Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 1 (2005), p. 110

Given the amount of scholarly attention that has been devoted to these well-documented Buckinghamshire landowners, it cannot be long before some enterprising institution of higher education starts a degree in ‘Verney Studies’. If so, then John Broad’s volume on the growth, development and transformation of the family’s core estate in the three Claydon parishes deserves to be at the head of the reading list. This volume represents the distillation of Dr. Broad’s extensive researches over the last thirty years into the estate policy of the family and the growth of their estates. These are presented in an unusual and impressive amalgam of two increasingly conventional idioms – the local community study and the estate history. By combining the two, this account traces the wider social impact of the Verney family’s single-minded pursuit of land and power in north Buckinghamshire, and its effect on fortunes of the three contrasting Claydon villages. In doing so, it illustrates how far a landowner could recast a settlement according to his own priorities, and make its inhabitants’ daily lifeserve his ends. As such, this work provides a valuable addition to the broader social and economic history ofrural England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Broad’s study of the Verney family traces a cycle of growth and decay – their financial ascent from the return of Sir Ralph from exile in 1653; and their partial collapse in the 1780s under the debts of the 2nd Earl Verney. Both elements have a number of fascinating aspects. Broad demonstrates how the harsh lessons learned by SirRalph in the 1640s shaped the financial strategy of thefamily through his long life, and the two succeeding generations, into the 1740s. In essence, the Verney’s combined a ruthlessly commercial management regime with close personal scrutiny of estate business and of their tenants, particularly in Middle Claydon. Few other rural settlements in later seventeenth-century England can have been under such relentless and pervasive surveillance by their landowner. The family also adopted preferred marriage into prosperous, but unconnected, commercial families over alliances that would bolster their position in the county or in national politics. Until the succession of the second earl in the 1740s, they favoured solvent obscurity to the high stakes (but high risks) of seeking power at court or parliament. Again, they seem to have been perpetuating the lessons learned during the life of the courtier Sir Edmund Verney, whose rewards for service to Charles I were precarious finances and an early death at Edgehill in 1642.

While tight-fisted estate management and a succession of lucrative marriage agreements achieved family prosperity in incremental steps over a century, the dramatic financial disasters of the second earl nearly undid this in a generation. Broad’s portrait of this Ralph Verney is subtle and intricate. Diligent and dutiful, rather than the archetypal aristocratic wastrel, he was undone by the two commonplace desires of the eighteenth-century gentry, of building a house and a parliamentary interest. These ambitions brought large debts, but were not in themselves likely to lead to ruin. Verney’s rash attempt to fund them by speculating in East India futures was, however. By 1786 his debts totalled £140,095, and he had degenerated into a grasping, destructive and devious character, quite at odds with his previous behaviour. He went into exile, while his trustees sold the outlying estates, and stabilized the situation by his death in 1791.

The rise and near fall of the Verneys had other significant costs. In particular, Broad shows how the open-field, ‘peasant’ community of Middle Claydon was transformed in the mid-seventeenth century into a tightly-policed estate village. Here the Verneys exercised a hard-edged ‘paternalism’, ensuring that while their tenants did not have to go to law or go cold in winter, they were sure to pay a market rent, and acquiesce to the family’s wishes, particularly the exclusion of migrants. As Parson Butterfield wrote in 1671 ‘those that are like to multiply may do it for the king, but not for Middle Claydon’. The Verneys depopulated the village and reduced an occupationally-diverse and self-sufficient settlement to a collection of farmers, servants and labourers. In East Claydon, where their landholding brought control rather than dominance, the population stagnated between 1660and 1800 and some rural craftsmen remained. In Steeple Claydon, which they had failed to enclose in the seventeenth century and where they held only one-third of the land, the population doubled, and the community retained the characteristics of an ‘open’ village. Only here did a more varied village economy survive, albeit one impoverished by unrestrained in-migration.

In this sense, the Claydons were the canvas on which the Verneys’ financial ambitions and social imperatives were drawn. The great strength of this depiction is that this landscape is full of people, so that estate policy is set in its wider social context, to show the human costs of the Verneys’ actions. It would have been enlightening to discover the social consequences in the Claydons of the financial crisis of the 1770s and 1780s, but the main legacy of this period is a sketchy estate archive. Similarly, the extensive correspondence of the first Sir Ralph Verney depicts his paternal interference in the villages more strongly than that of his successors, who may have been equally involved, but who failed to leave such an extensive archive. Of necessity, therefore, this study of the relationship between the family and the Claydons is able to say more about the seventeenth rather than the eighteenth century. Despite this, it remains a comprehensive and enlightening illustration of the social consequences of the widespread phenomenon of the growth of the ‘great estate’ during the long eighteenth century. It deserves a wide readership, both among scholars seeking to discover where the independent, self-sustaining early-modern village went to, and those concerned to establish where the dependent, tied estate-community came from.