IF ANY reader wants to be known henceforth as the legitimate Lord Churwell of Churwell the title will rush him or her between £5,000 and £7,000.

All they have to do is flutter a lordly hand at a manorial auction shortly after 2pm next Thursday at the Stationers’ Hall, Ave Maria Lane, London, and the honour could be theirs.

The new Lord Churwell would be able to put his or her title on their passport, chequebook and credit cards and will presumably be able to say imperiously: "Do you know who I am?" when stopped by the police.

Not that it is likely to do them any good.

The new owner of the title will have bought just that – a title. The Lordship of the Manor of Churwell, on the outskirts of Batley, confers no lands, wealth or status of any kind.

So you won’t be able to go into Churwell dressed in ermine with your nose in the air and boss the locals around, unless, as they say in churlish common parlance, you want to get well bricked.

But it would certainly be chickens home to roost if someone from Huddersfield bought the title.

Until recently the Manor of Churwell belonged to the Earl of Dartmouth who, as we know – or ought to know – also owns a lot of land in Kirklees. He used to own a lot more, but times was ’ard and he had to part with a few acres.

The present earl is, however, the genuine article. His mother is Raine, Countess Spencer, stepmother to the late Princess Diana.

Ownership of Churwell, and indeed huge tracts of West Yorkshire including the best part of Huddersfield, fell to one Ilbert de Lacy shortly after 1066 and the Norman invasion.

William the Conqueror – whose contemporaries called him William the Bastard, partly because he was illegitimate and partly because he wasn’t very nice – gave sidekick Ilbert masses of land in the North. He then farmed it out to his own sidekicks.

Ilbert himself quite liked Pontefract, possibly because he had a taste for liquorice. So he built himself a castle there, where he was safe from the peasants. He also owned Almondbury and a descendant, Henry de Lacy, was given permission by King Stephen to build a small castle there.

I think you know the rest of the story.

These were real lords of the manor. They had the power of life and death – and used it.

Some were racist thugs who liked nothing better than to kill and torture a few Saxons if the mood took them and the hunting elsewhere was poor.

Those days are long gone and instead of castles to storm we have faceless corporations, incompetent councils and service providers with call centres halfway up the Himalayas.

It is highly unlikely that the next Lord Churwell will find his path smoothed in this troublesome modern world.

I imagine it will be just as difficult, if not more so ("Do you know who I am?") to get the boiler cleaned or the car serviced.

In fact, it makes you wonder why the title should confer anything at all on anybody. This sort of thing clearly does, because auction houses know their market and they don’t set or predict selling prices by plucking a figure out of the air.

We Brits are, like it or not, still intrigued by class. A whiff of the feudal system, however faint, still hangs in the air of 21st-century Britain.

So if you still think you can ‘lord it’ over people and you’re happy to lighten your wallet by about £5,000 or so, good luck.