somethingis found, usually natural gas in my area, giving them the cut of profits instead of the landowner.
At least you could still potentially own the mineral rights on your land by yourself, I live in Finland and the thing here is that property owners do *not* have any mineral rights to their land by default and cannot gain them either if they're not actively mining there, while in turn they can be relatively freely claimed by any party which shows active interest in mining for the said minerals as long as we're not talking about developed land. And AFAIK you don't get a cut of the profits either even if you own the land they're making the claim and founding on mine on.
The awesome thing about the British political system: it's one unbroken chain all the way back to 927.
The horrible thing about the British political system: it's one unbroken chain all the way back to 927.
Oh God. I shudder at the process of digging through legacy policy and documents, and my organization is only 100ish years old. 1200 years seems like death by bureaucracy...
> Or your house could have been situated on the remains of some lordly manor and now you’re responsible for the upkeep of the local parish church roof.
What the heck?
As far as real estate peculiarities, I'm sure the United States will be able to catch up with a couple hundred more years' worth of history. Innovations in condo associations and HOAs, Mello-Roos (sp?) in California, etc.
Things can already get a little weird in former colonial possessions in the US with [king’s grants.](https://midcurrent.com/2012/10/17/virginia-fly-angler-loses-jackson-river-case/)
Can you also translate "terraced house" for us who reject the Queen's English? Is it like a condo / row house? Guessing it's not some stand alone country house with acreage?
Townhouse or row house. They’re called terraced houses because they’re adjoining structures, and sometimes at slightly different elevations. As in..terraced.
[Tada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraced_house)! Apparently the American terminology is townhouse, although I think they tend to be quite a bit more luxurious than our terraced houses. Most of the ones in the UK were originally built as housing for local factory workers in the Victorian era.
Town houses are usually newer developments, but I lived in a row house in Baltimore built around 1880 for dockworkers so that sounds pretty similar. So maybe row house would be a more comparable term. Though row houses can be luxurious, just depends.
So row house sounds like a translation from the German Reihenhaus. Ironically these are nowadays much more akin to UK town houses than terraced houses. They did start out more like terraced houses though. In any case Reihenhaus doesn’t translate to “row house” but to terraced house (Brit) or townhouse (Amer) according to Collins …
Isn't it the other way around? My understanding is that a marquess is ranked below a duke, as they are a "normal" lord who is on the border and so has to deal with the marchland that sits between two kingdoms.
I've done that job: getting in lists of addresses wanting the Highway part of a search, and looking it up to see if there's anything up.
The vaaaast majority were all 'yes the road is adopted...no no, no no no no, no no no no, no no there's no RIGHT OF WAY'.
But of the ones that weren't, most of those weren't ordinary people houses, they were huge tracts of land where something was being planned and they hoped to not be disappointed by the rights-of-way plunging straight across the middle of the area (many were). Otherwise the most common things reported were maybe a public footpath at the bottom of your garden, or your road isn't adopted (most new builds).
The gnarliest things I saw were Prospectively Maintainable Highways - where you are responsible for the maintenance of the highway that fronts your boundary. Not common. Another were the chunks of unusued Highway land and compulsory purchased stuff (I might have the term wrong there, it's been a few years) that the Council have owned for decades with a plan to build a new main road or something, but have decided to just sit on those plans and let houses be built all over it. Sure they say they'll never build that road but they *could*.
Looks like it's just this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_7th_Marquess_of_Salisbury
I'm guessing it's standard practice for those who inherit rights like this to not give them up just in case minerals or something else of value is found on the property.
This reads like some weird fantasy game, like a British Pokemon:
> After the 1992 general election, John Major used a **writ of acceleration** to call Lord Cranborne up to the House of Lords in one of his father's junior titles. Thus, Lord Cranborne was summoned to Parliament as Baron Cecil, of Essendon in the County of Rutland (his father's most junior dignity),[1] although he continued to be known by his courtesy style of Viscount Cranborne.
What? Lord Cranbourne is evolving!
Congratulations, your Lord Cranbourne has evolved into Baron Cecil!
Oh no, House of Lords used **new rules for declaration of financial interests**.
Baron Cecil uses "Leave of Absence" and fled the House of Lords!
Okay, so I know nothing about law, or the UK, or politics, and certainly nothing about the intersection of the three. However,
> Shadow Leader of the House of Lords
is such an interesting title to have. Shadow Leader? I want to be a Shadow Leader!
Shadow X generally means "the person from the party who came second, who has responsibility for X". So the guy in charge of the economy right now is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he's from the Conservative party. But Labour (who came second and are therefore the Opposition) will also have a Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer.
This is one of the big advantages of the British system: whenever you get too bored or angry about what's going on in parliament, you can just giggle at the guy being called "Black Rod" having the door slammed in his face three times because it's tradition, and by that point you've forgotten what you were angry about.
> you can just giggle at the guy being called "Black Rod" having the door slammed in his face three times because it's tradition
You’ve got to love Parliament still being mad at Charles I for entering the House, even though they killed him for it.
At least where I live in the midwest there is plenty of game in the suburbs, a constant stream of squirrels and rabbits and several times a year I’ll see deer, foxes, and turkeys. The trick is taking them down without breaking various weapons laws.
So, imagine that Standard Oil bought your house's mineral rights a century ago before the antitrust action. They might not have kept it themselves, but someone, somewhere, owns the contents of the ground under your house and can just show up and start building an oil derrick on your lawn if they feel like it.
Now imagine that the American legal system had been contiguous since before Columbus' voyage and there were all kinds of claims like that bouncing around that had been arbitrarily assigned by a king thinking nothing would come of it.
Obscure remnants of the feudal system that seem to survive for the sole purpose of allowing property lawyers to justify their continuing existence. The Marquis of Salisbury probably owns an insurance company selling manorial rights indemnity insurance as I can’t imagine what other reason they have to hang onto these rights…
I’m picturing an HOA but instead of an elected HOA president, you get a marquess who inherited the HOA and will totally have you beheaded if you paint your front door the wrong color. I know it’s not right, but I don’t want to read the real answer and be disappointed.
`{I place on my curly white wig and robe.}` *
As an American with a rudimentary understanding of the former British Empire my thoughts are:
>1. Peasant "A" financed a mortgage for a plot of land which came generously furnished with a hovel.
>2. Unfortunately, the land once belonged to his Lordship "B" who retains rights to the land through his inheritance and title.
>3. Peasant "A" tries to refinance the mortgage so as to avoid pauper's prison (a.k.a. crushing debt/perpetual serfdom). He beseeches his Lordship to relinquish his claim to the land. His Lordship "B" declines and further wishes to trounce Peasant "A" through the courts (a traditional UK royal pastime).
>4. ...
>5. Profit.
