Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 1 (2003), p. 122

Further information from the Society’s website, www.norfolkrecord.plus.com.

Detailed estate accounts survive relatively rarely for England in the seventeenth century, and only a few of these survivors have yet been printed. Elizabeth Griffiths’ edition of the estate accounts of William Windham of Felbrigg in north-east Norfolk is a significant addition to the published stock of such sources, and also to our understanding of the practice of estate management in this important century. As Dr Griffiths argues in her comprehensive introduction, the unrelenting fall in grain and livestock prices in the third quarter of the seventeenth century forced innovation and diversification upon Norfolk landowners in their struggle to maintain estate income. This sowed the seeds of changes in husbandry, tenancy-agreements and estate management that eventually came to fruition in the classic west Norfolk agrarian improvers of the eighteenth century – Coke, Townshend and the Walpoles. William Windham was one of their precursors, on his small East Anglian estates (2,300 acres in north Norfolk, north and east Suffolk, and north Essex). His account book reflects his efforts to bring order and systematic management to these properties, and his experiments with tenures and crops in the face of continuously falling grain prices.

Dr Griffiths details the scope of Windham’s activities in her scholarly introduction. She describes the structure and organization of these accounts, the history of the Felbrigg estate, its arrangement when William inherited it in 1673, and his subsequent management of the house and farms. In particular, she highlights his very unusual attempts at share cropping or ‘letting to halves’. Windham sought to overcome a shortage of properly capitalized tenants (and low rental yields) by supplying dairy herds and arable equipment to tenants in return for half the profits, generally with little success. The introduction also details Windham’s relationship with his family, the estate professionals, tenants and labourers, and locates his efforts effectively within the wider economic, governmental and intellectual contexts.

The accounts themselves are arranged in double entry form, detailing the debts followed by the credits of each tenant on the estate between 1673 and 1689. This is rare among printed estate accounts, although Blake Tyson’s recent edition of The estate and household accounts of Sir Daniel Fleming of Rydal Hall, Westmorland 1688–1701 (C.W.A.A.S. Record Ser., 13) does provide a northern equivalent, albeit one that is not arranged conveniently property by property. The historical interest in these accounts lies in the strategies that Windham adopted in order to balance the two columns. So, for example, the reader can trace how on Widow Skipper’s 220-acre farm at Crownthorpe in central Norfolk arrears had mounted to £522 by 1675, and see Windham’s response in the list of stock and contents sold to the value of £354 to clear the account. Such attention to detail, together with Windham’s efforts at mathematical accuracy, and the editor’s thorough cross-referencing of accounts, estate surveys and leases will allow students of agrarian history to use this volume to produce a systematic picture of estate management at this time. More unusually among seventeenth-century accounts, the double entry bookkeeping should also make possible a coherent analysis of Windham’s solvency during this agrarian depression.

As a consequence, this is a very important source for the agricultural history of early modern England, and Dr Griffiths’ edition makes it fully accessible for historical analysis, and sets it alongside a collection of other relevant estate records. At present, however, this source’s greatest strength is also its single weakness, because as the editor observes, ‘no other document of this nature has come to light’. Hopefully, this particular deficiency will soon be put right.