Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 136

This, the fifth volume to appear in the Hearth Tax series published by the British Record Society arising out of the larger Hearth Tax project initiated by Professor Margaret Spufford at Roehampton, is a notable achievement. The West Riding is, for these purposes, one of the largest English counties and the book is correspondingly big in the hand at nearly 750 pages. At its heart is the transcript of the Lady Day 1672 return which, printed in three columns, fills 365 pages of text. The exhaustive tabulation of the return fills a further 103 pages. There are, in all, 39,267 households enumerated in the return. The index of persons fills 104 pages in two columns. Besides the editors, seven assistants are named on the title page. Congratulations are surely due to all of them.

There are some oddities about this volume though. The 1672 return has been published once before, in a series of stapled booklets by the Ripon Historical Society in 1990–94, based on a contemporary copy held at the Wakefield Metropolitan District Library. This copy is used to provide the return for the Ainsty in the present edition and provides additional details of the poor, but it has not been collated with the Exchequer copy in the National Archives from which the remainder of the present text is taken. It is therefore too soon to throw away the pamphlets with their rusting staples for all local historians will wish to compare both lists. A quick check of Settle reveals that Roger Crombleholme (who the Ripon transcribers misread as Grombleholme) with six hearths is entirely missing from the new text, whilst the new edition misreads William Paley as Rayley. A bit of checking suggests that there are more than ‘minor discrepancies’ between the two texts. And whilst the return is described as being for 1672, the return for Osgoldcross is actually that for 1673 taken from a text in the National Archives and not the Wakefield version.

In addition to the transcript, there is an introduction by Professor Spufford describing the project to date, and a discussion of wealth and poverty in six counties by John Price. This gives Margaret Spufford great satisfaction as it shows a gradient nationally from north to south in the proportion of one-hearth households. But Spufford has yet to overtake Arkell’s 2003 figures for the distribution of hearths and I might suggest that the county is far too blunt a unit for a discussion of this sort. Overall, the West Riding has 57.4 per cent, but the riding shows its own marked gradient. The southern wapentakes of Strafforth and Staincross have 50–52 per cent households with one hearth. The textile wapentakes of Skyrake and Morley have 52.0 and 52.1 per cent respectively but the northern wapentakes of Staincliffe, Ewcross (roughly the area of the Yorkshire Dales) and Claro (the area to the east, including Ripon in the north and towards York, have respectively 63.6 per cent, 65.6 per cent and 65.0 per cent. More puzzling is the extremely high level of one-hearth households in the Ainsty, at 71.9 per cent. This is roughly comparable with the average for County Durham (69.6 per cent), but even Ewcross is, on this measure, far more prosperous than Westmorland, which has 80.4 per cent one-hearth households.

David Hey contributes an account of the West Riding in the late seventeenth century, which focuses more on his end of the county than mine. Colum Giles writes an account of ‘Wealth distribution, the Hearth Tax and housing’, which concentrates exclusively on the metropolitan county of West Yorkshire and is derived from work undertaken on that county some twenty years ago. The problems of finding someone to write a discussion like this are not to be understated, but this is disappointing, given the amount of work undertaken in recent years on the vernacular architecture of North Yorkshire, including the northern part of the old West Riding. This matters, because the poorer parts of the Riding are those in which the vernacular rebuilding was getting underway in the 1670s. There are then accounts of the administration of the Hearth Tax by Elizabeth Parkinson (whose monograph on the first phase of the tax has recently appeared), an appendix of surviving West Riding Hearth tax documents and a selection of exemption certificates. The bones of the return is presented in an elaborate statistical appendix. Some of the data is also presented in a series of gorgeous colour maps, although it would be churlish to complain that they are a little bit small and working out which township is which (which requires getting the key number from the rear end papers, then using the tabular key) is not easy. I might add that Settle has also by moved by some cataclysm six or seven miles eastwards on Map 12, possibly the same calamity which has headwaters of the river Aire going in the wrong direction. The photographic illustrations of the documents are welcome, but uniformly poor.

The index is a major achievement in itself, but is an exact index, with no attempt to bring together variant forms of surnames under a single head surname. At some moment past or present, the name of Hugh Armitstead of Twistleton and Coldcoates was misread as Arnistead. He is indexed as the sole Arnistead in the volume, but Armistead is indexed, as is also Armitstead. Three entries then for the one surname, but five for Appleyard: Apeleyard, Apleyard, Apleyeard, Appleyard and Appleyeard. This practice is justified in a headnote to the index, but I think that it is mistaken and an abdication of editorial or indexers’ duty. If it is an economy, then it is a false one. One might add that an indexer ought to have queried the misreading of Rayley for Payley mentioned before, and perhaps others too.

Reviewer’s gripes of this sort apart, the whole book is attractively designed and a joy to use. Having it is a great boon for future work. I look forward to the appearance of the other Yorkshire ridings and a few further southern counties for comparative purposes, Essex for instance.