When did mankind first begin to sell land?

Factual Questions
1

At what point in history did people finally say “I own this land and if you want to live on it you have to give me 50 Yak!” (or whatever the asking price was)

People used to just go out and claim territory and if someone else came along that could kick your ass and they wanted the property then it became theirs. Right or wrong, that’s how it was. And when people would get conquered sometimes they would just leave and find a “new land”. Of course eventually their was no new place to go because someone else was already there.

But there had to be a point way back that someone paid someone else for a piece of land. Would it be true that in most of the monarchies the ruler owned all the land and the people just lived there? And usually paid a tax to do it?

What really got me to thinking about this was the native american concept of not owning the land. I’m sure there must be other cultures that view it the same way.

I’m guessing the act of buying and selling land replaced killing and taking it. So when did we become so civilized?

2

It happened pretty much as soon as people stopped being nomads and settled down into agrarian societies. If you’re going to clear a field for farming and live there year-round to work the crops, then you’ve invested a significant amount of time and effort into making that land productive - clearing trees and rocks, building irrigation, etc. Orchards and vineyards also take many years to mature and reach peak production.

As soon as you’ve got that, it becomes obvious that a working farm is worth something.

Now, obviously there have been many legal variations on how ownership and transfer of ownership is managed, but it’s been done from the very beginning of civilization. In fact, it’s likely to have been an impetus for creating civilization in the first place. The places you see the first great civilizations are also places where people were organizing to manage the irrigation of crops.

3

I think it’s somewhat relevant that the Jewish Torah has passages on the selling of land - including a clause that reversed all sales back to the original owner on a particular day every 49 years or something like that IIRC - making them more like long-term leases. (Or short-term, if you sell a few months before rollback day. :smiley: )

4

“native american concept of not owning the land” is a simplification, also, as is practically any blanket statement of the sort. The Americas were a patchwork of tribes, whose cultures differed a great deal from one to the other. The Iroquois and Huron tribes had very well developed systems of land ownership, for instance, though it was communally based, with tracts parceled out by a central authority. They also practiced agriculture. I’ve heard it claimed that in some of the northeastern tribes an individual owned the land they lived on in a sense not terribly different from a modern suburban homeowner with a mortgage.

5

Under the feudal system in England, all land was owned by the King. It was the same here in the US, after the USA was declared. All the lands in the former colonies were owned by the federal government, or at least it claimed. When states were incorporated and recognized, the federal government granted the states the property contained within its boundaries. Initially, after the American Revolution, the federal government issued patents (deeds) to those who fought in the War. After the states acquired title, subject to reservation of certain rights by the federal government, such as navigation rights, the state issued deeds to purchasers of land or to rrld companies, but the rrld companies usually got just easements, with fee simple remaining in the state.

The Homestead Act granted title to those in the western territories who established a home and a farm over a certain amount of acreage.

Some of the lands in the USA that were formerly claimed by France were in possession of those who bought title from the French government. The Americans moving into that area got title either from the state or the federal government, so, in some cases, there were two chains of title: one from the French and one from the USA.

The same would probably be true everywhere. In the 1890s, when some Jews bought lands in what is now Israel (and was since Biblical times), they bought them from known Arab owners, but if the title was unknown (as much of that arid vacant land was), they bought them from the Ottman empire, the head of which at that time was the Egyptian ruler.

6

Which is cool, but that gets us as far as - at very best - 802AD, and I suspect quite a bit later. Maybe as far as William.

So, ownership of land prior to the 9th century . . .

7

Description of how it worked in ancient Egypt:

http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/economy/land.htm

8

That sounds like a lot of speculation to me. Do you have any cites to support those statements? Consider this: We started settling down and farming about 10k years ago. Written records date back to only about 5,000 years ago. That leaves a 5k year gap during which we don’t know what the heck was going on.

Which also implies that we currently don’t have a factual answer to the OP. Perhaps a better question is: What is the earliest record of a land sale?

9

This is absolutely incorrect. As an initial matter, after the American Revolution, there was no federal government, just thirteen independent and sovereign states. At first they banded together under the ineffectual Articles of Confederation, and then in 1789 adopted the Constitution, creating the federal government as we know it.

In the meantime, ownership of land in the former colonies went on just about as it had in colonial times. The colonies had been formed by royal charter, and title to within them was granted by the colonial governors or by the crown. On independence, title to land was undisturbed, except perhaps for Royalists abandoning their holdings or being dispossessed.

In fact, a healthy chunk of Lower Manhattan is still held under the original royal grants issued by King William III in 1697 and Queen Anne in 1705 to Trinity Church. (A law firm that I used to work at represented the Church, and at one point I had to use an exemplified copy of the 1705 Royal Charter from the State Archives to demonstrate ownership of a Church building.)

It may be the case that land titles in some western states that formerly were federal territories may derive from the federal government, but that is very much not the case in New York and other states with recognized land ownership predating United States federal control.

10

John Mace: Excellent! Even Yabob’s Egyptian post falls within that 5000 years. And is also very similar to European practices. But I’m not sure granting land to feudal lords of your kingdom is exactly the same thing. People could still go elsewhere, if they had the means and will to travel, to find a place that wasn’t ruled.

However, I’m not sure how to define “earliest record of a land sale”. ? Wouldn’t working for someone in order to own the land you worked after a set time count?

Maybe the better question is to ask when did the concept of land ownership take root? Who said they owned a piece of land, be it 1 acre or several million, first? Many people were not nomadic and often stayed in the same area. They would have naturally felt a sense of ownership if a situation arose where someone outside came and started using that land. Is this remotely possibly answerable? Or should I hang it up?

11

I believe that much of the writings (mostly on clay tablets) from ancient Babylonia and Egypt are actually accountant & merchant records. They give some good insight into the commercial practices of those nations, and even the numbering systems.