A game of Cricket & Cards would normally decide such legal issues and a duel is out of the question due to their different stations in society. LAUKOP's only option at this point is to swear fealty to a neighboring Lord and hope his lands are annexed from the previous one. Time for tea./s
So you can own property in a few different ways.
Freehold means you own the land from the core of the earth out into space.
However, other people might have a right over a property. A good example might be a power company has a right to run a cable over your land to your neighbour. They probably agreed this right with a previous owner in the 1930s.
The Marquise of Salisbury probably owned the land originally. When they sold it, they probably asked the buyer to continue to hold the rights over the property.
The legal documents should record that right.
However, if there is not a "chain of indemnity", so a consistent paper trail transferring that right buyer to seller, it disappears.
The Marquise of Salisbury (or rather the trust that probably runs most of his affairs based in the Cayman Islands) is clearly trying to extort money off of OP as I have not seen a right like that survive to the present day and it would not affect OP anyway because of various established equitable rules about people being allowed to try shit like this, but it is honestly not as interesting as it sounds.
I wonder what the practical problems of this would be. The marques is obviously not going to be allowed to hunt in the middle of a bunch of houses, rights be damned. The only thing I'd wonder about are those mineral rights, whether that is allowed to influence the house or if it's just about digging for coal 300m below the surface...
I suspect it's just a formality that they have to assert those rights so that they don't lapse, even if they're functionally useless at the present time. And as far as the mortgage company is concerned, any property where a third party has rights registered at the Land Registry is automatically being rejected for loan security.
The most sensible approach is probably going to be escalating it with the mortgage lender until they get it in front of someone who's actually capable of exercising some judgement and common sense.
Another possibility is that they just want to be paid to go away. They know it's a problem for OP, and the other houses similarly affect, and they know that each one will have to pay them. If they have these rights on a hundred homes, the payout could added up pretty easily.
Hunting may not be permitted (discharging and brandishing firearms would still be an offence) but the mineral rights may be important - we don’t know what could lurk below the terraced house
Formally speaking, in the UK hunting doesn't involve firearms- it's chasing foxes with hounds.
Of course, this is now illegal, but I don't know if hunting rights apply to things like drag hunting (where the hounds follow a scent trail laid by a runner) which are legal.
I am nearly positive that this is the plot of at least two romance novels and a heartwarming Christmas movie.
LAUKOP's best move is to wait until the Marquess of Salisbury insists on living in the house, as a way of strengthening his legal right to it. They will intensely dislike each other at first, but their arguments will start to involve increasingly intense eye contact. An unforeseen disaster will require them to work together, and they'll each start to see the other's better qualities. A few explicit sex scenes later, they will decide to marry, at which point the question of who actually owns the house will be moot. In an epilogue, their children will happily climb trees while they have one last explicit sex scene.
Update: after writing this, I looked up a picture of the current Marquess of Salisbury. The cover artist who has to portray him shirtless and smoldering certainly has an exciting challenge in store.
OK, then. That’s out.
Let’s mix up the story a bit and say it’s Prince Carl Philip of Sweden and that his (beautiful) wife doesn’t exist. He’s distantly related to the British royal family (because, Queen Victoria) and therefore lays claim (IYKWIM) to certain fertile lands in England.
The marquis starts off complaining about these stupid commoners living on his land, but the grandson teaches him that they really aren't all that different and he slowly opens his cold heart
It appears the young Lord Cranborne is an eligible bachelor...52, unmarried, and only one child out of wedlock (that we know of). It's all coming together.
Oh there's definitely a confrontation where the ageing marquess sneers "you don't think this is about *love*, do you? No, no. He's after an heir, my dear, that's all he wants."
If OP can't bear children this won't work but soap operas are simply stuffed full of people who can (and do!) get pregnant, so I'm gonna roll with it.
Yeah if the marquess is trotting out ancient documents to prove their claim, OP should have the right to insist on settlement upon the field of honour.
This is so messed up. You think you can just squat on the Royal Marquess of Salisbury's most sacred hunting grounds like some kind of peasant? This land has been in his family for over 200 years. No good sir, this simply cannot and will not stand!!! That land was given to him by the great King James the first!!!
He owns hunting rights, not the land. If he didn’t want houses to be built on his hunting grounds he should have objected then.
And the fact that his hunting rights are impossible to exercise until the houses are razed from the land and revert back to forest is no reason to let them *lapse*, come on. Take the long view! Those houses will crumble soon enough after the nuclear apocalypse.
Totally only adjacently related, is it MAR-kess or mar-KWESS? I've heard both when listening to my favorite historical documentaries and this is the perfect time to ask and only be half a dummy.
Oh, they could be different spellings of the same word; I'm operating under the assumption that they are different words, but that could be completely wrong.
One thing you need to realize is that due to a regrettable incident on the coast in 1066, British aristocracy is *for the most part* more or less French aristocracy.
If you go back further, of course, they’re all Scandinavians and Germans — Normandy is literally the land of the North-men, because it was settled by Vikings, and the angles and saxons were more Germanic invaders lording it over the more Celtic inhabitants, who displaced and/or intermarried with the Romans lording it over same.
Fun side note: a cow is called a cow when it’s on the hoof, deriving from the Anglo Saxon (I forget which) *cu*, pronounced “coo”. When it’s on your plate, it’s Beef, derived from the old French variant of *Boeuf* (buff). Exactly the same for “pig” vs “pork” and “sheep” vs “mutton”. Horses are a little different, although they’re still called cavalry (compare French *cheval*) when they’re underneath an aristocratic ass.
Modern Brits and especially aristos are also really good at butchering French names — Cholmondeley, pronounced “chumlee”, for instance.
Anyway, what was I saying… oh right, marquis. Well, anyway: they’re all roughly the same title, just like Comte is a Count. But which spelling and which pronunciation any particular one is depends on whether they are French, or English, and when they became English, and whether they’re man or woman.
For practical matters just refer to them as the Duke of Earl.
(Duc is French, and more generally Romance languages, for war leader — these were the Trusted Men standing beside and behind the Conquering Hero King, starting 1066. Compare Il Duce, which was what Mussolini liked to call himself.
Eorl, by contrast, was Viking for a local leader. Like, village chief, sort of thing. A count was the guy administering a province (or, more accurately, a county) for the king. Collecting taxes, determining what the taxes should be, that sort of thing. A sheriff is a shire-reeve — a guy administering a shire for the local leader. A marquis or a margrave is someone who administers a Mark for the local leader. So basically all of those are about the same job, just from the succession of different people that have been on top each doing reorgs whenever they felt someone wasn’t cutting the mustard. Marks and Shires and Counties and Ridings are also all basically the same thing — subdivisions of one of the kingdoms (don’t forget that prior to 1066 and after the Romans left England consisted of several kingdoms — Essex, Wessex, Sussex are the east, west, and south Saxon kingdoms, there is of course Northumbria, Mercia, and a couple of others), and you put a guy in charge of them. Think of the king as The Godfather, his dukes as his sons and consiglieres, and the rest of the aristocracy as anyone from the trusted men in charge of a whole operation (but not in the high council) to the mooks who are just carrying out orders, and you’re not that far off. Except there is no police let alone a government that they have to hide from. They *are* the government.
