End of the old order? F. M. L. Thompson, the land question, and the burden of ownership in England, c.1880-c.1925

Agricultural History Review

Volumn 55, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 269-288

  Beckett, John ^a   Turner, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 37149051529     PISSN: 00021490     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (81)

1. Estates Gazette (hereafter EG), 31 Dec. 1921.
2. F. M. L. Thompson, English landed society in the nineteenth century (1963), p. 332.
3. A. Howkins, The death of rural England. A social history of the countryside since 1900 (2003), p. 36,
4. P. Dewey, War and progress. Britain, 1914-1945 (1997), p. 160.
5. F. M. L. Thompson, 'English landed society in the twentieth century, I, property collapse and survival', Trans. Royal Historical Society, fifth ser., 40 (1990), p. 22.
6. The issue was most clearly represented in the title of Peter Mandler's book The fall and rise of the stately home (1997).
7. Thompson, English landed society, p. 332.
8. Personal communication, 17 July 2005.
9. A. Wightman, Who Owns Scotland? (1996), and see also http://www.yrtk.org/2005/who-owns-scotland/.
10. J. Thirsk and J. P. Cooper (eds), Seventeenth-century economic documents (1972), p. 174;
11. F. Sheppard and V. Belcher, 'The deeds registries of Yorkshire and Middlesex', J. Society of Archivists 6 (1980), pp. 272-86;
12. F. Sheppard, V. Belcher and P. Cottrell, 'Middlesex and Yorkshire deeds registries and the study of building fluctuations', London J. 5 (1979), pp. 176-217.
13. The registry for the East Riding dates from 1708: in common with the other county registries it remained in operation until local government reorganization of 1974. B. English, The great landowners of East Yorkshire 1530-1910 (1990), pp. 2, 69-72, 246n.
14. Land Registration Act 1925, 15 & 16 George V, c. 21.
15. K. Cahill, Who owns Britain? (2001), pp. 4, 53, also p. 401.
16. England is 33m acres in extent to the nearest million acres, Bartholomew's Gazetteer of the British Isles (ninth edition, 1963), pp. 246, 701.
17. See the latest on this in The Independent, 9 Apr. 2007, 'Who owns Britain? Biggest landowners agree to reveal scale of holdings', http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/legal/article2434964.ece.
18. BPP, 1874, LXXII, in 2 parts, 'England and Wales (Exclusive of the Metropolis). Return of Owners of Land, 1873'. For a brief summary of the returns see B. Afton and M. E. Turner, 'The statistical base of agricultural performance in England and Wales, 1850-1914', in E. J. T. Collins (ed.), The agrarian history of England and Wales, VII, 1950-1914 (2000), pp. 1931-2.
19. See also P. H. Lindert, 'Who owned Victorian England?; the debate over landed wealth and inequality', Agricultural Hist., 61 (1987), p. 42.
20. Bateman's reworking of the data in John Bateman, The great landowners of Great Britain and Ireland (1883).
21. R. B. Pugh (ed.), The Victoria History of the Counties of England. General Introduction (1970), pp. 1-27.
22. Brian Short, Land and society in Edwardian Britain (1997);
23. id., The geography of England and Wales in 1910. An evaluation of Lloyd George's 'Domesday' of landownership (Historical Geography Research Series 22, 1989);
24. id., The Lloyd George Finance Act Material (Short Guides to Records, 36, 1994). In the National Archives there are 95,000 volumes of Field Books associated with this survey. Although these documents were released by the TNA in the 1980s, the cost of extracting and using these data on anything other than a small-scale basis has been prohibitive. In theory, however, it provides a 'domesday book' of landownership on the eve of World War I.
25. Cahill, Who owns Britain?
26. Our thanks to Hilary J. Oakley of the RICS Library and Information Service, 12 Great George Street, Parliament Square, London, SWiP 3AD, who not only provided materials for us on our visits to RICS in the late summer of 2004 but who also answered innumerable emails both before and after.
27. F. M. L. Thompson, 'The land market in the nineteenth century', Oxford Economic Papers 9 (1957), p. 42.
28. Year Book, 1923, preface. The Year Book seems to have been regarded in similar terms to the way modern second-hand car dealers use Glass's Guide, that is, as a source of reference for the trade, which should not be released to the wider public.
29. Our thanks to Roland Quinault for raising the question of the appropriateness of our price deflator. We have experimented with a number of price indexes and they all produce the same real price profile, with subtle differences in the extent of the peaks and the troughs in real prices, but not really in their relationship to one another. But see further below when we estimate the amount of land sold but without the need to use a deflator.
30. F. M. L. Thompson's approach to this direction of research does not help us since he was more concerned with the influence of non-London agents than the absolute size of the market.
31. J. T. Ward, 'Farm sale prices over a hundred years', Estates Gazette, Centenary Supplement, 3 May 1958, pp. 48-9;
32. id., A study of capital and rental values of agricultural land in England and Wales between 1858 and 1958' (University of London, PhD thesis, 1958), pp. 43-5.
