Negative equity: Part 1, glebe land
“Congratulations, you’ve inherited property. That will cost you …”
Say what?
As I was flying from
Pay £500,000? God help us, say couple forced by a medieval law to foot the bill for church repairs
Be warned, however – the story’s more complicated than it at first seems.
Gail and Andrew Wallbank inherited their beautiful home. But it came with a hidden timebomb…
This is a beautiful spot. The
Northwest of Stratford-on-Avon
It’s here that Shakespeare’s parents are thought to have married, and if the walls look a little crumbly and uneven… well, perhaps that’s only to be expected of a building that dates back to the 13th century.
To Gail and Andrew Wallbank, however, the flaking masonry that surrounds the church’s stained-glass windows - and the suspiciously leaky-looking patches inside - are less a source of picturesque charm than one of stomach-gnawing anxiety.
Andrew and Gail Wallbank outside the church they are being forced to pay to repair – simply because they inherited land with a chancel repair liability
This is because, due to a peculiar ancient law that goes back to the reign of Henry VIII, the Wallbanks, who own a nearby farmhouse, have found themselves saddled with the repair bill for the chancel - the eastern end of a church, in which the pulpit and choristers’ stalls are normally found.
The church plan at Rottingdean (yes, a real name!)
For the implications of what is effectively a test case could be wide-reaching: a blessing for the cash-strapped Church of England, which has many dilapidated buildings in urgent need of repair, but a plague on homeowners who may unwittingly own land - a garden, field, allotment or even the plot on which their house is built - that carries a chancel repair liability.
And it isn’t small.
At the last count, the sum owed was £186,989. Plus VAT. Oh, and then there’s the interest, which they say they are paying at 8% and which began accumulating in February 2007.
Add to that the £200,000 they have spent in legal fees fighting their case over the years, and the Wallbanks are looking at a figure close to half a million. ‘And it’s not as if that’s the end of it,’ says Gail, 60, fastening up a bobbly jacket that looks as if it has seen better days.
The Wallbanks are a warm, calm and attractively dishevelled couple who, as well as raising a family of seven, have been fighting the case for 18 stressful years.
Chancel repair liabilities are similar to environmental encumbrances — they are a liability that runs with the land, and whose value can exceed the land’s value.
Such chancel repair liabilities are thought to apply to some 5,200 pre-Reformation parishes in England and Wales - though nobody knows for sure how many properties might be affected, as the legal documents are, in some cases, both ancient and in poor condition.
Where’d the expense come from? The ‘pre-Reformation’ qualifier will give you a clue:
Monasteries? What monasteries?
From the original head of the Church of England.
Before there were cities, there were parishes, who dispensed moral guidance and spiritual salvation – both highly valuable assets – in exchange for being supported from the community.
The law in question dates back to medieval times, when the parishioners had a duty to repair the nave - the part of a church in which the congregation sits to worship - while the rector had a responsibility to repair the chancel end.
A rector would pay for his share of the repairs using income from land attached to his rectory - ‘glebe land’ - as well as from tithes.
Mansewood: All the land inside the triangle was glebe land
Note the relation between church and manse
Tying the obligation to land reflected medieval reality — land was the source of wealth, so an assessment against farmland could be expected to be ‘in the money ‘ – satisfiable without undue hardship.
After the dissolution of the monasteries, that land was dispersed but never separated from the obligation to pay for chancel repairs, making the new landowners ‘lay rectors’.
In 1536, Henry VIII began the dissolution (read: suppression, dispersal, occasional demolition, and rampant plundering) of the monasteries because they were the source of resistance to his power-grab of establishing the Church of England and making himself its head.
We have Henry VIII to thank for this
With the monasteries’ source of income destroyed, the medieval economic equation – landowners paying for church upkeep out of their farm profits – was disrupted, but the obligation was not discharged.
In successive years, some of this land has been sold and re-sold, divided up, developed on and changed hands many times so that its history of liability has sometimes been forgotten.
Asks the real estate person, Where was the title insurer? And the blogger answers, Be patient, grasshopper, the story unfolds.
Fast-forward to recent times, and the cash-strapped Church has been busy encouraging its Parochial Church Councils (PCCs) to seek out any lay rectors it can find - and quickly, because chancel repair liabilities will become unenforceable unless they are registered at HM Land Registry by 2013.
Religion and churches are older than governments and towns, so with the advent of secular government, sooner or later all religious laws have too be harmonized with civil ones. We see this in the US in the struggle over gay marriage (marriage being historically a religious state that now conveys secular status, benefits, and obligations); England must harmonize property rights that antedate the government now in power over the (still established) Anglican church.
For some people, their happy ignorance may be about to come to a halt, as it did for the Wallbanks.
‘I inherited Glebe Farm, which is about half a mile away from the church, from my father,’ explains Gail.
Never wondering what the word ‘glebe’ might mean …
And then, out of the blue one day at the beginning of 1990, a letter arrived from the church wardens of
‘We hope that you are well and are enjoying your life in that beautiful part of
I’ve previously posted about struldbrug buildings that cannot die and are uneconomic to repair:
Struldbrugs are buildings that though listed, are not being saved – unimproved, they still empty, aging, decrepit, vandalized if not ringed with concertina razor wire, by their listed status protected against everything … except the struldbrug’s curse: functional senility brought about by funding drought.