But the existence of so many such artifacts shows that ‘ownership’ was clearly important starting way back then.

12

Well, I never said it would be easy to answer. Just possible. :slight_smile:

When and where. I’m sure the practices varied from place to place.

13

Well, does it have to be sale for money?

If the king grants you land to hold for an indefinite period (and, if you wish, in turn to grant it to your own feudal tenants) in return for which you are obliged to render him homage, provide knight-service, pay feudal dues, etc, is that a “sale”? After all, you do end up holding the land indefinitely, or alienating it for something that you consider worthwhile.

Or, if you as a feudal lord grant land to your mate, in a deal whereby he grants some of his land to you, or you marry his daughter and get a grant of land as part of the dowry, is that a “sale”?

Land was traded in various ways from quite early on. Trading it for cash specifically, I think, came rather later.

For a long time, English (and, I suspect, general European) public policy very much favoured the transmission of land by inheritance, marriage or feudal grant, rather than by outright sale. I seem to recall from many years ago that the creation of a clear mechanism in English Law for the simple sale of land for cash was an (unintended?) consequence of the Statute of Uses 1535.

I think until modern times nobody conceived of themselves as owning land in the same straightforward way that you could own, say, a horse. You were possessed of land, but that possession always carried some degree of obligation as well as various rights to use and exploit the land. It was also to some degree provisional; if you died without an heir, for example, the land reverted to your feudal overlord, who was ultimately the king. He could grant it to someone else, and could do so if he chose in return for money, but that wasn’t a sale in our modern sense.

14

It is speculation, but think about it this way: I have a farm and you want it. There are three pretty obvious solutions: 1) Kill (or otherwise coerce) me and take it, 2) Hope that I leave, or 3) Offer me something so that I agree to let you have it.

The solution is so obvious I cannot believe anyone had a farm for more than, say, 5 years before someone thought about buying it.

You don’t have the same issue for pre-agrarian societies. Land is rarely productive enough that you can survive there year-round, and if I’m not there all year, I can hardly prevent you from using it.

To offer something a little more factual, Hammurabi’s Code covered real estate ownership in the 18th Century BC. So 3,700 years ago we already had government-regulated methods of sale and formal protection of property rights.

Yabob’s link to Egyptian sources takes us another 700 years back.

15

Not “European” practices, the information we’d received was limited to England and I’m not sure it’s quite correct in the way it was stated. In other places the King was not the owner of the land in his country and gave it away as he wanted to, private property had been handed down since at least the Romans.

Also, let us not confuse “hey, we have some land here which nobody seems to own, please Sir Joe get some people and go settle it” or “hey, there is some land here which nobody seems to own and a nice river… hey y’all, if you settle there you won’t pay taxes for 50 years!” with “the King owned everything”. The King or the Kingdom (which is not quite the same) owned everything so long as it wasn’t owned by anybody else.

16

We don’t know when the first person “had” a farm. It’s possible land was owned communally.

Yes, and as I said before, we have about 5,000 years of agriculture before that, during which time we don’t know what went on.

Your speculation might be good, but it’s still speculation. Nothing inherently wrong with that as long as we’re clear about it. This forum is set up to for people to give factual answer to questions, so I think it’s only fair to indicate when we’re speculating and when we’re giving actual facts.

17

You need to decide what question you want answered. John Mace’s answer is fine if the question is as he posed it, but that is not the question you originally asked, and which you seem to have come back around to asking again.

As dracoi notes, the idea of ownership surely evolved over time as people gradually turned from nomadic to agricultural lifestyles. This shift did not occur ovenight–evidence indicates that some groups did both simultaneously, or shifted back and forth over time, sometimes in response to changes in climate conditions. People who clear and farm land would always have claimed ownership of it; but even nomadic herders and hunting tribes tended to return to the same areas periodically and expected competitors to stay away. Whether they thought of this as “owning” land or not, they fought for exclusive use of it, which is a very similar concept.

Surely at some point in pre-history, a smaller tribe agreed to hand over something of value in return for being to hang out near a larger tribe, or a traveler provided goods/services in return for housing. So the idea of “If you want to be in this spot you need to pay me,” undoubtedly predates written records by thousands of years. Asking for a cite on this is like asking for a contemporaneous account of when humans started walking upright.

18

I don’t think that’s true even in theory, and it certainly wasn’t true in practice, at least if you use the modern definition of “owned”. Firstly, there was land owned by the Church, which prior to the Reformation didn’t regard itself as subordinate to the King. Secondly, right through the medieval period there was a significant class of freeholders, who were distinguished from ordinary villeins precisely because the owned their land outright and owed no feudal service. Thirdly in a feudal situation where (say) the king grants a fief to a baron, who in turn grants a manor to a knight, who has it worked by serfs in exchange for service, there’s no ownership in the modern sense. No-one has the right to sell the land. At the top level, the grant of the fief cannot be (legally) revoked unless the baron is convicted of a crime, and won’t naturally end unless the baron’s family dies out. At the bottom level, there’s a distinction between the knight’s personal land (which is worked by the serfs as part of their service, with the knight keeping the produce), the serfs’ land (which the serfs work for themselves, though they may have to pay rent) and common land (which is owned by the village as a whole, and the knight can neither sell, work nor charge rent for it).

One of the few rights feudal lords did not possess was the right to evict serfs (for reasons other than non-payment of rent/non-perfomance of service). In many cases, a serf had the right to pass on “his” land to his heirs, regardless of what the lord thought about it. The move to exclusive possession and money rents didn’t really start until the end of the Middle Ages (and was often strongly opposed by the serfs, who correctly suspected it would lead to evictions and rack-renting.)