After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 the most powerful positions and profitable assets in the countryside were secured by the landowning establishment. Admittedly, sales of Royalist land during the preceding Interregnum had meant that part of the old gentry had been replaced by parliamentarians up to and including Oliver Cromwell, who received the Marquis of Worcesterâs estates. Yet under the restored monarchy a surprising number of the recipients succeeded in hanging on to their gains. Charles II pursued men who had signed his fatherâs death warrant but was otherwise inclined to let sleeping dogs lie. He did not wish to brew up another rebellion. Possession was nine-tenths of the law and the legal system certainly favoured landholders as a whole. In the next century their power facilitated the enclosures whereby the poor, even the second poor (those who kept themselves just above qualifying for poor relief), were often deprived of many rights. Despite even that consolidation of land in the hands of those who already owned a lot of it, scholars nevertheless see more continuity than change. Whatever happened to individuals, the prevailing organisation of landholding was disturbed but never overthrown.
The landowner class set about re-embracing the order it had been busily threatening in twenty years of military and political turmoil. It was good at reproducing itself. Unfortunate families might fall out of the system but the basic structure of rural society persisted through thick and thin. Changes in personnel there were but it seems hardly possible to compute how many. To make sure how much real alteration in family ownership took place, as opposed to changes in the standing of individual family members, each household would need to be examinedâan almost unimaginably large task, certain to be frustrated by yawning gaps in the documents. Nor did the political changes, formative though some were, betoken epochal breaks of trend in the way land was managedâand that is the element which directly influenced agricultural productivity. Given agricultureâs massive share in the economy, national economic security and growth rested on its productivity. Notwithstanding the appearances presented by a host of studies, rather little may be said about husbandry trends. The reason is that England is so very varied in geology and topography, and hence in ecology, that we do not know precisely how to sum up local research and offer a consistent account through time.
In the mid-seventeenth century upstart city lawyers and merchants displayed an urge to become respectable; the more corrupt their acquiring of estates had been, the greater the urge. Those who succeeded in camouflaging their moves merged back into the landed class and welcomed Charles II with one voice. Puritans sat in the first Restoration parliament and families in what might be called Team Puritan settled back into the unified ranks of landowners with remarkable ease. The Restoration was Animal Farm: like the pigs turning into the unlovely farmers of Orwellâs book, the Puritans rejoined the ruling class despite its revamped Royalist air. When members of the older gentry who had been usurped during the Interregnum later bought their land back from its new Puritan owners, this placed a burden of debt on their estates, reducing the funds they had to invest. Royalists who completely sank under this burden during the Interregnum had been replaced but some Puritans were replaced in turn after the Restoration, in both cases by new âimprovingâ men, keen to recoup their own investments as well as raise their status. This helps to explain a measure of the agricultural advance in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Agricultural development was already the watchword in Puritan times; at mid-century the successive editions of Walter Blithâs The English Improver Improved were dedicated to Protector Cromwell. Under all regimes many members of the landed interest busied themselves with farming.
A challenge to the very idea of a landed interest, and of an identifiable national interest that it might influence, was mounted by Julian Hoppit. He located differences within the landowner class by examining legislation concerning estates, enclosures and land registries and implied that the landed interest was not as strong as it seemed because many parliamentary bills concerning these topics actually failed to pass into law. The parliament was not willing to push, say, for an overarching right to enclose; enclosures were proposed and tackled only one by one. But this is surely consistent with different assessments of specific prospects by individuals rather than the absence of a corps of landowners that had interests in common. Hoppit does make a number of distinctions among categories of landowner, noting points well known in agricultural history, for instance that the interests of proprietors in arable areas were prone to diverge from those whose holdings were primarily pastoral. For a very long time it was the arable sector, fronted by what the Victorians called the âVoice of Norfolk,â that tended to dominate policy. Corn Laws designed to bolster profits from growing grain favoured arable farmers but simultaneously raised the cost of feedstuffs for livestock producers. Yet it was a long time before specialised regions fully supplanted mixed farming across the country and the agricultural interest accordingly retained a general similarity.
Splitting by locality and period can proceed almost indefinitely and nullify attempts to discern underlying patterns. Admittedly, few farms were exactly the same as others. They differed in location and market access, and possessed characteristics of soil and slope that affected management and productivity in ways not obvious from an overview. Estates may be thought of as âbundlesâ of diverse units and were in their turn extremely varied. The great historian of landownership, John Habakkuk, no slouch at economic theory, found their diversity so extreme that he preferred to work empirically, moving from one example to the next. Yet social aspirations and pressures did lead to a basic convergence of behaviour to which new entrants soon conformed.
