Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 2 (2010), p. 291

This is a substantial addition to the scholarly treatment of the financial and property arrangements of landed society, which stems from Habakkuk’s pioneering work. Deborah Wilson’s book is indeed devoted to Irish, largely Ulster, landed families, but needs to be read in the wider context of the British Isles. Her study is based on an exhaustive, detailed, analysis of the records, mainly in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, of twenty landed families. These were all in the magnate class, with Irish estates yielding at least £10,000 a year in gross rentals, and hardly surprisingly, with that scale of wealth, most of the twenty were either Anglo- Irish, with estates in England or Scotland as well as in Ireland, or were inescapably part of metropolitan aristocratic society when important family concerns like the marriage market were involved. Thus although Wilson goes to great pains to try to show that the arrangements and conventions of her Irish group were significantly different from the British model, the evidence she supplies scarcely supports that view. All of them habitually used the same form of marriage settlements, with trustees to preserve contingent remainders, as their mainland peers. Admittedly there was a sharp difference between Irish and Anglo-Scottish marriage law from the early eighteenth century, when Irish statutes designed to prevent Catholics marrying Protestant heiresses were passed; but there seem to be no instances among the sample of twenty families in which these laws were of any relevance. There were indeed instances of marriages entered into without parental consent or approval, but these were because of financial or social disapproval, not religious difference, and similar cases in mainland families are not hard to find.

The strength of the book lies in the thoroughness with which Wilson has combed through all the marriage settlements and wills of these twenty families, and a fair amount of correspondence and accounts, extracting and tabulating a large amount of data on the portions brought to their marriage by brides, the pin money secured on the husband’s estate, the jointures provided for widowhood, the portions envisaged for daughters and younger sons, and the bequests made in widows’ wills. There is also plenty of information on the appointment of trustees to secure a wife’s independent control of specified property, usually estate she had brought to the marriage, possibly a postnuptial addition to her portion given by her father, or sometimes a life interest in property given by an affectionate husband. All this shows that there was frequently a substantial difference between the sums provided in a settlement made before marriage and the amounts of income actually received by wives and widows, a point with considerable importance for arguments about the position and fortune of women of landed families that derive solely from the provisions made in marriage settlements. A favourite argument has been that, from the sixteenth century onwards, aristocratic women were increasingly subordinated to their men-folk, mostly because on marriage they were forced to surrender their common law right to dower in return for securing a specified jointure in the event of widowhood. Ignoring evidence of the uncertainties, difficulties, and costs of enforcing claims of dower, which seemed to make the promise of a fixed amount of jointure a good bargain, it has been claimed that the annual value of jointure was consistently much less than the one-third of the husband’s estate that dower provided, proving that the position of women was weakened by this central feature of marriage settlements. The actual position, Wilson shows, could be much more complicated and confusing. In at least a third of her twenty families, widows enjoyed jointures that were around one third or more of the gross rental of their husbands’ estates and, while the rest had jointures that were certainly worth less than half the hypothetical dower-third, only one was left with less than £1,000 a year, which was twice the annual rental of many country squires.

Doubtless there was no shortage of women who would have been happy to be ‘marginalised’ at this level. Nevertheless Wilson likes to retain the fashionable language of ‘the marginalisation of women’s interests in the landed estate’ at the same time as providing much evidence that casts doubt on the concept. Her sample, after all, includes such eminently strong, not to say formidable, characters as Theodosia, Lady Clanwilliam, who elbowed aside her drunken husband and took control of the family’s affairs, and above all Frances Anne, Lady Londonderry, who was not only the wealthiest heiress of her time but also an outstandingly successful businesswoman of early Victorian Britain. This book is not an easy read – Americans would instantly recognize it as an unredacted thesis, densely precise, where every will has always to be described as a ‘last will and testament’ – but patience is rewarded with ample supplies of original and interesting information.