Agricultural History Review, Volume 67 Part 2 (2019), p. 320

The Lincolnshire Agricultural Society celebrates its 150th anniversary in 2019. At the time of its foundation people were used to reading about the quality of Lincolnshire farming in agricultural journals and the farming press and Lincolnshire’s pre-eminence as a county of ‘improvement’ was widely acknowledged. Richard Olney’s study of the Dixon family’s estate in North Lincolnshire and that of Peter Worsley examining Darwin family farms in the county illustrate the contribution of two, very different, farming estates to this overall picture through a detailed account of how each estate was painstakingly acquired, managed, and farmed.

The Dixons were farmers of the ‘middling-sort’ who built up their estate from a minor purchase in 1741 to a point where they owned the whole parish, lived in a fine house, had a governess for their daughters, and a phaeton to ride out in. In 1842 the estate of Thomas John Dixon and his wife (and cousin) extended to 3600 acres of which Thomas John farmed 3000 acres himself. This was an enormous holding by contemporary standards and probably the largest in North Lincolnshire.

Olney’s account is chronological, introducing us one by one to six generations of Dixon landowners at Holton. He clearly identifies the different Dixons despite the family tradition of naming the eldest son alternately William and Thomas. There are chapters on ‘The grazier: William Dixon (1697–1781)’; ‘The tenant farmer: Thomas Dixon (1729–1798)’; ‘The old-style farmer: William Dixon (1756–1824)’ and two chapters on Thomas John Dixon (1785–1871) firstly as ‘The man of business’ and then ‘The man of property’. Finally, we meet ‘The ladies of Holton’, two Dixon sisters who succeeded as owners of the estate, following the failure of the male line, before it passed to a cousin whose descendants own and farm the estate today.

Olney makes it clear from the start that his book is ‘primarily a piece not of economic but of social history’ (p. 1). However in the detail he provides about the Dixons’ farming and business activity; their land acquisition and sales; their position as owner occupiers, rentiers and tenants simultaneously; the market centres to which they turned for the sale and purchase of goods; and their involvement in the development of the local canal and later railway networks (which led to the geographical expansion of their market and business activities even as far as London), there is plenty to interest the agricultural and economic historian.

The book also has a chapter based on a twenty-year run of journals kept by William Dixon junior who is dubbed ‘philosopher and philanthropist’. With his breadth of reading and his insistence on styling himself tenant farmer, even though he owned a considerable amount of land, he could have been the model for Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Mr Thomas Holbrook, yeoman’, in Cranford. The evolution of William junior’s religious and social thought gave rise to a wide range of benevolent activities: in 1800 he was the prime mover, and subsequently a lifelong supporter, of the Caistor Union Society of Industry workhouse whose three-volume history he wrote and published himself. For his workers he founded a friendly society and provided schooling. In his local market town of Caistor he also established a savings bank (1818) and his wife founded and ran the Caistor Matron’s Society.

Olney’s well-structured, immensely readable book is the product of nearly fifty years’ association with the Dixon family and their remarkable collection of family and estate papers. It was he who organized the removal of the archive (lowered a basketful at a time) from a loft at Holton Hall to the Lincolnshire Archives, where it is now fully catalogued and available for further study. The fine set of labour and cash accounts (1824–97), some kept by the labourers themselves (whose education the Dixons promoted in the local Sunday School), are a source which has considerable potential for those interested in the day to day experience of labouring life. With its meticulous referencing and its appendix detailing the nature and content of the archive, Olney’s book will serve as an invaluable guide to anyone wishing to explore the Dixon papers for themselves.

The accumulation of land in Lincolnshire by the Darwin family can be traced back to before 1548 at Marton in the Trent Vale. Worsley’s account offers insights into the experience of a landowning family who rose from a similar level in society to that of the Dixons but followed a very different path and, with the help of advantageous marriages (including intermarriage with the Wedgewood family), and national recognition in the scientific field, rose to a more elevated place in society than was aspired to by the Dixons. Clear distinctions can be made between the two families: the Darwins were never such large landowners as the Dixon family became nor was their estate centred on a single parish as was that of the Dixons. Moreover, whereas the Dixons were resident landowners who took an active part in farming their estate, the Darwins soon became absentee landowners letting out their land to tenant farmers and leaving the management of their estate to the Alford-based local land agents, the Higgins family.

Worsley is a geologist and his starting point is to place the Darwin farms in their landscape context. Maps, along with a grid reference, locate each holding clearly. Underlying geology, soils, drainage and topography are all discussed in a scientific manner which gives way to more straightforward prose for an account of the history of the farms. Worsley visited each one in person. He includes information received from inhabitants and neighbours of former Darwin properties, which demonstrate the importance of oral testimony especially in rural areas where collective memory is strong and people’s links with the soil run deep.

At various times the Darwins held land at Cleatham, in and around Lincoln, in Sutterton Fen (Amber Hill), at Claythorpe (Aby) and at Beesby. There was also a family bequest of land at Kirton Lindsey to fund a charity. These landholdings are meticulously researched by Worsley who unravels for us the confusion caused by no fewer than seven successive generations of the family being called William, while others shared the name Erasmus, Robert or Ann(e). For each farm the reasons for its acquisition are examined along with the identity of its tenants, its nineteenth-century value (although not always its acreage), and its management by the local firm of land agents. The family continued to hold farms and parcels of land in various parts of Lincolnshire until 1943 when the last remaining Darwin land in the county, at Amber Hill in Sutterton Fen, was sold.

From the late seventeenth century the family were almost always non-resident landowners. They lived first at Elston Hall in Nottinghamshire, next in Lichfield, and then on the outskirts of Shrewsbury where Charles Darwin was born in 1809. Charles later purchased Down House in Kent to be his family home. The history of the Higgins family connection with the Darwin family (John Higgins’ father and Charles Darwin’s father were neighbours and professional associates in Shrewsbury) illustrates how social networks as well as family connections influenced the building up of an estate. Family and social connections of both the Darwins and the Higgins family, plus those of the tenant farmers themselves, all contributed to the dispersed nature of the Darwin farms in Lincolnshire.

Worsley pays considerable attention to the history of the Higgins family and their business dealings. There is also mention of the family’s charitable activities in their home town of Alford. Information about the relationship between the Darwins and their managing agent, the business that was transacted, and the dealings of the family with their farm tenants is drawn from the Higgins papers deposited at the Lincolnshire Archives in 1974 by Dorothy Higgins, granddaughter of John Higgins senior. The deposit includes correspondence with various members of the Darwin family, principally Charles Darwin, farm records, and an account book belonging to Higgins which Worsley considers to be the single most valuable item in the deposit. There are also papers relating to Higgins’ work as an Assistant Tithe Commissioner, an Enclosure Surveyor, and a Crown Agent. Worsley mentions a report drawn up by Higgins in 1846 in relation to the proposed East Lincolnshire railway line which ‘examined seven groups of prospective agricultural traffic: bones and oil cake, fat beasts, sheep, spring corn, wheat, and wool. He also assessed likely tonnages of chalk and lime’ (p. 61). Worsley concludes that the role of land agents, and archive deposits of their papers, are areas of study which invite further attention.

In the books by Olney and Worsley we see clearly that, alongside wider political and economic circumstances which affect the fortunes of an estate, there are also social and kinship networks and individual, personal factors such as intelligence, aptitude, character, health, good or bad fortune, and the existence, or otherwise, of direct issue. These are harder for the historian to identify and more difficult to quantify. Micro-studies, such Olney’s study of the Dixons of Holton-le-Moor and that of Worsley focusing on the Darwin family estates, exemplify the importance of the human element in the history of landownership.