Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 137

While Herefordshire has been served reasonably well by agricultural historians, particularly in relation to cattle breeding and cider production, the wider social and economic history of the county remains underexplored. This volume, which focuses on the history of a small village, six miles from Ledbury, has no pretensions to offer a history of the wider agrarian society of the county. However, it does provide a very interesting illustration of the lives of many of the families who inhabited this community from the eighteenth to the late twentieth century, and seeks to set their experiences in the context of broader developments within the community.

The focus on family lineages, and relations between families and farms, probably derives from the genealogical nature of much of the evidence on which this book is based. As such, it is characteristic of many ‘community’ histories. It is also reminiscent of the distant ancestor of all such works of parish memory, Richard Gough’s History of Myddle. This resemblance is compounded here, because in many cases the family histories are linked to surviving memorials in the parish church and churchyard, rather as Gough tied his histories to the holders of pews in Myddle church.

From 1700–1870, Putley was a small, farming, community, of approximately 1,100 acres, 600 within the ancient parish of Putley, and another 500 in the township of Putley and Woolhope. The largest property holders were the Philipps of Putley Court, an early eighteenth-century mansion with 250 acres, and the Gwillims of the Brainge, who owned 350 acres. The remaining lands were distributed among perhaps two dozen yeoman farmers, plus a variety of smallholders. The bulk of this study is concerned to detail the lives of successive generations of these families, and to note family extinctions and changes in ownership.

After 1870, the character of the community was altered by the arrival of John Riley, a Yorkshire textile merchant, who bought Putley Court in 1872 and who changed the mixed arable, pasture and fruit-growing economy of the village by concentrating on commercial fruit production. This allowed the village to evade the worst of the agricultural depression. From this period, Riley also began buying up neighbouring farms, and turned himself into an autocratic, but relatively benevolent squire, and most of the village into his dependents as tenants or labourers. If this trend was typical of its era, so was its aftermath. In 1925, the Riley estate was sold off and broken up, with the commercial fruit and mixed farms being purchased by owneroperators, who endured the 1930s to benefit from the greater profitability after 1945. The later chapters of the book add to these farming genealogies by harnessing the memories of older village residents to detail life in the community in the mid-twentieth century.

As noted, this a village study, pure and simple. However, the care with which it has been produced, and the efforts taken to trace the histories of individual families and farms, mean that it will be of value not only to those interested in genealogy and local history, but also to provide comparative contextual information for studies of ownership, tenancy and farming practices over the last 300 years.