How were property lines known / created back in the old days when huge lots of land were owned / claimed?
In: 89
With sticks and stones.
I claim this land.
No it is mine.
No, I smash your head with a stone, it is mine.
Case closed.
Of course we have used laws and lawyers since the dawn of time, but controversies were usually solved by “let’s see who has enough strength to claim and maintain this land”
Otherwise there would have been no kings and nobles and colonialism and stuff. The rough idea was “i am the king, cos I’m tough and strong, you pay me taxes. Or else…” then someone stronger comes, so on and so forth.
UK here. We have a land registry, but the boundaries are not very accurate. Basically a red line on a one inch by one inch part of a diagram. Essentially, existing fences determine the boundaries. You would have thought there would be a slow process to update records to be digitally accurate.
Norwegian here:
Where my family lives, they own pretty much the entire valley (farmers), but that valley used to be home to maybe 50 families, all with their own plot of land. So when farmer A, had two sons, they would get 50/50 of the land. And they would then build up stone fences (just stacked stones) to fence it off. They would then tell the local gvt whenever practical the name of this plot of land. This has been more or less in place in the same way since Viking times.
Within the last 50ish years, most of those farms have died out, and my family has bought up one by one plot for their farm (small farms arent viable anymore, so it has to be one family – one area), they have kept all the names. So if you go in the maps today, there are still officially 5acre plots marked off as “Olavs land” or funny names like “Nosebleed hill”.
George Washington’s first job was surveying. Here is how they did it. You start at the Atlantic ocean at high tide pick a spot and set a stone marker. The center top of that marker is where all of your measurement will come from. In Colonial America they had a building level, a Circumferentor ( A compass with a disk marked off in degrees ), chains to give them distance and a pole with marking in feet and inches.
So you set your building level up on a tripod directly over the marker and measure the distance from the marker to the building level. Let us say it is 5 feet over the marker. You then use your circumferentor to point your building level in the direction you want to go. Let us say due west. You then pull your measuring chain out and drive a stake at the end of it. Put your pole with feet and inches on it on top of the stake. You look through the building level and see what measurement the crosshairs line up with. Let us say 3 foot 6 inches. You now know that you have a stake the top of which is one chain due west of your original marker that is 1 foot 6 inches above high tide. You keep repeating this until you get to California.
Generally speaking it was a mess. Deeds were often very vague and open to interpretation, for example “from the boulder to the tree and all the way up the hill” or “standing on X location, everything you can see is part of the property” or “…up until the stream/creek”.
As you can imagine, such descriptions were incredibly vague, deeds were also lost, forged, or some were never made at all officially, and of course the descriptions were open to interpretation and as such many disputes occurred on the ground, as people constantly moved their fences or straight up built in neighboring plots and pretty much sucked them in. Basically, unless you were ever vigilant and ever present in maintaining your land, it would be taken from you one way or another. Then we have the fact that deeds based on characteristics if the landscape which may change were very easily disputed, and we also have the fact that over the years depending on the history of each region, land could be claimed or lost depending on the system, or lack thereof, in place that determined land ownership. A war or a change in government could easily see vast stretches of land being simply taken by the governing authorities and given to others.
Stones with markings were used as well. Not far from. Where I live there’s a slab of stone that delimits the borders of a medival bishopric.
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