Sadly, this has little to do with an anti-authoritarian streak. It's mostly a combination of continuous property rights going back more than a thousand years (s

Sadly, this has little to do with an anti-authoritarian streak. It's mostly a combination of continuous property rights going back more than a thousand years (some of these unregistered bits have belonged to the Crown since the Norman conquest), and it being not-inconvenient for large landowners to be able to avoid scrutiny. People with dodgy money would indeed like to buy English land, partly for the legal certainty you suggest, and partly because we've historically been very slow to ask from where you got it...