Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain (review)

The central issues of the agrarian history of early modern England – tenures; rents; enclosure; engrossing; innovation and its diffusion – have been established for over a century. Yet knowledge of the course and complexity of change, and insights into its causes and consequences continue to develop. This stimulating collection contributes in both ways. It is empirically rich, providing an abundance of valuable information to illuminate further the economic processes involved. It is also distinctive in approach, emphasising in various ways the social, cultural and political dimensions of economic change.

‘Improvement’, as Richard Hoyle points out in his introduction, could describe several things: changes in estate management policy intended to enhance the landlord’s income; the adoption of new techniques to improve yields; the transformation of landscapes to render them more suitable for intensive farming regimes. All of these are well represented here. Paul Warde traces the development of the concept over two centuries, showing how a word originally used in the limited sense of enhancing rents became “infused with new meaning” (p. 128): a general sense of betterment, a public good, even a national mission; increasingly presenting change in a positive light. Henry French surveys the enclosure of urban commons (a largely neglected subject). Bill Shannon reveals the reclamation of the Lancashire mosses by ‘approvement’ (the right, within limits, of manorial lords to enclose the waste). Julie Bowring brings a fresh perspective to the drainage of the Fens. Elizabeth Griffiths, Briony McDonagh, and Alasdair Ross examine (respectively) the transformation of the Hunstanton, Norfolk, estate of Sir Hamon and Lady Le Strange, the commitment to improvement of Mrs Elizabeth Prowse of Wicken, Northamptonshire, and the conversion of shielings to arable on the Grant estates in Stathspey: all three providing particularly telling material on how the ambition to improve was fostered by both precept and example.

Such schemes, of course, could come into conflict with ‘custom’: the second major theme of the collection. As Hoyle observes, the maintenance of custom as a set of established rules and expectations, worked only when both landlords and tenants subscribed to it. Such consensus could be sustained. Landlords and tenants usually cooperated in mossland approvement in Lancashire. The Le Stranges combined improvement with respect for custom and Elizabeth Prowse eschewed forms of improvement she considered socially damaging. But where it was lost, the overriding of custom meant contention over rights and entitlements, litigation, sometimes riot. Such conflicts have been much studied, but again these essays offer rich examples of their complex and varied nature: James Taverner’s lifetime of litigation with various lords of North Elmham, Norfolk (Hoyle); Anthony Bradshaw’s determined attempts to compile and preserve the customs of Duffield Frith, Derbyshire (Heather Falvey); the resistance of urban freemen to the curtailment of their common rights (French); the new interest groups and new sources of conflict that emerged in the drained fens (Bowring); the sense of betrayal expressed by tenants in the Norfolk Brecklands whose lords’ extension of their foldcourse and warren rights threatened the sustainability of local agriculture – ironically leading tenants to advocate enclosure as a means of restraining them (Nicola Whyte).

As so often in agrarian history, it is in the rich detail provided by these case studies that we encounter the full complexities, ambiguities and ironies of a massive process of change, its causation and motivation and its varying chronology and outcomes in particular places. Collectively, they also highlight some general issues to be noted. Hoyle observes that ‘improvement’ in its initial sense, much in evidence in the early sixteenth century, may have slowed after the ‘commotion time’ of the 1549 risings; but it moved forward rapidly from the 1580s. Both he and Shannon suggest that the chronology of English enclosure supplied by J.R. Wordie may need revision as more is revealed of how much enclosure through ‘approvement’ was achieved silently before 1640 (some forty thousand acres in the Lancashire lowlands alone, for example). Warde and Hoyle bring out the extraordinary power of...