here are some thoughts which strike me as entirely anachronistic when I read them in romance novels. The reason they strike me as such has to do with another major not-quite-hobby of mine, which is a study of the common law. I’m by no means an expert, but I know who the experts are in this area, and I’ve read a bunch of stuff by most of them.

Now, you’re thinking–all I need to know about property law is that some estates are entailed, and other estates are not. Nothing else matters for my plot. Right?

Wrong. The reason you need to know more is that our subtle understanding of what is bound up in the concept of the word “mine” has changed significantly over the last few centuries. In order to explain what I mean, I need to tell you what “mine” means in modern times. It’ll all sound second nature to you, and you’ll wonder what I’m talking about. And then I’ll tell you what “mine” used to mean, and how it has changed, and suddenly, you’ll start reading books and saying, “Gosh, that’s anachronistic, too.”

These days, we regularly accept the following formulations: “I can do X to thing A, therefore I must own thing A.” And its inverse: “I own thing A, therefore I should be allowed to do thing X to it.” This is becaus our definition of property has devolved into one that’s purely functional: Property ownership is nothing other than a series of rights that you have. So if I say “it’s my house,” what I really mean is that I have the right to invite people in and kick them out and paint it yellow and plant dahlias, unless I live in a snarky neighborhood.
This aspect of ownership bleeds into the way we think of the world around us. Take, for instance, the expression, “it’s my life; I can do what I want.” Implicit in that concept is the idea that ownership gives means rights.
This is a modern conception of ownership. Centuries ago, property ownership was vastly different. Instead of rights that attached to property, you had lords who granted you things in return for the appropriate homage. (If you go back far enough, there wasn’t even any remedy for lords who failed to deliver.) There was no concept of property ownership, just servitude and sufferance.

The Regency period is a period of flux between the old concept of property, which was something closer to a bargain between lord and vassal, and the new concept of property, which was closer to a bundle of rights.

So take something like: “It’s my life; I can do what I want with it.”

This presupposes that ownership means you can do what you want with things. But ownership didn’t always meant that. Lords could do what they wanted by right; everyone else was allowed to do things at the lord’s sufferance. Not only could people in Regency eras rarely do what they wanted; the idea that ownership meant rights to dispose of as you would made no sense.

Or, for instance, take the idea, today relatively firmly entrenched, that men in that time period owned their wives. What do we mean by that? We mean that men had rights to do things to their wives, like beat them, or take away their children, and that wives often lacked those rights themselves. But this is a very modern statement of the matter. As women’s rights were understood in those times, the wife was her husband’s vassal, with concomitant rights and responsibilities. (Notice, if you read Mary Wollstonecraft, that she never uses the modern formulation. Not once.)

Why does this matter? It doesn’t, really. But it does, because there are some sentiments that we express today as ownership, but which regency people would express differently. And in cases like, “It’s my X, I can do whatever I want,” it’s most blatant.