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Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

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Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#31

Post by [deleted] »

sneak wrote: post #28
pmlnr wrote: post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

> Leftover laws are weird things. Fun fact: just like this old tax that the Italian residents are unhappy with, every single person that was old enough to vote for their representatives who then voted to ratify the income tax amendment in the USA is now dead. There is no one alive in the USA that was in any way represented in the vote for income tax; conversely everyone that is alive in the US today and is subject to…

[deleted]

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#32

Post by 3v1n0 »

carlob wrote: post #21
azernik wrote: post #11

Note that in a common law system, this would be thrown out of court under either "acquiescence" (if you don't raise a fuss for a very long time when someone unknowingly infringes your rights, you can lose those rights), or "laches" (if you wait long enough to make a legal claim that the defendant is injured by e.g. having made economic decisions in ignorance of that claim). Not sure about the equivalent Italian law,…

> Not sure about the equivalent Italian law, but I would be deeply surprised if there isn't something similar. It's actually in the constitution: hereditary titles are no longer recognized.

That's even better concept, although that's related to the title but not sure if applies to properties.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#33

Post by CaptArmchair »

pjc50 wrote: post #7

Now wondering which European countries still have intact feudal law. Scotland abolished feudal tenure in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc... ; most of the feu burdens were abolished or explicitly ported across. England&Wales still retains the feudal system in places and occasionally people are hit by "chancel repair liability" or somesuch. The chivalric court still exists: https://en…

It's a surprisingly hard question to answer. "feudal" is a historiographic term which was first coined in the late 18th century. It saw various interpretations over the course of the 19th and 20th century through various historical schools. Another term, at least for mainland Europe, would be "Ancien Régime" which denotes the political and socio-economic system before the French Revolution.

As for legal traditions, you're looking at concepts such as customs (coutumes) and seigneurial rights (banalités or bans) which varied from region to region. The former were normative and mostly local. From the 12th century onwards, Civil Law based on Roman Law started to coalesce. The major driver was monarchs gradually succeeding in centralizing and consolidating their power throughout Europe. Through violence (wars, subduing insurrections,...) and through gradual establishing a powerful administrations (typical example: the Dukes of Burgundy).

The French Revolution swept all of that away. The period between 1789 and 1830 saw a fracturing of European nobility and their power, and subsequent consolidation into nation states based on constitutional powers.

Put in a different way, if you were born in 1760 and lived to 1840 (80 years), you'd experience a "societal collapse" (to describe with a hyperbole) in which any and all "old" ways that governed life were overthrown and replaced by an entirely new way of organizing society.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#34

Post by 3v1n0 »

The news isn't so new (https://www.lastampa.it/topnews/primo-piano/2021/03/12/news/...), but doesn't look something that will really end up well for those "barons" (no title is recognized in Italy - as should be everywhere).

However if they want the rights, they're possible legible also of having to pay to the tenants for all the improvements they did so far, and very likely taxes on the property.

So... Might end up a quite bad move.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#36

Post by mytailorisrich »

Joker_vD wrote: post #19
pjc50 wrote: post #7

Now wondering which European countries still have intact feudal law. Scotland abolished feudal tenure in 2000: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_Feudal_Tenure_etc... ; most of the feu burdens were abolished or explicitly ported across. England&Wales still retains the feudal system in places and occasionally people are hit by "chancel repair liability" or somesuch. The chivalric court still exists: https://en…

I suspect that none of the European countries to the eastern side of the Iron Curtain retained feudal law, or much of the "legacy" law in general. That, I guess, is one of the few potential upsides of any revolution: an opportunity arises to just throw away a lot of pre-existing arrangements and re-draw them anew in (hopefully) more sensible way. Of course, the quality of the new design and/or its implementation is n…

That's exactly what happened in France. Napoleon (and the Republic before him) had the law rewritten [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#37

Post by azernik »

carlob wrote: post #21
azernik wrote: post #11

Note that in a common law system, this would be thrown out of court under either "acquiescence" (if you don't raise a fuss for a very long time when someone unknowingly infringes your rights, you can lose those rights), or "laches" (if you wait long enough to make a legal claim that the defendant is injured by e.g. having made economic decisions in ignorance of that claim). Not sure about the equivalent Italian law,…

> Not sure about the equivalent Italian law, but I would be deeply surprised if there isn't something similar. It's actually in the constitution: hereditary titles are no longer recognized.

That's a more specific thing regarding hereditary titles. Acquiescence in the common law applies to any right. Could be water rights, grazing rights, certain intellectual property rights (though those are generally registered in a way that infringing on them legally "unknowing" is hard), &c

If I have grazing rights on land that someone else owns, but don't actually graze there for decades and a new owner doesn't know about those rights, I can't then come back mad that his new fence infringes on the right that I've never asserted and he's not aware of.

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#38

Post by mytailorisrich »

toyg wrote: post #23
pmlnr wrote: post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

Even without going archaic, I had to take insurance when I bought a terrace, because a lease existed on the land at some point but the owning company had dissolved years prior and no lease had been paid for a long time. This is very common in a country (UK) where the State has had strong continuity for several centuries, so land rights and entitlements can be tracked very far back.

These things really are to extract money and commissions during the property purchase. In most cases there is no issue at all but no-one is going to question paying a few pounds extra on a property purchase "for peace of mind".

Re: Italian seaside residents hit with bygone feudal tax

#40

Post by CogitoCogito »

sneak wrote: post #28
pmlnr wrote: post #5

In the UK, during the purchase of our house we had to take a "chancel liability insurance", because our freehold once belonced to a rectory, so to protect ourselves from repair liability towards a chapel that has been here for centuries, we had to pay a one-off insurance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chancel_repair_liability Leftover laws are weird things. EDIT: PS: sadly, the legendary, obligatory archery practice…

> Leftover laws are weird things. Fun fact: just like this old tax that the Italian residents are unhappy with, every single person that was old enough to vote for their representatives who then voted to ratify the income tax amendment in the USA is now dead. There is no one alive in the USA that was in any way represented in the vote for income tax; conversely everyone that is alive in the US today and is subject to…

Today's voters are capable of electing representatives who could repeal that amendment. It's not like voters are left without recourse.
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