Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), pp. 269–288

In 1921 the Estates Gazette announced that one-quarter of the land of England had changed hands since the end of the war. F. M. L. Tompson has suggested that if this really was the case, then it represented a revolution in landownership on a scale unknown since the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the sixteenth century or even the Norman Conquest. Tis paper revisits Tompson and the land question on the eve of the First World War to ask whether such apocalyptic language truly refected accumulating pressures on landed society, including the late nineteenth-century agricultural depression, the impact of the encumbered estates legislation, the introduction in 1894 of death duties, and the fears posed by Lloyd George’s land tax proposals. To distinguish between political scaremongering and real land revolution the paper employs previously only partially used data to assess land turnover both before and afer the 1918 Armistice. Te credibility of contemporary claims is questioned. Was the country in the grips of a landownership revolution or were the fears expressed by landowners before 1914, and by commentators afer 1918, a misunderstanding of the reality of the land question in these years? 

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