Haunting the chapel

I’ve just been robbed by Henry VIII.

Yes, Britain’s favourite wife-killing fatso has cost me about £20 or so 550 years AFTER his death.

“How?”, you may well ask – unless you are already asking “Are you having a psychotic episode, Roger?”

Well, let me tell you – because the erstwhile Tudor monarch could well be reaching out his chubby phantom fingers from beyond the grave to lighten your pockets also if you try to buy a house.

The merrie maniac

Henry VIII, you may recall, was responsible for the dissolution of the monasteries. Much like our present-day rulers, he wanted to grab hold of a load of cash and give some of it to his chums and spend the rest of it on war.

To cut a long story short, when this happened the Church’s liabilities for the repair of church buildings passed to the new owners – which were then generally dumped on the local starving, struggling populace in the form of tithes.

Still with me?

Tithes were then gradually abolished over the following few hundred years.

OR WERE THEY?

Turns out, no one is quite sure if certain bits of land across the country are in fact still liable to pay for repairs to church buildings in whose parishes they may happen to be. The records are sketchy.

In 2003, a couple were charged £100,000 for repairs to an ancient chapel on a farm they had inherited.  The good old House of Lords decided that the Human Rights Act didn’t apply – which is surprising considering how many of its members have undoubtedly inherited ancient chapels.

And so, we return to the present day and the preposterous Chancel Repair Liability Search – for which I have just paid my own tithe, on top of all the other pointless costs on which I have already bent your ears. Eyes. Whatever – sense organs generally. I’m fairly sure I haven’t touched anyone about it.

As I said before, records in this area are sketchy. It’s not clear, even if you check all the available paperwork, whether the property you are buying is potentially liable.

With the same enervating uncertainty as Ant and Dec telling an unpopular celebrity that “it might be you” who has to face the Bushtucker trial (but less than half the charm), Chancel Repair Liability Searches can only tell you that you “might be” liable for a whopping great bill at some unspecified point in the future.

And on what grounds? On the production of some tattered scrap of paper found in the crypt of some OTHER church, which says you are.

That is, if the institution which stands to benefit from finding such evidence digs out documentation which was available only to itself. Now that’s justice.

And so, whither goest risk, hither cometh the insurance industry. You can insure yourself against the danger that you might be financially fucked forever by a law that you not only didn’t know applied to you, but which you couldn’t know applied.

In 2008, the government refused to do anything about this Kafka-esque state of affairs. Its reply to an online petition said:

Chancel Repair Liability has existed for several centuries and the Government has no plans to abolish it or to introduce a scheme for its redemption.  

The Government acknowledges that the existence of a liability for chancel repair will, like any other legal obligation, affect the value of the property in question, but in many cases this effect can be mitigated by relatively inexpensive insurance. It is for the parties involved in a transaction to decide whether or not to take out insurance.

And so the demands of the past over the present are sanctified by the availability of insurance.

Perhaps legal anomalies of this sort are just the price we pay for our “living” constitution – the appendix or coccyx of the body politic.

Indeed, we have many thousands of apparently humorously quaint and charming laws, some 800 of which the Law Commission is looking to get rid of later this year.

Isn’t it delightful that we live in a land where you can technically be pilloried for not tethering your goat correctly on St Swithin’s Day?

No it isn’t – and here, the drummer out of Blur explains why. As he says:

There is no such thing as "technically" being a criminal

Let me paraphrase (and draw perhaps slightly stronger conclusions than a Labour candidate might endorse): these laws put power into the hands of the state which may subsequently be used to suppress activities you had no idea were illegal.

That a person can be criminally liable for something he or she had no idea was illegal and which has never consistently before been treated as illegal is the essence of injustice.

The persistence of these ancient laws is a merkin for the arbitrary exercise of state power – they are the Patriot Act hiding on the village green.

Yeah, it’s only £20 – but it’s the principle of the thing, innit.