Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 1 (2004), p. 114

‘A pamphlet on the Poor Laws’, observed Sidney Smith in an 1820 Edinburgh Review article, ‘generally contains some little piece of favourite nonsense, by which we are gravely told this enormous evil may be perfectly cured. The first gentleman recommends little gardens; the second cows; the third a village shop; the fourth a spade’. Historians in their turn have not, on the whole, taken either allotment gardens or the spade husbandry that nurtured them seriously. For Burchardt, however, allotments are not nonsense. In the course of nine closely argued chapters, backed by eight appendices and a fifteen-page bibliography, he sets out a compelling case for locating allotments at the heart of the narrative of mid-nineteenth century social progress and stability. This is the first ever full-length study of allotments and agricultural and rural historians will be indebted to Burchardt for decades to come.

The author necessarily takes some time setting the scene, choosing 1793 as a starting point as the conjectural date of the first documented allotments, in Wiltshire. Before the 1830s almost fifty per cent of documented allotment sites (still only 54 in total) were still all in Wiltshire or close to its borders. Burchardt prudently concludes that by 1830 the actual number of schemes was around double this. On the face of it, this seems low and Burchardt himself only fully accounts for it by arguing that 1830 was the hinge upon which allotment history turned. The year 1830 saw the critical coincidence of the Swing riots and the formation of the Labourers’ Friend Society, the first and only national body dedicated exclusively to allotment promotion. To support his claim that Swing decisively shifted landowner and farmer opinion in favour of allotments, the author finds evidence to support the contemporary view that Swing left untouched those parishes which had allotments; but with site numbers so small the avoidance of riot may just have been chance, as he concedes.

A better test of the relationship between allotment provision and social unrest might be found by correlating such schemes with the incidence of Chartism, and especially support for the Chartist land plan. Burchardt considers this possibility; but he does so in a not especially systematic way (making no use of the subscribers’ registers that survive in Board of Trade papers or the known distribution of land plan branches). He concludes that allotment promotion ‘may have contributed to the genesis of the Chartist land plan’. However, a rough check of the sources Burchardt has not used, against the east midlands case study he offers, suggests that allotments may indeed have suppressed interest inthe Chartist plan. Only four out of the twenty-two locations he identifies as visited by the indefatigable localpropagandist for the Labourers’ Friend Society apparently supported the land plan.

The allotment movement presents a long-overdue evaluation of the Labourers’ Friend Society (of the records of which, implausibly surviving in the Greater London Record Office’s Peabody Housing Trust archives, it makes shrewd use). He necessarily draws heavily on its journal, published continuously from 1834 until 1884, bolstered by a full range of parliamentary papers and contemporary literature. His conclusions are suggestive and underline just how much remains to be found out concerning rural Victorian society. Allotments, Burchardt concludes, were a substantial compensation for common right and customary commons access. They raised family incomes significantly, perhaps by as much as a fifth. Furthermore, their prevalence across southern England meant, he argues, that agricultural labour there was never as proletarianized as is usually thought. They were a profoundly modernizing force: the land was restored to the labourers but in a marketized context that pointed towards individual enterprise, respectability and urban-style working-class mutuality. Burchardt is also persuaded, on the basis of qualitative evidence, that allotments reduced crime (some contemporaries thought the opposite). The combined effect of increasing allotment provision after 1830 ‘was to make villages less “rough” and more “respectable” and to control and channel social conflict into more regularized, peaceable and legal channels’. Concerning the latter, Burchardt places particular emphasis upon the allotment as a base ‘to fly to’, as labourers themselves put it, ‘when times are hard and labour troubles have to be fought out’. These are large claims and Burchardt readily concedes that Methodism, elementary education, and more regular employment were as important in shaping rural social relations. In southern England, however, he suggests allotments may have contributed as much as any other factor.

In view of the claims made for their importance, it is unfortunate that the book nowhere states with complete clarity what the total extent of allotments by 1873 actually was. Burchardt chooses 1873 as his terminating date because of the fairly reliable Agricultural Returns for Great Britain of that year: they are no more than fairly reliable since they excluded both urban parishes and, probably, individual allotments over one acre in extent. Within these limitations the returns suggest the total number of plots was 242,542, with a density of more than one plot to every male agricultural labourer aged 10 or over in Leicestershire, falling to a ratio of one plot to thirty labourers in Westmorland. Nationally, the overall ratio was one allotment to 3.1 male labourers. Of course, and Burchardt shows this, not all allotment holders were agricultural labourers. However the basis for his generalizations about the social impact of allotment provision appears secure, until one stumbles across an aside (p.223) that by the mid-1870s the proportion of parishes with allotments was ‘probably’ only ‘about a third’. It isunclear if this includes urban as well as rural parishes; 116 the agricultural nor is it completely clear how distribution varied regionally. For although Burchardt is very firm in claiming for allotments a significant social impact in rural southern England, density ratios were 9.5 in Kent and well over 11 in both Surrey and Sussex – only Shropshire, Cheshire, Lancashire and Westmorland had poorer levels of provision by his criteria. By 1873 the clear strongholds for allotments were the east Midlands and Warwickshire. (This perhaps suggests that miners may have been as significant a tenant base as farm workers, a point not explored by the author, except obliquely in Somerset in 1839.) Ultimately, for all its extensive calculations of profits, yields, rents and sizes, backed by a two-thousand strong computerized dataset, The allotment movement still leaves some key questions tantalisingly unanswered.