Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 348

Wiltshire farming has long fascinated agricultural historians. It features strongly in the many volumes of the Agrarian history of England and Wales, particularly because of its marked division into different agrarian landscapes and farming types, and its early participation in agrarian improvements, such as enclosures and the ‘floating’ of water meadows. It is therefore timely and appropriate that the Wiltshire Record Society should have produced this excellent edition of agrarian sources, edited by the acknowledged expert on the county’s early modern farming history.

These sources can be divided into four broad categories. Firstly, there are materials that depict farm and estate management, perhaps the most interesting of which are the detailed farm accounts of large chalkland farms at Norrington and Trow, and the home farm on the Arundell estate at Ansty. The materials also i nclude accounts of sheep flocks, estate surveys, probate inventories and tithe accounts. The second category comprises local agrarian institutions, notably manorial government, the activities of manorial stewards and the regulation of markets and fairs. Of these, the sources illustrating manorial custom and government are particularly revealing, showing how the communal sheep flocks of the chalk downs were managed, and emphasizing the range of sanctions available against transgressors. The lists of sellers of animals at the fairs of Castle Combe are a rare survival and offer an important insight into the likely volume of business at these sometimes overlooked hubs of the agrarian economy. The third category of sources relate to activities that could be described collectively as ‘improvement’. These include records of pre-parliamentary enclosures by agreement on the chalk downs, an important and wide-ranging collection of estate sources and leases relating to the management of water meadows adjoining the Avon, and sources covering the specialist husbandry of woad and rabbits. Finally, there is a section that highlights the effects of these seventeenth-century changes on the labouring population, particularly the fluctuations caused by population increase and squatters, and the subsequent depopulations following enclosure, and the many battles engendered by what Hindle has termed the ‘politics of entitlement’ to resources and relief.

This is a wide and valuable range of sources, backed up by very careful and knowledgeable editing. This takes two forms. Firstly, there is a useful and important scholarly introduction, sketching out the county’s agrarian regions, agricultural techniques and markets, and then concentrating on the nature and diversity of improvement in the seventeenth century. This amounts to an extremely informative overview of the sources, and sets them very effectively into their spatial and chronological contexts. Secondly, each of the sources has its own short introduction, explaining the nature of the source, the location of the farming enterprise by which it was created, and any other relevant details about its authors or notable features of its content. These two elements add considerably to the historical value of these materials, particularly to those coming to such sources for the first time.

There are only two possible criticisms of this collection, both of which the editor acknowledges, and neither of which is easily surmountable. The first is that most of the sources are drawn from the more extensive archives of the larger estates. The second is that these archives are more common on the larger holdings of the sheep-corn downs than they are of the wood-pasture vales, where ownership (and source survival) was more fragmentary. This creates a slightly lop-sided perspective of the county’s agriculture, even if it emphasizes the importance of its regional differentiation, and one of the fundamental problems inherent in the study of agrarian history. Nevertheless, this volume is an important and highly impressive edition of farming sources. It should be required reading for students of agrarian history and the local history of the county alike. It will also be very useful for comparative purposes to those early modern historians with subject interests outside Wiltshire, and for those interested more generally in material life in seventeenth-century England.