Crown Land

In Commonwealth realms, Crown land is an area belonging to the monarch ("the Crown"), the equivalent of an entailed estate that passed with the monarchy and could not be alienated from it.

In the United Kingdom and during the British Empire, the hereditary revenues of Crown lands were a feature until the start of the reign of George III when the Crown Estate was surrendered to the Parliament of Great Britain in return for a fixed civil list payment – the monarch retains the income from the Duchy of Lancaster.

In the United States the feudal concept of Crown land and Crown Estate was repudiated during the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). The legislative process of the Continental Congress (1774–1789) produced a system that transferred individual state land claims into a repository of land held by the federal government, to be used for the benefit of the nation as a whole. The result was land held in the public domain by the federal government. The formal process was initiated in 1780 and land was added to the public domain from 1782 onward. Once land was a part of the U.S. public domain, it was thereafter held in allodial title, meaning that it could not be alienated from federal authority, but might be removed from the public domain (as in the creation of a new state) or transferred and owned in fee simple.

In the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its predecessor the Austrian Empire Crown lands were alternative administrative units to duchies, as in the Kingdom of Poland and its successor, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.