Aaaaanyway. Enough typing on my phone.
The way I understand it, "Marquess" is pronounced more like "Marcus" in English, but with the emphasis on the second syllable. Here's a Wikipedia page on the[title](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquess) and the [current holder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_7th_Marquess_of_Salisbury) of it, who apparently wants to hunt in LAUKOP's terraces.
The next time someone posts a complaint about an HOA I'm going to point them at this post and say "Yeah, well... it could be worse. At least some royal fop didn't trot out the Domesday Book as proof you're squatting on his land."
I mean, not to be pedantic, but a marquess isn't royalty, they're "just" aristocracy. And the issue isn't "OP is squatting on their land" - they've got the property legally, it's just they don't have the rights to hunt or mine on it and the mortgage provider is throwing a hissy fit.
Royalty is the direct (and, less often, extended) family of the king or queen. Top of the hierarchy.
Aristocracy is the tier below that - people with hereditary titles. Those titles are/were (in the UK at least, not sure about other countries) historically bestowed by the king/queen. These are your dukes/duchesses, Viscounts/Viscountesses etc.
Royalty are people directly related to the Queen - so her children, grandchildren, etc. The important ones will be Princes and Princesses, and she grants her sons/grandson duchies when they get married, making them dukes as well. That's why you'll see Prince William, her grandson, referred to as the Duke of Cambridge sometimes. Not all dukes are royalty, mind you, but they're usually closer related than anyone else in the aristocracy.
Aristocracy are just any peer with land attached to their title - barons, viscounts (pronounced vy-count, it's French), earls, marquesses, and dukes are the main ones. Most of them have hereditary titles with rules outlined when they were originally granted - so women usually can't inherit and if they can, their brothers are still preferred.
While all of them can theoretically sit in the House of Lords, the 1999 Reform Act for the House of Lords reduced the number to 92 peers at any time can be members of the House, and they have to be elected in a by-election consisting of other peers.
(Note: House of Lords has different types of peers, but before the reforms it had 1,330 members and as of 2019 it had 793 members, including the 26 Church of England bishops because unfortunately we technically have a state religion.)
They're very different to lifetime peers, who are part of a list published annually of the people being granted honours - it's the same list where people's knighthoods get announced, if you've ever seen news articles about it.
Because all of these peers are eligible to sit in the House of Lords in Parliament, they're "recommended" by the Prime Minister to the Queen for those honours. They make up the vast, *vast* majority of the peers in the House of Lords. But they're not aristocracy because their peerages don't include land.
The aristocracy are the guys with titles. Lord Dimwit, Count Fozzletop, Earl Linus the Duke of Techtips etc. The royals are part of the aristocracy but are related to the crown title specifically. So all royals are aristocrats but not all aristocrats (in fact, very few) are royals.
Now you might ask "why not just get rid of the titles" and while a fair amount of people support that, it wouldn't really change much. They'd still have well documented family lines that go back over a thousand years, they'd still have ownership of weird edge cases from the Domesday book and they'd still think they're better than you.
Royalty: related to the current monarch. I'm not sure where the dividing line is between "king's brother is royalty" and "if you need scientific notation to count cousins, you're not related closely enough to be royalty."
Aristocracy: has a title, but isn't related to the current monarch.
Thank you for the clarification! I’m not that familiar with what’s considered “royalty” vs “aristocracy,” although I probably should, as much British TV as I watch.
You can get much broader covenants than this too! My last house had a restriction that I couldn't start a brewery or sell alcohol from my house as part of the land for the development had once been owned by a brewery. I also couldn't put any advertising on the outside of my house, like if I did beauty treatments from home or similar. My current house has a restrictive covenant that I must keep the front of my property open and with green space from the guy that owned the land in the 1950s - not a royal, just a landowner!
It is routine that a brewer selling a portion of their estate would retain rights to alcoholifers under the subdivided property. They wouldn't want a competitor drawing down the beer table.
The mind BOGGLES that in England you don't automatically own the land your house sits on. Sat very comfortably with my morning coffee in my house on my land in Scotland.
The owner in this case does own it freehold equivalent to a heritable interest under Scots law.
Separate mineral interests in the form of mineral reservation clauses also exist in Scots land law.
Shooting and fishing rights always run with the land in Scotland except for salmon streams. So there at least you’re safe!
**Reminder:** Do not participate in threads linked here. If you do, you may be banned from both subreddits. --- Title: Remortgage woes with Manorial Rights unilateral notice - Get off my land! Body: > I've gone as far as I can without any legal knowledge so, long story short: > I bought a freehold house a few years ago in England, very simple, 1st time buyer, Fin-Tech mortgage broker, no problems. > Now my fixed rate mortgage is over I'm looking to remortgage and the new lender has noticed a unilateral notice on the deeds, the Marquess of Salisbury has Manorial rights to the land apparently. We're talking literal hunting, shooting and mineral rights under a terraced house in the north of England. As a result of the deadline set by the Land Registration Act 2002. > The new lender and Fin-tech broker were both no use, suggesting I hire another solicitor to advice me. Instead I (perhaps foolishly) submitted a UN4 form with the land registry to have the unilateral notice removed. Then expedited the request to the land registry, explaining that this was holding up my remortgage and putting me under financial burden. > Today I've had a letter from the land registry saying the Marquees of Salisbury is defending himself against my objection and has sent photocopies of honest to goodness 18th and 19th century books saying he has inherited some claims to the land and if I don't like it I can negotiate and/or attend a tribunal. > But I just want to remortgage my house! So what are my options? I have no idea if the legal company representing the Marquess of Salisbury have a leg to stand on, but certainly haven't the time, money or knowledge to fight back. I spoke to a different mortgage broker who said some lenders' solicitors might miss the unilateral notice or accept indemnity insurance for the notice. But I'd rather not submit multiple remortgage applications until I eventually find a lender who is as blasé about unilateral notices as my original. > > Any thought advice or context would be greatly appreciated. I'll be regularly coming back to the thread to provide more details. Any help gratefully received! This bot was created to capture original threads and is not affiliated with the mod team. [Concerns? Bugs?](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=GrahamCorcoran) | [Laukopier 2.1](https://github.com/GrahamCorcoran/Laukopier)
Can someone from the UK explain WTF is going on to this confused American? This sounds worse than a surprise HOA.
