Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale "nsd0e3779"

1. This theme is examined further in chaps. 3 and 8.

2. See Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society , pp. 10-13; Everitt, The Pattern of Rural Dissent , pp. 20-22; B. A. Holderness, "'Open' and

'Close' Parishes in England in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries," Ag.HR , XX (1972); and Mills, Lord and Peasant , especially chaps. 2-6; however, see Sarah Banks's critique of this model, in Banks, "Nineteenth Century Scandal."

3. See, for instance, Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society , p. 12, n. 2; Obelkevich bases his analysis on the land tax return for 1831.

4. Alan MacFarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (Oxford, 1978), defines individualism in terms of property right; for the correlation of property right with Dissent, see above, n. 2 as well as the two classics: Max Weber (trans. Talcott Parsons), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York, 1976) and R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: An Historical Study (London, 1964).

5. For references, see above, chap. 1, n. 12 and n. 73.

6. Almost 25.0 percent of the parish's acreage remained unlisted, however; this was undoubtedly unoccupied waste, "the lord's waste," that he protected from encroachment by cottagers; see chap. 4 for a detailed treatment of the exercise of manorial authority.

7. Intermediary and small holdings among owners fell 37 and 24 percent, respectively.

8. The range was from a mean of 0.8666 to a mean of 0.4888 acres.

9. Horsley's acreage in 1784 was estimated from the land values and acreage figures in the 1784 Avening tithe survey and from Horsley's land tax assessements for that year. A regression equation, Total Acreage = -0.2357178 + 0.3919663 (land value) was derived from the tithe survey, and Horsley's land values, based on the assessment of 4s. per pound sterling, were substituted to yield estimates of total acreage for each landholder in the parish. Although methods of valuation for tithe and land tax could have differed, the pattern of variation between land values and acreage size are assumed to have been the same.

10. The percentage fall in acreage was respectively 34, 40, and 55.

11. John Dela Field, Esq., probably a distant relative of the late lord, Henry Stephens, occupied Chavenage manor house in 1141 but appears only to have had the "use" of the estate, the rents of which were collected by its trustee, Robert Kingscote; see the Will of Henry Stephens, Esq., February 28, 1795, PRO Prob. 11/1256/122. For the activities of the manor court under the Stephens, see chap. 4.

12. See above, chap. 1, tables 1 to 4.

13. See above, chap. 1, table 8 for the net loss of arable acreage that resulted from a sharpening of the division of labor. Adam Smith had observed that absence of specialization made preindustrial labor particularly inefficient: "A country weaver who cultivates a small farm must lose

a good deal of time in passing from his loom to his field, and from the field to his loom''; see Adam Smith (G. Stigler, ed.), Selections from the Wealth of Nations (New York, 1957), p. 6.

14. See this chapter (chap. 2), section on agrarian transformation.

15. See E. P. Thompson, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Social History , VII (1974): 387 and Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts: Social Protest and Popular Disturbances in England, 1509-1640 (Oxford, 1988), p. 5. Manning writes that during the early modern period the survival of use-rights among the tenantry, as well as "[t]he continued exercise of seigneurial jurisdiction, the extraction of manorial dues and services, and the survival of servile tenures all modified the terms of landholding," limiting both the lords' and tenants' assertions of unqualified rights to private property. This conclusion applies equally to the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century, to the extent that remnants of seigneurialism can be found.

16. See Ivor P. Collis, "Leases for a Term of Years Determinable with Lives," Society of Archivists Journal , I (1955-1959) and Christopher Clay, "Lifehold Leasing in the Western Counties of England," Ag.HR , XXIX (1981) for close examinations of this particular form of leasehold.

17. E. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems of the Sixteenth Century and after (London, 1969) discusses the difference between leases as "real interests" in land and as "real chattels"; cf. A. W. B. Simpson, A History of the Land Law , 2d ed. (Oxford, 1986), pp. 70-73. The life tenant held "seisin" because he could transfer his holding to his heirs instead of an executor.

18. In the West of England, both copyholds for lives and lifehold leases were renewable at the expiry of each life listed in the indenture, a practice that offered additional security of tenure; see Kerridge, Agrarian Problems , pp. 35-36, 47.

19. The customary obligations they contained, at the very least, were payment of heriots and suit of court; the succession of lifehold leases from copyholds is depicted in Kerridge, Agrarian Problems ; see also R. H. Hilton, The English Peasantry in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford, 1975), pp. 69-70, 149; F. Pollock and F. W. Maitland, The History of the English Law before the Time of Edward I , II (Cambridge, 1968): iii; and Manning, Village Revolts , p. 133.

20. See n. 17, above, on "real chattels." In eighteenth-century Norfolk, a seat of the agricultural revolution, twenty-one-year leases were regarded as long tenures; see R. A. C. Parker, Coke of Norfolk: A Financial and Agricultural Study, 1707-1842 (Oxford, 1975), p. 54.

21. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems , p. 47.