Even at the level of agrarian politics, Hoppitâs case, which includes arguing that a unified landed interest could have existed only had there been a national agricultural policy for it to react against, carries splitting to extremes. Joan Johnson, in her close study of the Gloucestershire gentry, found the opposite, stating that for centuries the gentry formed, âa united and socially compatible bodyâ. As far as small farmers and village labourers were concerned, landed proprietors typically faced them with something of a common opposition, mobilising against their interests and against those of the consumers of bread as a whole. Underlings were in thrall to proprietors whose decisions were barely subject to sanctions and could be, to say the least, erratic: as Terry Eagleton wrote in the London Review of Books about a lunatic eighteenth-century member of the Wallop family, âthe line between eccentricity and insanity in the English aristocracy has always been hard to drawâ. James Lees-Milneâs People and Places gives the inside story, sometimes inadvertently, always revealingly, of relationships and behaviour among country house owners in the twentieth century. Such people felt free of ordinary constraints.
Distinctions did exist between âlanded interestâ and âestate systemâ. Sometimes they were subtle and sometimes marked. Hoppitâs concern is with high politics and the currents of legislation rather than their direct impact on husbandry. He acknowledges that, despite internal differences that might reach down to disputes between individual owners, the landed interest as a whole was really quite powerful, achieving important and lasting legislation like the Game Laws that appealed to most of its members. The Game Laws permitted them to lord it over their poor neighbours in virtual perpetuity and it is with respect to this form of domination that the landed interest category is least to be doubted. The system was and is both resilient and elastic. Until 1870 it barely paused in growing, for all the political and economic hazards. Right up to the present, a fraction of the oldest landed families has retained a footing through every vicissitude, the most damaging being the great agricultural depressions, the loss of heirs in war and Lloyd Georgeâs taxes. While lesser operators fell at these fences, the great lords have constantly been joined by layer upon layer of men with new money. Seventy-nine mansions were demolished on the UK mainland between 1870 and 1919, years that were followed by a massive liquidation of estate acreage, but even today certain members of Englandâs ancien regime survive on the land.
Possessing sufficient non-agricultural resources and being lucky about the lifespans of male heirs were requisites for the long-term survival of family estates, while selling off standing timber in emergencies was an expedient for those with inadequate liquid funds. One asset of an estate was woodland that could act as a bank deposit. Little could be done to guard against personal catastrophes or succour incompetents, but the attractions of estates guaranteed that the ranks of landowning families would be replenished, faster in times of national prosperity than was managed by the ârecession opportunistsâ who bought land in economic downturns, but nevertheless inexorably. Where one family fell, another roseâmore and more as the economy grew. Any tightness in the land market meant business fortunes were spent on carving new estates out of former farmland.
This suggests a path-dependent thesis whereby landed society as a whole repeatedly renewed itself, not least via access to the political power which was shamelessly used to bolster the incomes and safeguard the wealth of landowners. The process may of course be made to seem smoother than it was by telescoping time as we look back; the record was mixed and not guaranteed to succeed in every case. In the generations and centuries after the Restoration there were still policy swings and external alarms but little resumption of the old interpersonal violence. Apart from Monmouthâs Rebellion in 1685 and Judge Jeffreyâs savage treatment of the prisoners, fatal affrays were rare in England. One of the last was in 1688 when Sir Richard Lovelaceâs men were attempting to join William of Orange and killed several of the Cirencester militia. But overall the stability described by J. H. Plumb in The Growth of Political Stability in England (1967) came to prevail. Violence was restricted to dealing with rioters and poachers and the dog-eat-dog conflicts among the landowners of the seventeenth century did not return. Energy was absorbed by elite politicking and naked force was deflected down the social scale.
Social divisions had been firmly in place long before the Civil War . They were gradually softening as the economy grew, increasing market activity and creating non-agricultural jobs. But from time to time efforts were made to turn the clock back. In the sixteenth century, the occasional pushy manorial lord attempted to assert that his tenants and everything they owned constituted his personal property; in short they were serfs. This retrogression was tried on ancestors of mine at Ashley, Hampshire , and represented an attempt at a shakedown in which the fictitious or archaic obligation could be bought off at a price. In the next century Charles I notoriously tried to revive feudal incidents. Like the Ashley landowner of Tudor times, he was trying to raise money. It did not work well in either case.
Calling these embryonic intentions feudal is misleading since feudalism implies mutual obligation between social levels. For the rich, such obligations were largely matters of choice and, if they were shouldered at all, were assumed in only minor waysâband aids, along the lines of a lady from the big house taking soup to sick cottagers. The hardening inequalities that continued through the Civil War and Interregnum and far beyond the Restoration were not so much features of winners and losers in a competiti...