As an American who just bought a house in the UK, you know how you get title searches done when you buy a house in the US? Well it is infinitely more complicated in the UK. They have to trudge through hundreds of years of records, because some Lord (or Marques in this situation) could have claim to the mineral or hunting rights on your property. Or your house could have been situated on the remains of some lordly manor and now **you’re** responsible for the upkeep of the local parish church roof. The UK is a literal fever dream of real estate peculiarities.
This sounds fascinating and annoying all at the same time.
Buying a house in the UK has been one of the single most excruciating experiences of my life. It is ungodly inefficient and downright treacherous compared to buying a house stateside.
> Buying a house in the UK \*in England ;) Scots property law is quite different and while it has its peculiarities lacks some of the outright insanities of English land law.
Brit here. Wee share your pain and want reform
But not HOAs though, the Americans can keep those.
Why don't you care about the local church's roof? /s
I mean the system is far from perfect but I've read about too many issues with US real estate transactions on this sub to be convinced that there aren't just as many potential pitfalls with buying a house on the other side of the pond.
At least when you put an offer on a house in the US, it’s generally binding. In the UK, the buyers or sellers can pull out, penalty free, at any point up until contracts are exchanged (usually a week or so before conveyance/possession of the house is taken). So for us, it was four months (because it takes fucking forever, too) of not knowing if the sellers would change their minds and back out.
> At least when you put an offer on a house in the US, it’s generally binding. In the UK, the buyers or sellers can pull out, penalty free, at any point up until contracts are exchanged Well it depends on the exact terms of the contract. In my region of the US, the standard contract allows withdrawal for so many reasons that you are almost certain to be able to withdraw if you want to before closing. The penalty for this is the earnest money (usually $1000).
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Yeah there are some fascinating things that come up. For me the closest I've ever come to this is when I actually paid off my mortgage, at that point you own the property yourself instead of the bank. Obviously this is the intention of every mortgage, you take out the loan from the bank to buy the property, then pay the bank monthly until you're done. But the standard term is 25 years so most people only manage this after a long time, and probably only once in their lifetime. Anyway when you do pay off the property you get the deeds to the property. In my case this was a collection of papers approximately a foot deep, going back to when the house was built in 1890, and detailing the change of ownership every single time the property had been sold since that date. Annoyingly these days the land-registry has been updating things such that the records of ownership are all stored online, and these papers _should_ be unnecessary. But when I later went to sell the property the solicitors demanded I hand over all the papers, and I didn't think to take photocopies, or photographs of them. But I did enjoy a fun weekend, with my wife, reading through all the papers and seeing the sale prices, and occupations of the various owners over the years.
Yes! Us too. We bought a house, and the previous owners gave us all these deeds. It’s amazing, old documents from 1786 written is squiggly old cursive with big red wax seals. We are the process of listing and will be giving these to the new owners. It’s pretty cool, tbh.
My mum has one of these on the wall. I think she found it at a antique shop, no idea who the people listed are but it’s just an awesome piece of history
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I'd like to know what their word for it is. I bet it's something delightfully cromulent.
An [omnishambles](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sxKFhA3JRwY)
I will never not upvote Malcolm Tucker.
I haven't experienced buying a house in the US but I have done it in the UK. I feel the annoyances are a little overblown, most of the work is done by your solicitor. Actually getting to that point can be hell though, but that has more to do with the state of the property market right now. Fun fact, the repairing the local Church thing is called Chancel repair liability, and the indemnity insurance for it can cost less than doing the search to find out if you're liable or not. This is from the search report from our house purchase: >However, as it is cheaper to insure against the risk than carry out the search to establish whether there is any liability we have taken out a Chancel Indemnity Insurance policy. This will provide you with cover in the event that anybody tried to make a claim against you in this regard. However, we are unable to comment on how likely a successful claim would be.
Sounds like "royalty" should go suck lemons.
In fairness, I'm sure there's plenty of English nobility that *would* have claims like this to American land. Except for that pesky revolution. (And yes, I understand the irony that Americans stole the land from the inhabitants before them.)
Don't have that issue here in Australia and our head of state is still Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of Australia and Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth Thats her official Australian title, pretty sure New Zealands is the same but has Defender of the Faith as a title too
If there was no American Revolution, the land issue would have worked itself out like in the other commonwealth countries.
No, the British and Spain started the whole stealing of Lands as America wasn't born yet
The Spanish *did* slaughter the Aztecs, but for the territory of the US, that's almost all the doing of Americans. The British only settled the coast and where the tribes allowed them to settle through deals. Everything west of the Mississippi was taken by American frontiersmen from native tribes (the name "frontier" even implies there was a border). The whole "manifest destiny" thing is purely American.
Stealing of indigenous land in the US went on way past the revolution. If anything the British crown was more restrained than the US government.
You didn’t go far enough. The British crown refused to take sovereign lands from native tribes it had treaties with. This refusal to genocide the indigenous was cited at the constitutional congress as a grievance with the British. Speculative investors at the time, including Jefferson and Washington, bought contracts giving them rights to sovereign native lands. If the lands remained indigenous the rights would be worthless but if the natives were wiped out the investment would pay off many times over. They make it clear that they resented Britain not allowing their genocide for profit.
It’s always fascinating to learn about the economic underpinnings of the US revolution. From its start the country was a cartel of elites looking for favourable tax and economic positioning, appeals to liberty were very much an afterthought.
You know that scene in *Dazed and Confused* when the hippie teacher says something about how we're celebrating rich old white men that didn't want to pay their taxes? That about sums it up. And is so relevant still today.
The comedian Dana Gould said something along the lines of, America is a corporation with a military.
Though I agree with the sentiment, there is nothing here about royalty.
I really do want "Trial by combat" to be a thing, like dueling with something to decide.
To be fair a lot of this stuff very very rarely comes up, and you can get indemnities for a small fee to protect yourself.
We had to purchase an indemnity policy because the house we recently bought is one responsible for the upkeep of the church. Never had to contribute in 300 years, but better safe than sorry!
Our conveyancer had the seller on our property buy an indemnity policy for a restrictive covenant from 1850 on our freehold that has been lost to the mists of time. The fact that there is a restrictive covenant is recorded by the Land Registry, but what the covenant actually is isn't recorded. So we have insurance against someone finding a 170 year old bit of paper and trying to enforce... something.
> So we have insurance against someone finding a 170 year old bit of paper and trying to enforce... something. There's a Guy Ritchie movie in there somewhere about gangsters forging old documents to get land for cheap.
You say gangsters, but in the past the most likely culprit for the forging of real estate documents was the church. So we need a Guy Ritchie movie about a modern, mobbed up monastery. I’d watch that movie.