The gentleman to whom I addressed my discourse said to me, with a sort of a smile which usually arises from pity to the ignorant….
Listed bus stop
In economic terms, English historic listing is no blessing but a curse that only increases costs:
Higher hard costs occasioned by mandated historic restorations of facades, windows, and details.
Higher soft costs arising from lengthy negotiations with historic preservation officers, neighbourhood consultations, and protracted approval/ protest/ appeals cycles.
Higher operating costs from high ceilings and aged building envelopes.
Higher insurance costs because of structural age.
English Heritage provides the following advice: “We strongly advise owners to insure, as a minimum, to cover reinstatement liabilities under legislation and government policies dealing with scheduled monuments, listed buildings or buildings in conservation areas.” In other words, you should provide for recovery from a worst case scenario, and you need to determine how much it would cost to rebuild the entire building using like materials and methods of construction.
We thus have a quintessential struldbrug: a financial obligation that lasts forever.
Decreased earning potential because choices of use are limited and interior space cannot always be optimized.
Higher risk premiums for entering into individual negotiations with historic preservation officers.
Yes, my gentle reader cries, but in exchange for accepting these burdens, listed historic properties receive substantial economic benefits from government. “What economic benefits?” the traveler asks mildly.
Listed kiln: Dudson
There settles an embarrassed silence.
Many such buildings wait for funding, and wait, and wait – while wind and storm and arson and ennui kill not just the building’s skeleton but all hope of its revival. (One such tale of dashed expectations and promised funding withdrawn is Brighton’s famous West Pier.)
Glebe land is an extreme form of struldbrug property – it has negative equity and, like the struldbrug, it cannot be divested – that would have delighted mordant old Jonathan Swift:
“I never saw, heard, nor read, that the clergy were beloved in any nation where Christianity was the religion of the country. Nothing can render them popular, but some degree of persecution.”
They were not only opinionative, peevish, covetous, morose, vain, talkative, but incapable of friendship, and dead to all natural affection, which never descended below their grandchildren. Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions.
They have no remembrance of anything but what they learned and observed in their youth and middle age, and even that is very imperfect. And, for the truth or particulars of any fact, it is safer to depend on common traditions than upon their best recollections.
I feel certain that Swift would have immediately decried any suggestions that the two preceding paragraphs could be read to resemble the Church of England’s pursuit of its rights.
The language of this country being always upon the flux, the struldbrugs of one age do not understand those of another; neither are they able, after two hundred years, to hold any conversation (further than by a few general words) with their neighbors, the mortals; and thus they lie under the disadvantage of living like foreigners in their own country.
But the usual way of computing how old they are is by asking them what Kings or great persons they can remember, and then consulting history; for, infallibly, the last Prince in their mind did not begin his reign after they were fourscore years old.
In any case, the Church of England sought, understandably if not entirely sympathetically, to enforce its contractual entitlements:
It went on to detail the outcome of an architect’s report, which suggested that a large amount of expensive work needed to be done to the Grade I listed church - among which were three windows that needed repairing at a cost of £2,000 each - and concluded that, ‘if a large job is necessary, we are obliged to ask for your financial support’.
What triggered this duty?
Who pulled the trigger?
Their fate, it seems, rests not on the house itself but on a single 6.5 acre field on the 179 acre farm, known as Clanacre, which carries the property equivalent of the black spot, as it is this part of their land that most closely binds them to the chancel repair liability.
The black spot of a struldbrug?
He told me that sometimes, though very rarely, a child happened to be born in a family with a red circular spot in the forehead, directly over the left eyebrow, which was an infallible mark that it should never die. The spot, as he described it, was about the compass of a silver threepence, but in the course of time grew larger and changed its color; for at twelve years old it became green, so continued till five-and-twenty, then turned to a deep blue; at five-and-forty it grew coal black and as large as an English shilling; but never admitted any further alteration.
Once slapped on a building, the spot makes it legally immortal
If thine black spot offend thee, pluck it out?
At one early stage they made an offer to give this field - which was estimated to be worth between £6,000 and £7,000 - back to the church, but the donation was rejected.
A tragic end to a loyal son, who
Loved his mother
There you have it – the spiritual equivalent of the Superfund obligation – once you’re in the chain of title, you can never escape.
Meanwhile, the bills were mounting, rising from £66,094 in 1992 to £91,791 two years later.
For its part, the church argues that ‘PCCs are charities and so, in principle, subject to the usual duty imposed by law on charities to protect their assets.’
I love that ‘in principle,’ suggesting that an institution 1,500 years older than the laws which it claims now compel it to protect its assets must genuflect toward those laws rather than showing Christian charity.
In other words, they say have no choice but to pursue lay rectors like the Wallbanks with vigour.
They also say the situation is complicated by the fact that English Heritage is reluctant to offer grants to those churches which have the opportunity to extract cash from lay rectors.
Of course, if they owned the land – as after receiving a donation – they could then apply to English Heritage for grants, or pass the collection plate among their parishioners.
Suffice it to say that those connected with the church do not appear to have a great deal of sympathy for the Wallbanks’ plight as they struggle to scrape together the necessary money.
‘Oh, they’ve got the money,’ one church warden told me, tight-lipped as she handed over the keys so I could see the chancel for myself.
Is “oh, they’ve got the money” a valid response?
It is if you need money!
Before you decide, jury of readers, do please hear the other case:
Oyez, oyez, oyez!
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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