Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 231

By the 1830s one-third of all English grain came from just six eastern counties: Cambridgeshire, Essex, Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. It was here that the new fodder crops made their greatest contribution to agricultural productivity, by allowing farmers to reduce the area under permanent or temporary grass while maintaining livestock numbers without loss of manure. Suffolk won the admiration of James Caird for its mixed farming on heavy land, its pipe and tile drainage, and its commitment to artificial fertilizers. All was so well and good through the years of high farming that no one really spotted the change – when it came. Landowners were so convinced that they had invested wisely that when grain prices started to fall they unwisely buried their proverbial heads in the local clay, convinced that the higher yields they were achieving must eventually bear financial fruit. In the end they compromised and what emerged was what Edward Bujak calls ‘a bastardized version of mixed arable and livestock farming’, which enabled farmers to continue to fatten livestock and also to keep some arable land in tillage – at a significantly reduced rent (pp.59–60).

Much of this story is perhaps predictable, particularly in the light of Tom Williamson’s recent work on East Anglia, but Bujak looks beyond the bare agricultural facts to ask interesting questions about the rural social structure. Suffolk was a county of large estates, but why was it possible for these estates to survive the tempestuous times of the agricultural depression, as well as the legal changes brought about by the Settled Land legislation, more or less intact? Why did tenant farmers remain loyal through these years, to their landlord and to his political preferences? Why did land reform make so little progress in the county? Why did labourers continue to doff their caps when they might have been expected to be in dispute with their employers through agricultural trade unions, or simply take to the road to London in the search for fortune, if not fame? The answer to these questions, Bujak suggests, is that there was a kind of elaborate conspiracy in which landlords refused to betray their tenants, keeping them on through thick and thin because letting a farm during the agricultural depression was not something to be contemplated lightly. Tenants in turn respected their landlord’s position by continuing to vote Conservative (and thus also took little notice of either the Liberal party or its flirtation with land reform). Any potential disrespect from labourers was nipped in the bud, with new cottages, gardens and allotments, often made available in protective closed villages. Everyone gained: landlords retained their estates and their political influence (transferring it by the 1880s adroitly from national to local politics), tenants renegotiated their leases when conditions were bad, and labourers lived in relatively good circumstances – although Bujak has little to say on wages. Of course, some of this rosy glow could not survive the agricultural downturn of the 1880s and beyond. Some landowners were forced to sell, although usually only their detached estates. Some labourers were locked out in a trade dispute in 1874, but were admitted back into their old jobs and cottages soon enough afterwards. Deference was challenged, but not defeated.

Bujak argues a good case, bringing together economic history, political history, and rural social history, to show how the different strands interacted through the years of plenty and the years of dearth. His discussion of the impact of the land reform movement in its Suffolk context is particularly illuminating, and he contributes to a number of mini-debates as he goes, such as the role of local landowners in the implementation of the New Poor Law, and in the reforms of local government from 1888. But at the end of the book I was left with a slight tinge of concern. I have no doubt that Suffolk landowners built cottages, laid out allotments and closed villages, but they come over as a smug lot, anticipating the needs of farmers and labourers, and digging deep into their pockets to fund them. Yet Rider Haggard, writing of Suffolk in 1902, found that ‘the owners of land who have no other source of income are practically ruined’. Had they spun him a yarn, or was he painting a deliberately provocative picture of the late Victorian countryside? This book suggests the latter, and in doing so it raises some interesting questions for future research.