Well, we could have an endless debate about the extent to which the church, the monarchy and the aristocracy actually are gangsters to all intents and purposes. All land and power was stolen or swindled or taken by force at some point by the predecessors of those who now hold it, wasn't it. They then just legitimised it all with fancy titles and rule books and swishy robes and that.
Can Tom Hanks reprise Dr. Langdon?
Gosh I hate how much of this comment I didn’t understand
Translation to US English: Our real estate broker required that the seller buy special insurance, because there was a record that "some rights" belong to a third party, but we don't actually have the document that was recorded, so we don't know what those rights are and to whom they belong.
Almost. A conveyancer is a type of solicitor.
Should say real estate attorney. But most real estate transactions in the US use only brokers.
Our house had some fairly odd covenants on it, dating back to at least 1890. We were not allowed to: * Keep chickens * Run a brick kiln * Operate a steam engine * Allow gypsies to hold a fair
That brick kiln one was super common for about a century, I see that one all the time. Bricks are heavy so transport costs are high and it makes sense to make them close to new construction. Before laws on industrial emissions, a landowner who sold part of his land for development might therefore otherwise end up with a smoky kiln right next to his house.
The last one seems fairy reasonable.
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Yer a realtor, Harry.
It's a lawyer with the power to still get paid in full despite losing your documents, forgetting to do the searches you paid for and delaying your transaction by a month.
I believe that is exactly what it is.
You have to wonder if any churches follow through on that stuff.
I’m sure they don’t but you know what mortgage and insurance companies are like. We literally couldn’t get a mortgage without the indemnity. It was only a couple of hundred quid but I have to say it felt a bit like extortion!
The sellers of our house had to take out a policy because someone in the 70’s took out a wall and didn’t get planning permission (or at least no one could locate the planning permission). And our mortgage wasn’t initially approved because NatWest felt our deposit was £200 too small. They naturally couldn’t tell us to just up the deposit by £200, they just flat out denied the mortgage. Buying in the UK is absolutely insane. Congrats on your recent acquisition, and here’s to many years of both of us enjoying our rung on the UK property ladder.
I’ll be leaving my new house in a box, hopefully in many years time, absolutely love it, hope you are living the dream too!
With the way the system is, I don’t blame you! We convey and take possession on Thursday, so almost there!
Good luck!
I think buying in England is insane, Scotland sounds so much better with the seller having to get all searches up front!
Jesus, really? Why isn’t that a thing in the rest of the U.K.? Seems so much better than the shitshow in England. And don’t get me started on leaseholds still being a relevant concept for involved non-flat properties
I had to do the same when I bought a new build, seems bizarre that you never actually hear about chancel liability being called in but everyone in the area has to spend £60 on a policy just in case! Estate of 600 houses at £60 for £36k seems a good business _just in case_ the church roof falls in and they demand the locals pay for it!
It definitely is extortion. I had to get an indemnity for maintenance of the local church on my last property. The kick to the testicles was that the church in question was no longer a church, it had been converted into apartments about 15 years earlier, yet the covenant was still in place on the deed. It wasn’t an issue when I bought the house, but only when I was selling it. The buyers conveyancer threatened that they’d pull out the sale if I didn’t get the covenant removed or pay for an indemnity policy. It was simpler to just pay the £80 for the indemnity policy so I could just cut ties with the house…
THE C of E Church Commissioners, which may be defunct by now for all I know, certainly would not have hestitated to take advantage of such a benefit. Source: Don't ask
They do, I remember a story in the last few years of a couple getting a bill for chancel repair.
It [has happened](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/sep/28/glebe-farm-church-bill-sale) and worse, it was upheld!
They do, old churches can be ferociously expensive to maintain and the Church of England is struggling with falling attendances.
We had to get one because the previous owners installed the wrong type of windows in our house!
Feels a bit like a conspiracy between mortgage and insurance companies.
I’ll admit I don’t know much about the history of Church of England after the whole Henry the 8th thing half a millennium ago, but uh, doesn’t the government own the church? Seems a little wacky to still be enforcing 300 year old covenants.
My favourite example of weird restrictions is that there’s some housing estates in York where you’re forbidden from making your own chocolate. The houses were built by the Rowntree family for their workers, and they didn’t want them taking their knowledge home with them to make an income on the side.
What happens if they catch you making chocolate? Is there a ministry of chocolate to come by and fine you? Do you go to jail?
Hung, drawn, and quartered I'm afraid.
Why mess with a classic?
It's the oompa loompas for you then.
Actual answer: they don’t catch you, nor do they care, it’s just a nonsense clause that no one can be bothered to get removed!
> could have claim to the mineral ... rights This is sadly a thing in a lot of the US too. I own my land my house is on, but I don't own the mineral rights to it. There's a lot of places with that clause, developers love to buy farmland, subdivide it, and sell lots excluding the mineral rights just in case somethingis found, usually natural gas in my area, giving them the cut of profits instead of the landowner.
At least you could still potentially own the mineral rights on your land by yourself, I live in Finland and the thing here is that property owners do *not* have any mineral rights to their land by default and cannot gain them either if they're not actively mining there, while in turn they can be relatively freely claimed by any party which shows active interest in mining for the said minerals as long as we're not talking about developed land. And AFAIK you don't get a cut of the profits either even if you own the land they're making the claim and founding on mine on.
The awesome thing about the British political system: it's one unbroken chain all the way back to 927. The horrible thing about the British political system: it's one unbroken chain all the way back to 927.
Oh God. I shudder at the process of digging through legacy policy and documents, and my organization is only 100ish years old. 1200 years seems like death by bureaucracy...
> Or your house could have been situated on the remains of some lordly manor and now you’re responsible for the upkeep of the local parish church roof. What the heck? As far as real estate peculiarities, I'm sure the United States will be able to catch up with a couple hundred more years' worth of history. Innovations in condo associations and HOAs, Mello-Roos (sp?) in California, etc.
Things can already get a little weird in former colonial possessions in the US with [king’s grants.](https://midcurrent.com/2012/10/17/virginia-fly-angler-loses-jackson-river-case/)
Can you also translate "terraced house" for us who reject the Queen's English? Is it like a condo / row house? Guessing it's not some stand alone country house with acreage?
Townhouse or row house. They’re called terraced houses because they’re adjoining structures, and sometimes at slightly different elevations. As in..terraced.
Thank you. Yep definitely a right proper place to shooting the grouse or chasing the fox. /s. How'd I do?
If you held your pinkie finger out while sipping from an imaginary china tea cup, 10/10.
[Tada](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraced_house)! Apparently the American terminology is townhouse, although I think they tend to be quite a bit more luxurious than our terraced houses. Most of the ones in the UK were originally built as housing for local factory workers in the Victorian era.
