Agricultural History Review, Volume 60 Part 2 (2012), p. 314

This welcome collection of essays ranges from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries and in place from Northamptonshire to the Scottish highlands. It focuses on the interplay of modernizing landowners and the customs and manorial traditions within which they operated. Three essays on general themes set the agenda. Richard Hoyle’s introduction provides an overview of the themes of the book, and a fascinating discussion of the nature of early modern custom, which whets the appetite for his forthcoming study of early modern tenure. Paul Warde’s dissection of the agricultural literature shows how slowly the modern sense of improvement developed towards modern concept of sustainable agricultural innovation, largely in the later seventeenth century. Henry French provides a national overview of urban commons 1500–1750, a neglected topic, and links the interplay of agriculture, industry, and commerce with the workings of custom in an urban setting.

Satisfying themes run through the case-study chapters, with rich interconnections. Most obvious is James Taverner’s presence in both Richard Hoyle’s and Nicola Whyte’s studies of Norfolk. In Hoyle’s he is a defender of custom in North Elmham, trying to restrain Lord Cromwell’s encroachments eroding fixed fines and timber rights in Star Chamber cases from the 1560s to 1590s. In Whyte’s, Taverner appears as Lord of Wighton manor, accused by copyholders of over-pasturing the fold course to their detriment. Battles over custom are part of the process of ‘closure’ in Matthew Johnson’s sense of the narrowing and defining uncertainty in landownership in a society moving from under-population to the more crowded world of the seventeenth century. James Taverner was a Tawney-esque ‘rising’ entrepreneurial figure on the cusp of gentility, with brothers who were royal officeholders, translators of Erasmus, and evangelical reformers. As a younger son with a small inheritance, he combined local roots in Norfolk with access to kin legal and administrative expertise to consolidate and exploit his patrimony.

The Norfolk fold course is also dissected in Elizabeth Griffiths’ chapter of Sir Hamon Le Strange’s early seventeenth-century estate management at Hunstanton. Here the landscape is observed from family notebooks, estate archives, and Alice Le Strange’s account books. Hamon revived family fortunes through land surveying, estate reorganization, and drainage, using wide reading of contemporary books on agricultural improvement to guide him. Yet he and his son always worked within existing tenurial systems, providing enhanced leases for tenants on better land in return for concessions to take over and improve poorer soils and marshlands.

Julie Bowring’s chapter on the Bedford level drainage in Eastern England after 1663 looks at the aftermath of a notorious courtier-driven project, to appropriate fenland at the expense of a peasant economy. The social dynamics of the post-drainage society reflect major ambiguities. Popular opinion was keen to ensure that the drainage corporation kept the dykes, banks and sluices in good repair so that farmers who had adapted to the changes did not lose out a second time. The decline of the drainage scheme was determined more by poorly understood ecological effects than by peasant opposition.

Popular verse enriches Bowring’s analysis, but also articulated customary rights in Duffield Frith, Derbyshire, discussed by Heather Falvey who includes an interesting discussion of the interface between custom and its written articulation. Her poem was part of a wider corpus of writing by Anthony Bradshaw, a lawyer and property owner in Duffield but also a local office holder. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, his meticulous court records protected both his own and the Earl of Shrewsbury’s rights in the Frith. Bradshaw was dismissed before Crown attempts to sell off land, and his accumulated notes were used in the defence of custom. His written customals gave tenants an enduring alternative point of reference.

Bill Shannon’s valuable study of the Lancashire lowland landowners’ improvement of mosses and meres includes an important discussion of the neglected term ‘approvement’ enshrined in the Statute of Merton (1236). Shannon’s Duchy of Lancaster approvement cases peaked between 1580 and 1599 and all but disappeared after the Restoration. Collusive actions by landlords and tenants were unknown, while cases defining township boundaries and ending inter-commoning were numerous. Violence generally small-scale, dispute specific, and a trigger for court mediation, not prolonged local confrontation.

Briony McDonagh follows the well-documented activities of Elizabeth Prowse, a childless Northamptonshire widow who for 45 years meticulously ran, improved, and expanded the family estates. Elizabeth read improvement literature and also observed practice on her mother-in-law’s estate, while her brother James, a London ironmonger, used her estate to test new designs for ‘roller’ cart wheels and other implements. McDonagh argues (with good evidence) that the female touch in estate management added both a social element of concern for villagers’ welfare, and an aesthetic dimension in landscape design.

Alasdair Ross examines ‘clearances’ and improvement on the Grant estates in northern Scotland after 1762. A grand project to replace extensive highland pastoral ‘shielings’ with ‘improved’ arable tenant farms, initiated by the family’s extensively travelled and well-read tutor and later land steward William Lorimer, was undermined by tenants who preferred their profitable pastoral tradition, a poor local market for grain despite the founding of Grantown-on-Spey, and adverse climatic cycles and weather conditions. Many tenants with twelve or more years rent arrears were evicted in the 1790s when the Grant estates were in deep financial trouble. Ross argues that these ‘clearances’ served the Grant estates well by leaving only larger arable farms, and allowing much of the upland to return to extensive grazing, and eventually to deer forest or game shoots.