THE SALES OF ROYALIST LAND DURING THE INTERREGNUM

Abstract

tT HE sale by Parliament of crown, church, and delinquents' lands during the Interregnum brought about a redistribution in the ownership of land comparable in scale with that achieved by the sales of dissolved monastic land a century earlier. Of the social changes produced by the latter, some seventeenth-century observers were already dimly aware.' But with the exception of polemical writers with an axe to grind, and Royalists in exile with but meagre first-hand knowledge, there were few who ventured to generalize about the results of the sales of their own generation. Not that the outward resemblance between the old confiscation and the new passed unnoticed. Henry Neville, who explained to the Lower House in February i 659 his theories on the changed balance of property between Lords and Commons, and attributed it to the sales of monastic land, immediately provoked speculation on this score. 'Query', wrote the Parliamentary diarist, Guibon Goddard, in the margin of his diary, 'whether this equality or almost parity hath not more enforced that argument of late by distributing King, Queen, Bishops' and delinquents' lands? '2 A full answer to Goddard's question would require a threefold study of the sales of crown, church and private lands. In this article the scope of the problem has been narrowed to delinquents' lands alone, and the material selected confined to those estates which lay in the twelve southeastern counties, namely, Hampshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex and London. A preliminary survey of the sales in Lancashire suggests that in more pronouncedly Royalist areas the findings would not differ substantially from those appearing here. Contemporary interest in the Parliamentary sales was not confined to those who, like Guibon Goddard, sought a nice balance of power between Lords and Commons. The decision to sell Royalist property overlay the problem of Parliament's long-term policy towards the Royalist partya subject which, no doubt, figured prominently in the debates on the sales themselves, and which agitated the Commons on at least one occasion in the later fifties.3 The disposal of the land raised the hopes of Levellers and