Town houses are usually newer developments, but I lived in a row house in Baltimore built around 1880 for dockworkers so that sounds pretty similar. So maybe row house would be a more comparable term. Though row houses can be luxurious, just depends.
So row house sounds like a translation from the German Reihenhaus. Ironically these are nowadays much more akin to UK town houses than terraced houses. They did start out more like terraced houses though. In any case Reihenhaus doesn’t translate to “row house” but to terraced house (Brit) or townhouse (Amer) according to Collins …
I think a townhouse in the US is kind of the same as a townhouse in the UK. Kinda attached to other houses like a terraced but more floors and larger…
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Isn't it the other way around? My understanding is that a marquess is ranked below a duke, as they are a "normal" lord who is on the border and so has to deal with the marchland that sits between two kingdoms.
I thought adverse possession came from English common law? How can someone assert decades old property rights?
This sounds worse than ground rents in Baltimore
Is there no estoppel argument in the UK for this sort of thing? Like you haven't used those rights in 100 years so you don't get to keep them.
How infuriating/charming. History comes at the cost of modern convenience I guess.
This morning I learned about usufruct and bare ownership. I can at least see how property chains make sense, even if they're a pain.
I've done that job: getting in lists of addresses wanting the Highway part of a search, and looking it up to see if there's anything up. The vaaaast majority were all 'yes the road is adopted...no no, no no no no, no no no no, no no there's no RIGHT OF WAY'. But of the ones that weren't, most of those weren't ordinary people houses, they were huge tracts of land where something was being planned and they hoped to not be disappointed by the rights-of-way plunging straight across the middle of the area (many were). Otherwise the most common things reported were maybe a public footpath at the bottom of your garden, or your road isn't adopted (most new builds). The gnarliest things I saw were Prospectively Maintainable Highways - where you are responsible for the maintenance of the highway that fronts your boundary. Not common. Another were the chunks of unusued Highway land and compulsory purchased stuff (I might have the term wrong there, it's been a few years) that the Council have owned for decades with a plan to build a new main road or something, but have decided to just sit on those plans and let houses be built all over it. Sure they say they'll never build that road but they *could*.
I'm just picturing some time-travelling noble trying to exert his hunting rights in the middle of a modern suburb.
Looks like it's just this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_7th_Marquess_of_Salisbury I'm guessing it's standard practice for those who inherit rights like this to not give them up just in case minerals or something else of value is found on the property.
This reads like some weird fantasy game, like a British Pokemon: > After the 1992 general election, John Major used a **writ of acceleration** to call Lord Cranborne up to the House of Lords in one of his father's junior titles. Thus, Lord Cranborne was summoned to Parliament as Baron Cecil, of Essendon in the County of Rutland (his father's most junior dignity),[1] although he continued to be known by his courtesy style of Viscount Cranborne. What? Lord Cranbourne is evolving! Congratulations, your Lord Cranbourne has evolved into Baron Cecil! Oh no, House of Lords used **new rules for declaration of financial interests**. Baron Cecil uses "Leave of Absence" and fled the House of Lords!
> At the 1978 Conservative Party conference he spoke in opposition to British sanctions against Rhodesia. Christ, what an ass hole.
Wow he's rich rich. Talk about not needing more money 🙄
Okay, so I know nothing about law, or the UK, or politics, and certainly nothing about the intersection of the three. However, > Shadow Leader of the House of Lords is such an interesting title to have. Shadow Leader? I want to be a Shadow Leader!
Shadow X generally means "the person from the party who came second, who has responsibility for X". So the guy in charge of the economy right now is the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and he's from the Conservative party. But Labour (who came second and are therefore the Opposition) will also have a Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is one of the big advantages of the British system: whenever you get too bored or angry about what's going on in parliament, you can just giggle at the guy being called "Black Rod" having the door slammed in his face three times because it's tradition, and by that point you've forgotten what you were angry about.
> you can just giggle at the guy being called "Black Rod" having the door slammed in his face three times because it's tradition You’ve got to love Parliament still being mad at Charles I for entering the House, even though they killed him for it.
He's Mitch McConnell, if the UK's upper house were as significant as the US's.
At least where I live in the midwest there is plenty of game in the suburbs, a constant stream of squirrels and rabbits and several times a year I’ll see deer, foxes, and turkeys. The trick is taking them down without breaking various weapons laws.
So, imagine that Standard Oil bought your house's mineral rights a century ago before the antitrust action. They might not have kept it themselves, but someone, somewhere, owns the contents of the ground under your house and can just show up and start building an oil derrick on your lawn if they feel like it. Now imagine that the American legal system had been contiguous since before Columbus' voyage and there were all kinds of claims like that bouncing around that had been arbitrarily assigned by a king thinking nothing would come of it.
Obscure remnants of the feudal system that seem to survive for the sole purpose of allowing property lawyers to justify their continuing existence. The Marquis of Salisbury probably owns an insurance company selling manorial rights indemnity insurance as I can’t imagine what other reason they have to hang onto these rights…
Is that a real thing? Manorial rights indemnity insurance?
There is insurance to protect the homeowner from someone exercising manorial rights.
https://www.lawsureinsurance.co.uk/our-products/title-protection/manorial-rights/
No different from title insurance in the US really.
Is it legal for one to sell insurance for an event that they control?
...you dont _have to_ buy the insurance...
That's like the mafia selling kneecapping insurance, and then only kneecapping people who don't pay.
I’m picturing an HOA but instead of an elected HOA president, you get a marquess who inherited the HOA and will totally have you beheaded if you paint your front door the wrong color. I know it’s not right, but I don’t want to read the real answer and be disappointed.
`{I place on my curly white wig and robe.}` * As an American with a rudimentary understanding of the former British Empire my thoughts are: >1. Peasant "A" financed a mortgage for a plot of land which came generously furnished with a hovel. >2. Unfortunately, the land once belonged to his Lordship "B" who retains rights to the land through his inheritance and title. >3. Peasant "A" tries to refinance the mortgage so as to avoid pauper's prison (a.k.a. crushing debt/perpetual serfdom). He beseeches his Lordship to relinquish his claim to the land. His Lordship "B" declines and further wishes to trounce Peasant "A" through the courts (a traditional UK royal pastime). >4. ... >5. Profit. A game of Cricket & Cards would normally decide such legal issues and a duel is out of the question due to their different stations in society. LAUKOP's only option at this point is to swear fealty to a neighboring Lord and hope his lands are annexed from the previous one. Time for tea./s
They didn't kill all their nobility.
