Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 134

Humphrey Newton is unusual among early Tudor gentlemen in that his commonplace book survives. He may even have been unusual in that he kept a commonplace book. From this book, often cryptic and sometimes barely legible, Deborah Youngs has recreated a wonderful impression of the man and his affairs. He was an upwardly mobile Cheshire gentleman, who moved from the ranks of the mere gentry to the squirearchy. A landowner, local lawyer and part-time poet, he enjoyed a successful career through his own skill, tenacity and good fortune. His somewhat down-market and cut-price effigy still lies in Wilmslow parish church to remind us that he made it into the upper reaches of society.

The foundation of Newton’s position in eastern Cheshire was the management and exploitation of his property. He inherited the family estate of Newton, worth some £10 p.a. in 1498 and his wife, the co-heiress of the Fittons of Pownall, entered her inheritance in 1506. This tripled his landed income and involved a move from the large farmhouse that was Newton Hall to the more substantial manor house at Pownall. The commonplace book contains 25 folios, almost a quarter of its total, concerning the management of the Newton estate between 1498 and 1506. These pages, originally a separate notebook, contain rentals and accounts in the form of a series of annual summaries of key incomings and outgoings. From these, Youngs reconstructs its agrarian history over one short period. Newton was a compact estate of less than 500 acres. There were few tenanted properties; the primary resource was the home farm which Humphrey managed himself. It was a mixed economy of arable and pastoral husbandry. The principal crop was oats, supplemented by inferior barley and rye. Cattle and sheep were kept. Produce was primarily for consumption, though Humphrey also bought and sold regularly in the market. He employed a core of around five full-time general labourers in any one year, identified as servants, and a fluctuating number of casual workers, as many as twenty at harvest time. They were almost all local people. Women were paid less than men. The accounts reveal a personal relationship between Humphrey and his employees, all members of his extended household. He attended the wedding of one of them. Here then is the hands-on gentleman landowner.

He was also an improving landlord. He carried out and extensive and costly marling of his land between 1498 and 1502. He rebuilt his corn mill at considerable expense; and he developed a fishery and fulling mill. As a result he increased the output of his farmland by a third to a half and his rentable income from £11 to £14. But he was not only concerned to improve: he was also determined to extend his property. There was a deserted village at Newton, the tenements of which, he claimed, his ancestors had held. There had been, if not a manor, then an independent vill there. As he noted in his book, ‘ther fell the pestilence and was a deth of people … called the greate deth; after whose decessez the londes of Neuton wer in decay’. The abandoned tenements lay on Newton Heath to the east of the Hall. He spent a good deal of his time and money acquiring land that he claimed his ancestors once held, establishing five or six new tenements and building a chapel on the Heath. Not many landlords set about restoring a lost village in the early sixteenth century: most hastened the destruction of what remained.

After 1506 Humphrey’s main interest shifted to Pownall; he no longer preserved his Newton accounts. Should we call him an entrepreneur, or a capitalist? How typical was he? There is a view that the small, personallymanaged single estates of the lesser gentry were in the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries more efficiently managed to benefit from market opportunities. Maybe, but we tend only to know of a very few like Humphrey Newton whose accounts have survived. Is it the keeping or the survival that is unusual? But in Humphrey’s case, as Youngs shows, the management, extension and improvement of his ancestral estate was but one aspect of a busy life. Other chapters on his family, his legal career, his religious beliefs, his lifestyle and cultural interests reveal him to be typical of the gentleman bureaucrat that emerged in the later middle ages. He is portrayed in his effigy in a fur-lined robe, not armour. To this extent he was of a new age rather than the old. This is an important study for all historians of early Tudor social history, not just those interested in agricultural history.