Land tenure is the right to own property and how it is determined varies by country. In medieval Europe, land was distributed under the feudal system. Terms of holding land had to be met, creating loyalties and unity. Today, land tenure is defined by mortgages, rental/lease agreements, and tax laws. Indigenous peoples still fight over the right to own property.
Land tenure can be defined as the right to own property (and other property such as houses on land). How tenure is determined can vary from country to country, and sometimes land tenure refers solely to how land was distributed in medieval Europe under the feudal system. Obviously, the term possession must also be taken into account, which can be defined as the right to hold or conditions on the basis of which the right to hold or possess is established. Conditions become more complicated when determining how people might hold land today.
In the feudal system in Europe, much of the land belonged to the rulers, but these rulers gave tenure of the land to a variety of people, including the nobility. The high nobility owned the land, but with their tenure they could distribute it to others such as knights, who could distribute it even more. Payment for this land was ultimately a duty to the king, nobleman, knight, or anyone else who allowed someone else to live there or own it. At the lowest level, serfs took up small rights to their living spaces and paid for them through their labour.
If anything agreed upon about the terms of land tenure were ignored, the person who bestowed the land could take it away. Hence, there has always been a sense that terms of holding land had to be met, and this created bottom-up loyalties and often unity if wars were to be fought. Of course, holding land in this way made upward mobility in caste difficult; the average serf never owned more than a squalid cottage of stone or log, if that were the case.
There are still discussions of land tenure, though gradually in Europe, most people came to define the terms of tenure in different ways, such as paying property taxes instead of granting allegiance to a particular crown. This problem was one of the main ones in the colonization of North and South America. Many of the North American Indians did not consider it possible to own property, and therefore did not fight for ownership or necessarily acknowledge the land ownership claims that had been staked by the settlers. In any culture where different ideas about land tenure come together, the results can be tragic and/or combustible. There are still countries especially with indigenous peoples who are fighting over this issue or trying to understand how people perceive the right to own property.
In many places today, the idea of land tenure is constructed in a more modern way. The right of possession is defined at any time, by mortgages, by rental or lease agreements, and by tax laws. Most people know exactly what their mandate is and try to stay within the formal agreements they have made so they don’t miss it.
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