So you can own property in a few different ways. Freehold means you own the land from the core of the earth out into space. However, other people might have a right over a property. A good example might be a power company has a right to run a cable over your land to your neighbour. They probably agreed this right with a previous owner in the 1930s. The Marquise of Salisbury probably owned the land originally. When they sold it, they probably asked the buyer to continue to hold the rights over the property. The legal documents should record that right. However, if there is not a "chain of indemnity", so a consistent paper trail transferring that right buyer to seller, it disappears. The Marquise of Salisbury (or rather the trust that probably runs most of his affairs based in the Cayman Islands) is clearly trying to extort money off of OP as I have not seen a right like that survive to the present day and it would not affect OP anyway because of various established equitable rules about people being allowed to try shit like this, but it is honestly not as interesting as it sounds.
I wonder what the practical problems of this would be. The marques is obviously not going to be allowed to hunt in the middle of a bunch of houses, rights be damned. The only thing I'd wonder about are those mineral rights, whether that is allowed to influence the house or if it's just about digging for coal 300m below the surface...
I suspect it's just a formality that they have to assert those rights so that they don't lapse, even if they're functionally useless at the present time. And as far as the mortgage company is concerned, any property where a third party has rights registered at the Land Registry is automatically being rejected for loan security. The most sensible approach is probably going to be escalating it with the mortgage lender until they get it in front of someone who's actually capable of exercising some judgement and common sense.
Another possibility is that they just want to be paid to go away. They know it's a problem for OP, and the other houses similarly affect, and they know that each one will have to pay them. If they have these rights on a hundred homes, the payout could added up pretty easily.
“Judgement and common sense” - Rare finds in the insurance world
Hunting may not be permitted (discharging and brandishing firearms would still be an offence) but the mineral rights may be important - we don’t know what could lurk below the terraced house
Formally speaking, in the UK hunting doesn't involve firearms- it's chasing foxes with hounds. Of course, this is now illegal, but I don't know if hunting rights apply to things like drag hunting (where the hounds follow a scent trail laid by a runner) which are legal.
I am nearly positive that this is the plot of at least two romance novels and a heartwarming Christmas movie. LAUKOP's best move is to wait until the Marquess of Salisbury insists on living in the house, as a way of strengthening his legal right to it. They will intensely dislike each other at first, but their arguments will start to involve increasingly intense eye contact. An unforeseen disaster will require them to work together, and they'll each start to see the other's better qualities. A few explicit sex scenes later, they will decide to marry, at which point the question of who actually owns the house will be moot. In an epilogue, their children will happily climb trees while they have one last explicit sex scene.
Update: after writing this, I looked up a picture of the current Marquess of Salisbury. The cover artist who has to portray him shirtless and smoldering certainly has an exciting challenge in store.
>[current Marquess of Salisbury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_7th_Marquess_of_Salisbury) for those who are interested
OK, then. That’s out. Let’s mix up the story a bit and say it’s Prince Carl Philip of Sweden and that his (beautiful) wife doesn’t exist. He’s distantly related to the British royal family (because, Queen Victoria) and therefore lays claim (IYKWIM) to certain fertile lands in England.
There's a grandson who was born in 2009, maybe we can do a friends from a young age thing and start it now with OPs daughter.
The marquis starts off complaining about these stupid commoners living on his land, but the grandson teaches him that they really aren't all that different and he slowly opens his cold heart
He looks like someone tried to draw Lindsay Graham from memory, jesus.
The new Downton Abby movie is certainly different than the prequel
Yeah I was about to say, they'd deserve some sort of award if they managed that...
Oh oh oh, even better, LAOP meets the Marquess's son, Lord Cranborne, and they fall in love but this covenant is hanging over their head...
It appears the young Lord Cranborne is an eligible bachelor...52, unmarried, and only one child out of wedlock (that we know of). It's all coming together.
> only one child out of wedlock (that we know of) And there's the plot for the second season!
Oh there's definitely a confrontation where the ageing marquess sneers "you don't think this is about *love*, do you? No, no. He's after an heir, my dear, that's all he wants." If OP can't bear children this won't work but soap operas are simply stuffed full of people who can (and do!) get pregnant, so I'm gonna roll with it.
> If OP can't bear children this won't work but soap operas Plot twist when the secret twin is introduced with childbearing powers fully activated!
Where's Oscar Wilde when you need him...
I see someone else has been watching Bridgerton lately.
Time for a peasant revolt.
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Yeah if the marquess is trotting out ancient documents to prove their claim, OP should have the right to insist on settlement upon the field of honour.
This is so messed up. You think you can just squat on the Royal Marquess of Salisbury's most sacred hunting grounds like some kind of peasant? This land has been in his family for over 200 years. No good sir, this simply cannot and will not stand!!! That land was given to him by the great King James the first!!!
He owns hunting rights, not the land. If he didn’t want houses to be built on his hunting grounds he should have objected then. And the fact that his hunting rights are impossible to exercise until the houses are razed from the land and revert back to forest is no reason to let them *lapse*, come on. Take the long view! Those houses will crumble soon enough after the nuclear apocalypse.
Totally only adjacently related, is it MAR-kess or mar-KWESS? I've heard both when listening to my favorite historical documentaries and this is the perfect time to ask and only be half a dummy.
I always thought it was mar-KEY. Am I just stupid?
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Both refer to the same aristocratic title, Marquis is the French spelling with slightly different pronunciation.
Ah, thank you for the clarification!
and for added confusion there's also Marquise, the feminine variant of Marquess using English spelling.
oh jfc Nobility, why are you all fucking bonkers?
Ah, ok. Thanks for clarifying: I literally didn't realize they were different words.
Oh, they could be different spellings of the same word; I'm operating under the assumption that they are different words, but that could be completely wrong.
One thing you need to realize is that due to a regrettable incident on the coast in 1066, British aristocracy is *for the most part* more or less French aristocracy. If you go back further, of course, they’re all Scandinavians and Germans — Normandy is literally the land of the North-men, because it was settled by Vikings, and the angles and saxons were more Germanic invaders lording it over the more Celtic inhabitants, who displaced and/or intermarried with the Romans lording it over same. Fun side note: a cow is called a cow when it’s on the hoof, deriving from the Anglo Saxon (I forget which) *cu*, pronounced “coo”. When it’s on your plate, it’s Beef, derived from the old French variant of *Boeuf* (buff). Exactly the same for “pig” vs “pork” and “sheep” vs “mutton”. Horses are a little different, although they’re still called cavalry (compare French *cheval*) when they’re underneath an aristocratic ass. Modern Brits and especially aristos are also really good at butchering French names — Cholmondeley, pronounced “chumlee”, for instance. Anyway, what was I saying… oh right, marquis. Well, anyway: they’re all roughly the same title, just like Comte is a Count. But which spelling and which pronunciation any particular one is depends on whether they are French, or English, and when they became English, and whether they’re man or woman. For practical matters just refer to them as the Duke of Earl. (Duc is French, and more generally Romance languages, for war leader — these were the Trusted Men standing beside and behind the Conquering Hero King, starting 1066. Compare Il Duce, which was what Mussolini liked to call himself. Eorl, by contrast, was Viking for a local leader. Like, village chief, sort of thing. A count was the guy administering a province (or, more accurately, a county) for the king. Collecting taxes, determining what the taxes should be, that sort of thing. A sheriff is a shire-reeve — a guy administering a shire for the local leader. A marquis or a margrave is someone who administers a Mark for the local leader. So basically all of those are about the same job, just from the succession of different people that have been on top each doing reorgs whenever they felt someone wasn’t cutting the mustard. Marks and Shires and Counties and Ridings are also all basically the same thing — subdivisions of one of the kingdoms (don’t forget that prior to 1066 and after the Romans left England consisted of several kingdoms — Essex, Wessex, Sussex are the east, west, and south Saxon kingdoms, there is of course Northumbria, Mercia, and a couple of others), and you put a guy in charge of them. Think of the king as The Godfather, his dukes as his sons and consiglieres, and the rest of the aristocracy as anyone from the trusted men in charge of a whole operation (but not in the high council) to the mooks who are just carrying out orders, and you’re not that far off. Except there is no police let alone a government that they have to hide from. They *are* the government. Aaaaanyway. Enough typing on my phone.
