ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ongoing process of decline that has continued over the past century and to examine in some detail the present-day ownership of the 500 sample estates. The Joicey family, in common with other Northumberland landowners in the nineteenth century, greatly increased their wealth through the exploitation of coal on their property and in the years 1907 and 1908 Lord Joicey purchased the two adjacent estates of Ford Castle and Etal Manor, properties with a combined extent of over 10,000 acres. Traditional ties of landed society with the commissioned ranks, though no longer their exclusive domain, meant that a high number of estate owners and their successors served in the war. An early comment following the Finance Act 1975 declared that ‘the results of the capital transfer tax will be the break-up of a land pattern which has existed for a thousand years’.