33. In both of these works he makes reference to the main sources that we have used in RICS, but he also refers to the Estate Exchange, an office to which auctioneers' reports were submitted. The aggregation of reported sales is what appears in the Year Book. If the records of the Estate Exchange still exist it would allow the details of those aggregations to be uncovered and furnish a clearer idea how they were made. To this end we conducted an email exchange with J. T. Ward in Mar./Apr. 2005, as we did also with Hilary Oakley at RICS. Unfortunately neither of them could suggest where these records might be obtained or indeed whether they still existed. All subsequent online searches have also drawn a blank.
34. Pam Barnes, Norfolk landowners since 1880 (1993), pp. 30, 60-7.
35. VCH Shropshire, IV, p. 252
36. Information prepared by Dr David Brown for A. D. M. Phillips and C. B. Phillips (eds.), Historical atlas of Staffordshire, forthcoming.
37. Susan Parrott, A time of change: land sales in the East Riding of Yorkshire in the early twentieth century', East Yorkshire Historian 6 (2005), pp. 17-30, esp. 22.
38. A. Offer, 'Farm tenure and land values in England, c.1750-1950', EcHR 44 (1991), pp. 1-20, esp. pp. 15-17.
39. EG, 29 Mar. 1919, 3 Jan. 1920;
40. The Times, 19 Mar., 15 May, 30 and 31 Dec 1919;
41. Thompson, English landed society, p. 334.
42. EG, 3 Jan. 1920, p. 13; 1 Jan. 1921, p. 13.
43. EG, 4 Jan. 1919, Review of the Year, 1918; 27 Dec. 1924, Review of the Year, 1924.
44. J. V. Beckett, The rise and fall of the Grenvilles: Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, 1710-1921 (1994), p. 283.
45. In the years following his marriage in 1907 Christopher Hatton Tumor rationalised the management of his estate centred on Stoke Rochford Hall ending with the sale in 1917 of the 6,000 acres of the Wragby part of the estate, 'Tumor, Christopher Hatton (1873-1940)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
46. The Times, 19 May 1920, p. 19.
47. EG, 24 Feb. 1912.
48. BPP, 1912-13, XLVII, 'Report of the Departmental Committee appointed to inquire into the position of tenant farmers on the occasion of any change in the ownership of their holdings'; See also E. H. Whetham, The agrarian history of England and Wales, VIII, 1914-39 (1978), p. 52.
49. S. G. Sturmey, 'Owner farming in England and Wales, 1900-1950', Manchester School, 23 (1955), pp. 245-68,
50. repr. in Minchinton (ed.), Essays in Agrarian History, II, pp. 281-306, esp. p, 287.
51. Birmingham University Library, Liberal Land Enquiry, 1924-5, Charles Masterman Papers, 34/1/3.
52. Sir Nicholas Bacon, Raveningham Hall, Norfolk, to 12 tenants (individually), 6 Apr. 1920. Raveningham MSS, Norfolk (reference courtesy of Barbara Linsley).
53. D. K. Britton, 'The sale value of farm land between the Wars', Farm Economist, 6 (5) (1949), pp.126, 129;
54. Howkins, The death of rural England, p. 36; Offer, 'Farm tenure and land values'.
55. The volumes are not simply about large landed estates. The main contents of each volume consist of detailed information on London and suburban properties and ground rents, and country properties. Most volumes also include shorter entries on colonial properties, fishing rights, licensed properties, policies, reversions, Scottish properties, stocks and shares, tithe and rent charges, Welsh properties, and a range of minor sales such as theatre seats and insurance policies. It was this detail that made it feasible for J. T. Ward to extract farm level data to produce a survey of farm sale prices over 100 years; Ward, 'Farm sale prices'.
56. Year Book, renamed this year as The Estate Exchange Year Book 1924, Preface, n.p. The long-term significance of this apparently better coverage is that we are uncertain whether Table 1 and the accompanying Graph 1 are telling a misleading story about the combined market in the 1890s, which then improves into the twentieth century, or whether the relative sizes of the London/Winchester House market and the Country market are accurate representations of the whole market over the whole period.
57. EG, 1 Jan. 1921, p. 13.
58. EG, 1 Jan. 1921, p. 13.
59. EG, 31 Dec. 1921, p. 909.
60. EG, 31 Dec. 1921, p. 910.
61. EG, 31 Dec. 1921, p. 910.
62. Thompson, 'Land market in the nineteenth century', pp. 43-6.
63. Norton, Trist and Gilbert, A century of land values: England and Wales', in The Times, 20 Apr. 1889, p. 11,
64. repr. J. Royal Statistical Society 54 (1891), pp. 128-9.
65. Thompson, 'Land market in the nineteenth century', pp. 49-50.
66. James Caird, English agriculture in 1850-51 (1852), frontispiece.
67. EG, 3 Jan. 1920, p. 13.
68. EG, 1 Jan. 1921, p. 13.
69. H. Durant, "The development of landownership, 1873-1925, with special reference to Bedfordshire', Sociological Rev. 28 (1936), p. 94.
70. Thompson, English landed society, p. 322.
71. H. J. Habakkuk, Marriage, debt, and the estates system. English Landownership, 1650-1950 (1994), p. 684.
72. Thompson, English landed society, p. 329 in general,
73. but also citing EG, 6 Jan., 14 Apr., 16 June, 30 June, 18 Aug. 1917.
74. Beckett, The rise and fall of the Grenvilles, pp. 282-3.
75. J.V.Beckett, 'Contesting the urban fringe: Nottingham City Council, Wollaton Hall and Broxtowe Hall, 1924-37', Trans. Thornton Society, 108 (2004), pp. 159-71.
76. Mandler, Fall and rise, passim;
77. Thompson, English landed society, passim.
78. John Bateman's figures were adapted by George C. Brodrick, English land and English landlords (1881), pp. 173-87.
79. We have extracted the Welsh figures, but Bateman's overall acreage for England of 30.4m acres (of which he calculated 1.2m acres were waste) is significantly less than the accepted figure of 32.5m acres for England published in Bartholomew, Gazetteer, p. 246.
80. Cahill, Who Owns Britain?, p. 6, quoting Valuation Office Property Market Report, Autumn 2000, marketed and distributed by the Estates Gazette.
81. Offer, 'Farm tenure and land values'.