ABSTRACT
Land Reform is the great forgotten issue of nineteenth-century history. Yet it does not deserve to be. It was a live issue in the 1840s, when Cobden and Bright, logically but inexpediently, argued that a nation professing free trade in all other commodities should not shore up redundant aristocratic privilege by retaining the outmoded paraphernalia of entail, strict settlement and primogeniture. These restricted covenants prevented the benefits of free trade from being realized. The new Domesday Survey of landownership in 1873 revealed that one-half of the enclosed land of England was owned by not more than 2,250 families.
