Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 2 (2017), p. 345

Despite their pivotal role within rural society, land agents, estate stewards and factors have attracted surprisingly little notice in the historiography of early modern and modern Britain. A handful of books have been written over the past fifty years including David Spring’s The English landed estate in the nineteenth century (1963), J. R. Wordie’s Estate management in eighteenth-century England (1982) and David Oldroyd’s Estates, enterprise and investment at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (2007), together with articles by T. J. Raybould, Christopher Napier and Sarah Webster. Yet there is no definite history of the English (or British) land agent. As such, this short edited volume of essays is a welcome addition to the limited existing literature.

Drawn from a conference of the same name held at the University of Leicester, the book consists of an introduction and eight chapters. The introduction outlines the duties and responsibilities of land agents, offering a historical overview of the development of the role over the past few centuries and underlining continuities in the experiences of and personal skill set needed by land agents past and present, a theme picked up again by most of the contributors in their individual chapters. Land agency was and is a ‘people business’ (Hurren, p. 170) and land agents must be ‘accomplished diplomat[s]’ (King, p. 132) who can negotiate with landowners, tenants, labourers and diverse others alike: agents thus occupied a ‘pivotal position within agrarian society’ (Beardmore, p. 88). The editors then move on to introduce the individual chapters, although it is perhaps to be regretted that they do not offer a little more by way a historiographical grounding for the book. They are undoubtedly right to argue that the existing literature is ‘relatively threadbare’ (p. 12, my emphasis) but a more explicit discussion of how the study of land agents might contribute to existing histories of the countryside and the aristocracy, business history, and the thorny question of agency within landscape change would have been welcome.

Along with the introduction, the early chapters by Jeremy Moody and Geoff Monks effectively set the scene. Moody briefly examines the history and development of land agency over the last thousand years, before focusing much of his chapter on the growing professionalization of agents in the period after c.1800. Monks takes up this theme again in the following chapter, arguing that mechanization and new legislation were both important factors in the changing remit of the agent in the nineteenth century. The chapters by Carol Beardmore, Steven King and Elizabeth T. Hurren offer detailed case studies of the working lives and relationship of particular nineteenth-century agents and estates, while Caroline Dakers examines agents in fact and fiction, paying particular attention to those agents who appeared in the lives and novels of three female writers (Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot). Both John Martin and Nick Morris offer interesting insights into the tensions inherent in managing heavily diversified estates with multiple stakeholders – Martin discussing game shooting estates and Morris the contemporary situation at Stowe in Buckinghamshire – although in neither case are the chapters centrally focused on the land agents themselves.

Read as a piece, the chapters stress the diversity of agents’ responsibilities and roles, offering useful insights into the circulation of ideas and knowledge between agents and the networks in which they situated themselves (perhaps especially in the chapters by Monks and King). They also almost all remind us of the connections between the past, present and future of land agency, although the contributors place varying weight on the issue of continuity versus change (read: professionalization). I would perhaps have liked to have heard a little more about how representative the individual case studies were of wider experiences in the countryside, about the relations between landowners and agents (on which the surviving estate archives are surely fertile ground for research) and about the experiences of agents before the turn of the nineteenth century. The history of the early modern land agent remains to be written it seems, but this modest addition to the otherwise rather slim historiography on rural land agency in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is certainly timely. The combined reference list and detailed index will both be appreciated by readers, although I would also like to have seen a list of contributors.