Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 284

Jacqueline Cooper, 24 Pelham Road, Clavering, Saffron Walden, Essex, cb11 4pq.

It is ironic that, although Essex has featured so heavily in a wide swathe of economic and social research, its agrarian history remains overshadowed by that of Suffolk and Norfolk. This has been partly a matter of sources (fewer great monastic or landed gentry estate records), and partly because other themes (such as the cloth industry and the growth of London) have overshadowed agricultural subjects. As a consequence this book is a welcome addition to the stock of knowledge on the county’s agrarian economy and society over the last 400 years. More particularly, though, it is of special interest because it deals with a significant, but often overlooked portion of the county, the north-west. This area, extending from the Cambridgeshire-Hertfordshire border, through its hub, Saffron Walden, and encompassing the three small Hundreds of Clavering, Freshwell and Uttlesford, represented a small corner of the ‘Midland’ open-field sheep-corn, chalk-belt husbandry in a county renowned since Tusser for its clay-bound farming in ‘severalty’.

Geoffrey Ball’s essays provide a concise, but incisive and detailed illustration of this agrarian region. They are strengthened considerably by the author’s own experience of the farming economy of the region in the late twentieth century, and his ability to understand and explain historical farming and rural industrial techniques from a practical viewpoint. This means that the overall impact of the work is greater than the sum of its parts. The parts themselves consist of seven short essays, linked more by their common concern with various aspects of the area’s rural life than by any overt thematic unity.

The first four essays cover aspects of farming in the area, beginning with a brief overview of open-field cultivation around Saffron Walden, and followed up by three very interesting farm histories, of the Home Farm at Audley End, Horham Farm at Thaxted, and Mitchells Farm in Little Walden. These three studies provide interesting contrasts. The voluminous home farm records provide a very detailed picture of production for the ‘big house’ in the mid-nineteenth century. The study of Horham Farm concentrates on the inventory of the goods of its owner, Mary Buttle, particularly the evidence of continuing large-scale cheese production by this single female proprietor. The history of Mitchells Farm is more ambitious, giving a series of snapshots of its cultivation over four centuries, with particular emphasis on acreages, rents, and buildings after 1750. The subsequent chapters are also useful in locating this farming activity within the wider agrarian economy. North-west Essex was well known, from the eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, for the production of malt for the London market, an industry that has subsequently disappeared, its buildings subsumed into housing developments. The chapters on the malt trade and its effects (notably the plan to build a canal linking Saffron Walden to the Great Ouse, and ultimately to the Wash) provide an insight into one half of the sheep-corn equation. The final, longer chapter on the area’s woollen industry supplies information on the other half, particularly the Norfolk sheep and the carding and combing of their wool that predominated in the area.

This is a restricted study of a particular region. However, its insights are very valuable, and they demonstrate the author’s painstaking research, his eye for detail, his ability to set these facets in both a wider economic and social context, and his understanding of the practicalities of these processes. As such, it should certainly find its way onto the shelves of those interested in the agrarian history of Essex, and of those interested more broadly in the histories of East Anglia and lowland farming in the last five hundred years.