22. Gloucester City Library, Glos. Colln., RF167.2 (1-4), Horsley

Manor Records, Particulars of Leases and Rents, 1562-1789; cf. Glos. Jnl ., 19 July 1842, the case of Garbind vs. Jekyel , in which the Lord Chief Justice is reported enforcing the payment of heriots to the lord of an Essex manor, although not to the amount the latter had claimed.

23. Ivor P. Collis, "Leases for a Term of Years," p. 168.

24. See chap. 4 for a detailed treatment.

25 Glos. Jnl ., 1 April 1816, "Manor of Horsley." We can estimate, however, that the number of leaseholders on the manor were fewer than at Minchinhampton, the estimate for which is given below. According to the series of suitors between 1794 and 1814, listed in appendix B, the trend value for the number of suitors in 1789 (the year of the last recorded lease) is 441; this means that about 10 percent of all Horsley suitors held leases from the manor.

26. GRO D1192/2; for a discussion of the evolution of tenures on the manor, especially the early commutation of labor services, see Jean Birdsall, "The English Manors of the Abbey of La Trinité at Cean," in Anniversary Essays in Medieaval History by Students of Charles Homer Haskins (New York, 1929), pp. 36, 38 and E. Watson, "The Minchinhampton Custumal and Its Place in the Story of the Manor," Trans. B & G Arch. Soc . LIV (1932): 255.

27. The results of this analysis can be expressed symbolically as X 1 = 2.65s, S 1 = 3.20; X 2 = 3.76s, S 2 = 3.48; t = 0.62, df = 34, t > 2.03 at the 0.05 significance level.

28. The assumption made here is that the type of property held (which might have affected the rental value) is randomly distributed among small holders and therefore should not affect the comparison.

29. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems , p. 48.

30. F. Pollock, The Land Law's (London, 1896), p. 142; cf. Simpson, History of Land Law , p. 252.

31. Gloucester City Library, Glos. Colln., RF167.2 (1-4), Horsley Manor Records.

32. Ibid.

31. Gloucester City Library, Glos. Colln., RF167.2 (1-4), Horsley Manor Records.

32. Ibid.

33. Glos. Jnl ., 15 September 1823, Sale at Boot Inn.

34. PRO PCC Prob. 11/1818/66, Will of Edward Bliss; PRO, IR26/1279/81, Estate Duty Registers.

35. PRO PCC Prob. 11/1256/122, Will of Henry Stephens, Esq.

36. GRO D1812/1. Ricardo Family Papers.

37. See Ivor P. Collis, "Leases for a Term of Years," pp. 168-171.

38. Occassionally, however, wills specify the tenurial status of the property bequeathed; where freehold status is not actually specified, the property may likely have been a long-term leasehold treated as though it were a freehold, as in the case of Edward Bliss, cited above.

39. GRO GDR, Wills of W. Kemish, September 5, 1812; T. Lewis, May 25, 1825; J. Heskins, April 15, 1818; P. Howell, March 31, 1764; T. Locker, September 12, 1759; Rob Mason, January 21, 1778; Jas. Bingell, February 14, 1803; Thos. Baker, July 5, 1827; J. Sansum, June 26, 1823; H. Dee, April 22, 1797; D. Sansum, December 13, 1826; W. Dowdy, March 19, 1763; J. Harrison, October 15, 1772, J. Cull, May 12, 1779; and T. Holliday, November 8, 1774. See also chap. 6, table 47, which gives the percentage distribution by tenurial status of artisan, weaver, and laborer householders at Horsley in 1811.

40. See J. D. Chambers, "Enclosure and the Labour Supply," in D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, eds., Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography (London, 1965), pp. 308-310; cf. the historio-graphic discussion in J. A. Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure in England , 1450-1850 (London, 1977), pp. 94-103.

41. See Joan Thirsk, "The Farming Regions of England"; Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure ; J. R. Wordie, "The Chronology of English Enclosure, 1500-1914," Ec.HR , XXXVI, 2d ser. (1983) has maintained, more recently, that 70 percent of the land in England had been enclosed by 1700.

42. Chambers, "Enclosure and the Labour Supply," p. 319; see also G. E. Mingay, Enclosure and the Small Farmer in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (London, 1968).

43. See Yelling, Common Field and Enclosure , pp. 26-29, 71-93.

44. Gloucester City Library, Glos. Colln. RF167.2 (1-4), Horsley Manor Records; subsequent similar references are drawn from the same source.

45. GRO GDR, Will of Daniel Harvey, Avening, March 31, 1785.

46. GRO, D1812/1, Ricardo Family Papers, Feoffment of Premises at Avening, May 11, 1807, Hill and Dangerfield to Phillip Sheppherd.

47. Ibid. Lease Indenture, September 24, 1777, Peach to Edward Sheppherd.

48. Ibid. Deed of Exchange, February 24, 1788, Sheppherd to Walbank.

49. Ibid. Conveyance of Estates, the Shard and Samao, March 24, 1824.