Ever hear of “eminent domain?” That’s a thing, you know.
It is. But this wasn’t, for the most part, eminent domain. For this you have to understand feudal systems. The Lord owns the land, but the sharecropping peasants think that they have a sort of partnership claim on it too.
If your absentee landlord sells “your” land out from under you, where your grandpa and great-grandpa ran their goats, you might be upset.
Not in law, but by tradition.