The land market of a Pennine manor: Slaidburn, 1650-1780

Continuity and Change

Volumn 14, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 349-383

  French, H R ^a   Hoyle, R W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL LANCASHIRE   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY; HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY; LAND MARKET; RURAL ECONOMY;

UNITED KINGDOM;

EID: 0033500997     PISSN: 02684160     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0268416099003409     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. Amongst other writings, see L. Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558-1641 (London, 1965), 36-8, 164-6 and other references; A. Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism: the family, properly and social transition (Oxford, 1978); Sir John Habbakuk, Marriage, debt and the estates system: English landownership, 1650-1950 (Oxford, 1994), and G. E. Mingay, Enclosure and the small farmer in the age of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1968).
2. Amongst other writings, see L. Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558-1641 (London, 1965), 36-8, 164-6 and other references; A. Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism: the family, properly and social transition (Oxford, 1978); Sir John Habbakuk, Marriage, debt and the estates system: English landownership, 1650-1950 (Oxford, 1994), and G. E. Mingay, Enclosure and the small farmer in the age of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1968).
3. Amongst other writings, see L. Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558-1641 (London, 1965), 36-8, 164-6 and other references; A. Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism: the family, properly and social transition (Oxford, 1978); Sir John Habbakuk, Marriage, debt and the estates system: English landownership, 1650-1950 (Oxford, 1994), and G. E. Mingay, Enclosure and the small farmer in the age of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1968).
4. Amongst other writings, see L. Stone, The crisis of the aristocracy, 1558-1641 (London, 1965), 36-8, 164-6 and other references; A. Macfarlane, The origins of English individualism: the family, properly and social transition (Oxford, 1978); Sir John Habbakuk, Marriage, debt and the estates system: English landownership, 1650-1950 (Oxford, 1994), and G. E. Mingay, Enclosure and the small farmer in the age of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1968).
5. For a useful summary of the debates, see J. V. Beckett, 'The decline of the small landowner in England and Wales, 1660-1900', in F. M. L. Thompson ed., Landowners, capitalists and entrepreneurs: essays for Sir John Habakkuk (Oxford, 1994).
6. J. Broad, 'The fate of the Midland yeoman: tenants, copyholders and freeholders as farmers in North Buckinghamshire, 1620-1800', in Continuity and Change (this number).
7. We hope to explore this on another occasion.
8. Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the yeoman: the agricultural development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (Oxford, 1992).
9. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman, tables 5.1, 5.2.
10. R. Brenner, 'Agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe', in T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin eds., The Brenner debate: agrarian class structure and economic development in pre-industrial Europe (Cambridge, 1985), 49: 'With the peasant's failure to establish essentially freehold control over the land, the landlords were able to engross, consolidate and enclose, to create large farms [our emphasis] and lease them to capitalist tenants who could afford to make capital investments'. We would turn this on its head and suggest that the development of secure systems of tenancy, whether inheritable or leasehold, enabled tenants to create large holdings through the operation of the land market.
11. All acreages in this paper are customary acreages. The 'acre' employed locally was approximately 40 per cent larger than the statute acre.
12. Lancashire Record Office, hereafter RO, Preston, DDHCL (unlisted).
13. Ultimately the database will be made available through the Arts and Humanities Data Service, University of Essex.
14. Our work on Earls Colne will be reported in H. R. French and R. W. Hoyle, The character of English Society, 1550-1750: Earls Colne revisited (forthcoming).
15. In 1550 there were grants of confiscated chantry lands; occasionally escheated land was granted.
16. R. W. Hoyle, 'The land-family bond in England', Past and Present CXLVI (1995), 169. Consideration of inheritence practices in the manor is reserved to another occasion.
17. Slaidburn database, 122.0013, 0014.
18. An account of the Gisburn estate will follow on another occasion.
19. G. Sreenivasan offered a figure of 45.7 per cent familial transactions at Earls Colne between 1550 and 1650; see 'The land-family bond at Earls Colne (Essex), 1550-1650', Past and Present CXXI (1991), 9-10. We will offer a fuller analysis in our forthcoming book on Earls Colne.
20. Lancashire RO, DDKW, box 111.
21. The rent of old enclosed land was 4d acre, of new improvements 6d acre.
22. The problem may be quickly explained. In order to calculate false rentals after the last appearance of a piece of land in the database, the database assumes that every parcel remains in the hands of its last recorded tenant until 1780. This worked perfectly for Earls Colne (where the database techniques were first tested), but the Slaidburn database contains a scatter of parcels which disappear from sight, sometimes (we suspect) in the case of old land through enclosure (when the names of enclosed parcels cannot be related to their open field predecessors), in the case of new improvements through abandonment. Ultimately these parcels will be caught by examining the history of all 3,000-odd parcels in the database, but for the moment we disregard any parcel 75 years after its last appearance, which catches the majority of broken sequences of tenement histories. Table 4 is based on the application of the '75-year chuck-out' rule.
23. Houses, other buildings and very small plots of land are excluded from this analysis: our experience is that they generated very high mortage principal per acre values which skew all other calculations.
24. Thornber's misadventures will be considered at length in our forthcoming book.
25. Previous accounts of the price of land have tended to talk in terms of years' value. At the moment we can only talk in terms of value per acre. For the most convenient account of the price of land in this period, see C. Clay, 'Landlords and estate management in England', in J. Thirsk ed., The agrarian history of England and Wales, V (ii) (Cambridge, 1985), 170-198.
26. A fall at the end of the period would be in line with Clay's assessment; 'Landlords and estate management', 173 (Table 14.1).
27. Table 8 excludes all properties sold at more than £40 per acre equivalent.
28. All figures computed from Table 1 except for mortgages.
29. See the figures summarised by Clay in 'Landlords and estate management', Table 14.1.