Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 176

There have been relatively few studies of the interface between towns and their adjacent townships, whether in terms of identifying networks of supply and demand as modelled by Von Thünen, or through examining spheres of urban political influence. This book therefore provides an important new case study, charting the changing pattern of landownership and landholding, improvements in transport and communications, and developments in agriculture and industry within Headingley-cum-Burley, one of 11 townships wholly within the ancient parish of Leeds. Tracing developments from the dissolution of the Cistercian abbey of Kirkstall to the end of the eighteenth century, Cruickshank finds a ‘progressively greater involvement of the town in the township’.

The book begins with a detailed examination of the property structure of the township from the ministers’ accounts produced at the dissolution of Kirkstall Abbey. Many of the abbey’s demesne lands had already been transferred to men from adjacent townships within the abbey’s estates, prior to the dissolution. Following the dissolution, the Kirkstall monks, while living separately, maintained a network of links, retained much of the abbey’s demesne, kept possession of goods from the abbey, and bequeathed the abbey’s property from one to another for a generation. In the 1560s, when the original Crown leases of the abbey demesne expired, the security of the remaining manorial tenures was destroyed. During the course of the seventeenth century, power in the township shifted from its manorial lord, a member of the county gentry, to a small group of minor gentry landowners who were also influential in Leeds.

Although the area of enclosed agricultural land grew substantially between 1540 and the end of the eighteenth century, mainly at the expense of woodland, the number of farmsteads and houses in Headingley and Burley increased only slowly. Throughout the period, the author considers the township to have been similar to a nineteenth-century ‘close parish’ in which landholding and residence were tightly restricted and very stable. Family members and resident farm servants, rather than landless labourers, provided the labour for tenant farmers, supported when necessary by casual labour from Leeds. Arable farming predominated, and livestock holdings were relatively small, but some farmers seem to have supplied liquid milk to Leeds from the 1680s. The township provided grazing land for butchers’ stock and animals in transit to the town, and formed a link in the trade that supplied cattle, which were driven from Scotland, fattened in Craven, and brought to the urban market. While not forming part of the well-known cloth manufacturing area around Leeds, the township accommodated some industry, including iron-making, tanning, milling and fulling.

The conclusion notes that those townships adjoining Leeds which lay to the north of the River Aire, including Headingley-cum-Burley, enjoyed good arable land, while those to the south and west, which were steeply sloping and poorly suited to grain production, became cloth manufacturing areas. The town of Leeds, at the river crossing, acted as the principal interface between these two zones. For those unfamiliar with the area, it would have helped to set out this wider geographical context in the introduction to the book, which is rather brief. A little more detail on the physical and economic development of Leeds in this period would also have assisted the reader. Nonetheless, this book, based on the author’s Ph.D. thesis, provides a valuable case study for those with agricultural, urban, or industrial interests in the early modern period.