Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 2 (2013), p. 357

In these straitened times few record offices have anything that might be called a publications programme, and yet here are two new publications from Northallerton. My old colleague Peter Leach, fresh from his labours revising Pevsner’s Yorkshire West Riding North volume, publishes the late seventeenth-century account books of Richard Wigglesworth of Conistone in upper Wharfedale. The re-emergence of these manuscripts is very welcome. They were briefly discussed by Arthur Raistrick in his Old Yorkshire Dales (1967). I tried – and failed – to track them down some years ago. Leach’s edition is very welcome as showing exactly what Raistrick saw, and for showing how much more there is in them to be exploited. He provides a full introduction, a detailed tabulation of the contents and a full transcript of what are evidently tatty and not always legible manuscripts. (One would have welcomed a photograph of a single page.)

These are not straightforward accounts. Indeed, to call them accounts perhaps flatters them. There are bits of accounts, memoranda about farming, hirings of servants, building costs and township matters including draft township accounts, together with the ubiquitous recipes for animal medicines and notes of cows bulled. Moreover, the books were used after Richard Wigglesworth’s death in 1703 by his sons for their own memoranda through to about 1719. Leach’s elaborate tabulation of the contents of the volume sorts all this out. A helpful introduction outlines the contents and identifies some of the people mentioned. For this writer at least there is an element of closure: a mystery is resolved, and Leach offers a definitive account and transcript of an enigmatic document which I and others can get down and exploit.

Production standards are much higher in Dr Joynes’s volume, which has been properly set where Dr Leach’s looks as though it has been set from the author’s camera-ready copy, with a much-too-small typeface employed for the introduction. Carleton in Coverdale is, in a sense, only just over the hill from Conistone: certainly one may assume a broadly similar economy and society. There is a more direct similarity in that the manorial rights were bought out by the tenants, albeit at very different moments. This is a businesslike volume, which looks at the parliamentary enclosure of the stinted Carleton West Pasture and the higher and unstinted Carlton Moor between 1808 and 1815. There appears to be no body of documentation explaining why then, or even why at all, merely the award of 1815. A few bits of estate correspondence of the Chaytor family are cited, but, when one comes to a promising section entitled ‘the advocates of enclosure’, we have extracts from the usual advocates, Young, Marshall, Tuke. Hence we have no special insights here except for some throwaway comments that William Chaytor was interested in acquiring high moorland for its value as grouse shooting. The layout of roads, allocation of land and subsequent history of the allotments are all traced. Dr Joynes ends by calling for other ‘similar detailed studies of parliamentary enclosure in other Dales townships. It seems to me that the local historian has a valuable service to perform in comparing the broad-brush picture with what actually happened on the ground’. I entirely agree, but historians need better documentation that is on view here to come up with compelling explanations as to why it was thought worth building all those long straight walls, which now stand largely derelict.