Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 2 (2014), p. 366

Farming, as readers of the Review will readily appreciate, is a very broad church. Irrespective of environment, location and soil type, the practice of the craft and science of farming will be determined by many complex and even contradictory factors. Family background, patterns of inheritance, method of tenure, availability of capital and the existence or otherwise of suitable heirs are among the many elements concerned. A man of 60 with no immediate family may take a very different view of the next ten farming years than his neighbour with a brood of sturdy sons keen to follow in his footsteps.

As Richard Hoyle shows in his admirable introduction to the present volume, the ‘farming ladder’ was occupied by all sorts, yet our ability to see them as a community and to assess their success or otherwise in overcoming the elements or coping with periods of depression is often obscured by the absence of good-quality source material. For earlier periods farm diaries, memoranda and accounts (often chance survivals) are frequently little more than things of threads and patches, giving tantalizing glances of income and expenditure but casting little light on real profits and losses and other elements of business activity. The problem is partially illustrated in Joyce Burnette’s chapter where she makes a brave attempt to apply sophisticated econometric analysis to a range of accounts as a means of assessing seasonality of agricultural employment between 1740 and 1850.

The reality is that for all the voluminous sets of extant nineteenth-century farm accounts, only the data collected by the Farm Management Survey from the mid-1930s onwards allows for a detailed view of the sectoral advance or decline of farming as a whole. Until more recent years the general body of farmers, irrespective of their level of agricultural education, have been at best reluctant keepers of records. Suspicious of officialdom and sceptical of the claims of ‘science’, the bulk of the pre-twentieth-century farming community tended to farm much as their fathers had farmed before them. Of course, they kept a close eye open to the main chance and in following trends in prices not infrequently adopted rotational and cropping measures wholly unsuited to the circumstances of their farms. If the price was right they followed it, but otherwise the efforts of landlords and their agents to cajole or even coerce them into change were often met with dour scepticism.

There were, of course, exceptions and to the extent that contributors to this book offer a series of essays on noteworthy individuals, its title might better be ‘Some farmers in England, 1650–1980’. At the peak, as it were, of the farming pantheon stood the genuine innovators, men like James Mason (1824–1903) and Rex Paterson (1903–1978), creative thinkers whose innovative approach towards their craft was instrumental in stimulating various significant developments in agricultural science. Yet, as Peter Dewey takes pains to point out, Mason’s ample wealth enabled him to sustain the considerable farming losses occasioned by his experiments, while Paterson, John Martin tells us, brought skills to his calling from outside the farming world. Meanwhile, the capitalist nineteenth-century farmers described in detail by John Broad and Susanna Wade-Martins, were hardly typical of the ordinary run of husbandmen. On the other hand, in common with Hoyle’s late seventeenth-century English farmers, the former would probably have attributed some of their success to a flexible approach to cereal cropping policy. Flexibility, adaptability and sheer toughness undoubtedly characterized those denizens of the uplands of the north west described by Hilary Crowe while similar qualities were required of the Lancashire smallholders of the eighteenth century who, Andy Gritt writes, played so important a role in the agrarian and industrial economy. Somewhat earlier, Lancashire was the home of the remarkable Quaker farmer, Sarah Fell, who successfully managed her customary and freehold lands with a sharp eye open for entrepreneurial opportunities. Her activities are considered by Jennifer Holt, while Nicola Verdon contributes further to the gender debate by elegantly outlining the life of Louise Cresswell who ran a substantial farm in Victorian East Anglia and wrote extensively of her experiences.

In sum, this book comprises a series of interesting and sometimes intriguing snapshots of individual farmers from the sixteenth century onwards. But as Richard Hoyle readily admits, it is not, nor could it ever have been, a comprehensive portrait of ‘the farmer’. Perhaps a final chapter based on returns from the Farm Business Survey would have given us a glimpse of the economic and social condition of the farmer in 1980? This would have provided some sort of conclusion or epilogue to a volume ending rather abruptly with Philip Conford’s essay on the organic pioneer Robert Stuart (1900–1980). It would, moreover, have laid the foundation for a study of the alarums and excursions, triumphs and traumas of the past 30 years of the agricultural world to which historians should soon be turning their interest. Professor Hoyle might care to reflect upon this, perhaps in discussion with the inimitable and evergreen Ted Collins, to whom the present work is affectionately dedicated.