Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 286

Romsey is a market town on the River Test in Hampshire, most notable for its ‘big house’, Broadlands (home of the late Lord Mountbatten). Today it provides little agricultural employment, but it still has the feel of an agricultural town, particularly on market days. The proximity of the river and the Broadlands estate mean that there are still fields close to the town centre, and Romsey continues to host the oldest surviving agricultural show in England.

The genesis of this little book lies in a project initiated by Hampshire County Council, who were concerned by the ‘inappropriate conversions of old barns’. A team started work, but concluded that it would be more interesting to take a wider look at the history of farms and farming in the area. This book is the result. The authors, who are not attributed on the cover of the book, acknowledge ‘contributions from LTVAS colleagues & members of the local farming community’.

A wide range of source material has been used – from archaeological reports, through Dr J. Latham’s ‘Notes for a history of Romsey’, to the National Farm Surveys of 1940–3 – to trace farming in the area from the Early Iron Age to the present day. The first chapter covers the period ‘Before the founding of the abbey’ in c.907 in just a few pages: limited archaeological evidence tells us that an Iron Age presence was followed by a Roman villa and some activity in the mid-Saxon period and later. ‘The Lady as Lord: 900AD to 1539’ is much longer, padded out with background material explaining the significance of the Romsey information. There are delightful illustrations from manuscripts in the British Library, including one of medieval nuns netting rabbits with ferrets, and a painting of the last Abbess of Romsey herself, on the reredos of the Abbey Church. In ‘The dissolution of the Abbey to the first Lord Palmerston’, our attention is drawn to yeoman farmers and their ‘well-built houses’, which can still be seen in the area today.

The strength of the book lies in its treatment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the chapters on ‘The great landlords: Palmerstons & Flemings, 1736–1840’ and ‘The Golden Age, 1840–1870’. Here, use is made of the two estate archives – the proportion of Romsey-specific material is much higher than in earlier chapters – showing that ‘the agricultural history of Romsey has mirrored national trends’: the disappearance of husbandmen, the increase of ‘landless poor’, the replacement of copyholds by leases for lives, and the decline of yeomen farmers. Romsey, in common with many other places in the South, experienced its share of rural poverty, ‘Game Wars’ – illustrated by the exciting story of a Broadlands poacher who was eventually hanged for the murder of one of Palmerston’s gamekeepers, despite the whole town, including Florence Nightingale, rallying behind him – and the Swing Riots. During the ‘Golden Age’, improvements such as the model farm built by Lord Palmerston, the plan for which (unfortunately reproduced too small for the captions to be legible) is still recognizable in the aerial photograph, were offset by impoverishment of farmland in favour of game (later, bizarrely, Palmerston’s step-son, Cowper- Temple, was to cause problems for tenant farmers by not allowing rabbits to be killed, out of concern for animal welfare). This chapter ends with a great deal of entertaining information about prizes given to agricultural labourers by Palmerston, for example, to ‘Moses Sillence and his wife for the neatness and cleanliness of their cottage and premises’.

Once we reach the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in ‘Troubled times: 1870–1914’ and ‘Agriculture at war: 1914–45’, the text is enlivened by photographs. The theme of ‘mixed farming’, which seems to have run through the whole story, is now broken by some interesting specialization, including chicken farming, dairying, and tomato growing under glass. In the last chapter, ‘Within living memory’, we see the tomato nursery being replaced by a garden centre, farmland close to the town being gobbled up for housing, and even the Broadlands estate being encroached upon for sports fields.

The original ‘barn conversion’ project is memorialized by the ‘Gazetteer of major farm buildings today’ which gives the farm name, grid reference, current use of lands and surviving buildings, a few historical and other notes, and the estate to which the farm belonged. Although there is a bibliography, there is a complete lack of footnote references. But there is much of interest here for anyone who knows the area, particularly the denizens of those ‘housing developments’, who may have wondered what the land was like before they arrived.