Agricultural History Review, Volume 55 Part 2 (2007), p. 318

William Gould came from an old-established farming family in upper Dovedale on the Derbyshire-Staffordshire border, where he was the tenant of a substantial farm at Pilsbury, a former monastic grange that been part of the Chatsworth estate since the Dissolution. His reputation as a progressive farmer led to his appointment, when he was 40 years old, as chief land agent and house steward to the Welbeck abbey estate of William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, third Duke of Portland and future Prime Minister, a position that he held until his death fifteen years later. He kept up the tenancy at Pilsbury, even though it was many miles away, and in 1784 took on further estate duties at Chatsworth, where his son, Joseph, eventually became land agent to the fifth and sixth Dukes of Devonshire. During his time at Welbeck, William kept a detailed diary, of which four of the original five volumes survive in the possession of his descendants. Michael Hanson’s edition contains an informative Introduction, placed in the context of wider scholarship, and provides lengthy selected entries (in modern spellings) from the years 1783 to 1788.

Gould was responsible to John Heaton, one of the leading land agents of his day, who was based in London and had an estate near Romford. Heaton was not only auditor to the Duke of Portland, but also agent to the Duke of Devonshire. The Duke of Portland was absent for most of the time, but took a keen interest in his estate during his visits. Gould provides many interesting and sometimes amusing comments about his aristocratic employers, such as:

1 October 1787: The Duke went out with Boaler to shoot on Carburton Forest this morning, though I suppose he has not shot these twenty years, they found plenty of partridges and His Grace shot a number of times but did not kill a bird, on his return he told me he thought shooting the most insipid diversion a man could follow, and thought he should not go any more. As for the servants in the great house, Gould thought

‘they are in general a parcel of thieves and designing persons’.

Gould was assiduous in the performance of his duties. The editor has calculated that in the five years beginning in 1783 he visited 144 different locations on horseback, by chaise or coach, in many parts of Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire and also into Cheshire, Staffordshire and Leicestershire, with two visits to London. He travelled about 9,265 miles in these five years and was on horseback nearly one day in three, in all weathers. He was a man of strong religious and moral beliefs, with only occasional lapses, such as the one noted in the entry for 20 February 1783: ‘Fit for very little business today from drinking too freely last night.’

His job involved collecting rents and tithes, viewing and valuing properties, chairing meetings of parishioners to discuss enclosure, supervising the erection of farm buildings, devising ways of improving land (including drainage schemes), and prosecuting poachers. Much of his time was spent on ‘improving’ the poor-quality land in the district that we now know as The Dukeries. He found, for instance, a ‘rabbit warren upward of 800 acres of barren poor land, it lays open to some other lordships and is good for little, the stock of rabbits upon it is by no means sufficient’. On 2 April 1783 he noted that:

Frith Pasture, which contains about 400 acres of very poor land. I compute there is about 170 of white dry land, 130 ling inclining to peat moss, neither very wet nor dry, and 100 very wet and strong peat moss, it lays exceeding cold and high and is of but very little value, and when improved will answer very little other purpose than a sheep farm. On 16 June 1783: he observed that in one of the woods

‘no care has been taken to keep up the fence, consequently the young spring is ruined by the cattle, and have ordered it all to be stubbed and the trees felled in order to convert it to tillage’. Woodland management was one of his major concerns. His diary contains numerous references to the planting on a large scale of thousands of ash, thorn, sycamore and oak trees. On 6 January 1783, for instance, he

viewed the unimproved Carburton Forest piece, and find about 5 acres covered pretty strong with gorse, the other chiefly ling, we propose taking up about 20 acres for a crop of turnips to prepare the same to sow ash-keys and acorns next winter.

Again, on 15 January 1783, he visited the Nursery, where

we agreed the spruce firs, Virginian cedars, American plants, walnut trees and elm should stand another year, the remaining part of the ground [to be] prepared to receive grass seeds or whatever His Grace may direct’. The diary has numerous entries of general interest.

On 10 June 1783 he visited Beeston and ‘saw the procession of a number of young men incorporated together for the purpose of supporting each other, commonly called a sick club’. On 19 February 1784 he

divided the Scotch bullock and about 14 stone of beef purchased at Worksop with about five pounds-worth of bread among the poor at Welbeck, Carburton, Nor-ton, etc. We made the collection for bread amongst ourselves and the farmers … which afforded a liberal supply to all the industrious poor of those places and was very acceptable at this inclement season. And on 16 March 1787, in a scene reminiscent of An-

thony Trollope’s The duke’s children, he noted that more than 100 gentlemen of the hunt and hounds at Worksop Manor Lodge had hunted all day but had failed to find a fox.

This edition of Gould’s diary is illustrated with contemporary views, maps and portraits. It is a very useful contribution to the local history of the east Midlands and will provide agricultural historians with many small insights into a period when land agents were becoming influential figures as great landowners invested in improving their estates.