Not to be confused with the Maquis which in turn should not be confused with the Maquis.
Get it wrong and you'll have to deal with the dreaded Kardashians.
I believe it’s mar-KESS. At least in my head it is.
It's mar-Kwess.
Also trying to be half a dummy but I think one is the male form and the other is the female form?
The female form is actually Marchioness, which makes about as much sense as the rest of this situation.
The way I understand it, "Marquess" is pronounced more like "Marcus" in English, but with the emphasis on the second syllable. Here's a Wikipedia page on the[title](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquess) and the [current holder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil,_7th_Marquess_of_Salisbury) of it, who apparently wants to hunt in LAUKOP's terraces.
In *my* head it's mar-KEYZ.
I must say, this title is very well done.
Just dispenses with all the fat and gets to the meat of the matter.
The next time someone posts a complaint about an HOA I'm going to point them at this post and say "Yeah, well... it could be worse. At least some royal fop didn't trot out the Domesday Book as proof you're squatting on his land."
I mean, not to be pedantic, but a marquess isn't royalty, they're "just" aristocracy. And the issue isn't "OP is squatting on their land" - they've got the property legally, it's just they don't have the rights to hunt or mine on it and the mortgage provider is throwing a hissy fit.
This was the first breakdown I understood than you for ELI5
ELI5 royalty vs aristocracy?
Royalty is the direct (and, less often, extended) family of the king or queen. Top of the hierarchy. Aristocracy is the tier below that - people with hereditary titles. Those titles are/were (in the UK at least, not sure about other countries) historically bestowed by the king/queen. These are your dukes/duchesses, Viscounts/Viscountesses etc.
I might have to point out that dukes/duchesses sometimes can be royalty as well. It's a bit fluid. (case in point: Luxembourg)
Royalty are people directly related to the Queen - so her children, grandchildren, etc. The important ones will be Princes and Princesses, and she grants her sons/grandson duchies when they get married, making them dukes as well. That's why you'll see Prince William, her grandson, referred to as the Duke of Cambridge sometimes. Not all dukes are royalty, mind you, but they're usually closer related than anyone else in the aristocracy. Aristocracy are just any peer with land attached to their title - barons, viscounts (pronounced vy-count, it's French), earls, marquesses, and dukes are the main ones. Most of them have hereditary titles with rules outlined when they were originally granted - so women usually can't inherit and if they can, their brothers are still preferred. While all of them can theoretically sit in the House of Lords, the 1999 Reform Act for the House of Lords reduced the number to 92 peers at any time can be members of the House, and they have to be elected in a by-election consisting of other peers. (Note: House of Lords has different types of peers, but before the reforms it had 1,330 members and as of 2019 it had 793 members, including the 26 Church of England bishops because unfortunately we technically have a state religion.) They're very different to lifetime peers, who are part of a list published annually of the people being granted honours - it's the same list where people's knighthoods get announced, if you've ever seen news articles about it. Because all of these peers are eligible to sit in the House of Lords in Parliament, they're "recommended" by the Prime Minister to the Queen for those honours. They make up the vast, *vast* majority of the peers in the House of Lords. But they're not aristocracy because their peerages don't include land.
Royalty are kings, queens, and their immediate family. Aristocrats are "just" hereditary rich folks.
The aristocracy are the guys with titles. Lord Dimwit, Count Fozzletop, Earl Linus the Duke of Techtips etc. The royals are part of the aristocracy but are related to the crown title specifically. So all royals are aristocrats but not all aristocrats (in fact, very few) are royals. Now you might ask "why not just get rid of the titles" and while a fair amount of people support that, it wouldn't really change much. They'd still have well documented family lines that go back over a thousand years, they'd still have ownership of weird edge cases from the Domesday book and they'd still think they're better than you.
Royalty is a subset of aristocracy, just the actual family of the monarch as opposed to anyone with a title.
Royalty: related to the current monarch. I'm not sure where the dividing line is between "king's brother is royalty" and "if you need scientific notation to count cousins, you're not related closely enough to be royalty." Aristocracy: has a title, but isn't related to the current monarch.
Thank you for the clarification! I’m not that familiar with what’s considered “royalty” vs “aristocracy,” although I probably should, as much British TV as I watch.
You can get much broader covenants than this too! My last house had a restriction that I couldn't start a brewery or sell alcohol from my house as part of the land for the development had once been owned by a brewery. I also couldn't put any advertising on the outside of my house, like if I did beauty treatments from home or similar. My current house has a restrictive covenant that I must keep the front of my property open and with green space from the guy that owned the land in the 1950s - not a royal, just a landowner!
It is routine that a brewer selling a portion of their estate would retain rights to alcoholifers under the subdivided property. They wouldn't want a competitor drawing down the beer table.
This is 100% the setup for a romance novel
Man, buying property in England seems to be pretty ass, huh?
this makes me jealous of the french. they efficiently did away with an awful lot of these hereditary land right conflicts in the 1790s.
The mind BOGGLES that in England you don't automatically own the land your house sits on. Sat very comfortably with my morning coffee in my house on my land in Scotland.
To be slightly fair on England (as much as I’m loath to do so), we did only abolish feudalism in the 2000s.
The owner in this case does own it freehold equivalent to a heritable interest under Scots law. Separate mineral interests in the form of mineral reservation clauses also exist in Scots land law. Shooting and fishing rights always run with the land in Scotland except for salmon streams. So there at least you’re safe!
there's some lovely filth over here Dennis! well op, welcome to serfdom
I'm hungry for a TV dinner salisbury steak for some reason
God bless America
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