Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), p. 256

This volume represents a continuation of the tradition of scholarly publishing long-established by the Northamptonshire Record Society and stands as the first of a series commemorating the life and work of the distinguished local historian Victor Hatley. It comprises the third-person memoirs of the Rev. John Mastin (1747–1829), printed from a manuscript recently deposited in the Northamptonshire Record Office, along with a republication of the first edition of Mastin’s well-known History of Naseby which first saw the light of day in 1792. The editors have contributed a brief introduction and intelligent footnotes, while Glenn Foard offers an assessment of the value of Mastin’s History to our current understanding of the pivotal Battle of Naseby.

Unlike most eighteenth-century clerical memorialists, Mastin was the non-graduate son of a grazier who entered the priesthood at the age of 30 after working in various counties as a secretary/servant, valuer, land-agent and farmer. Nevertheless, he learned his letters well and was reckoned ‘a good scholar’ at 13 despite (or perhaps on account of) regular thrashings with the birch while suspended from a bacon hook in his father’s house, this being the standard punishment for playing truant! Meanwhile he read widely, wrote music, hunted, shot, fell in and out of love and discovered the pleasures of the alehouse, ‘which he afterwards regretted’. By his early twenties Mastin was a land agent in Hertfordshire in vigorous pursuit of a wife. Having played the field with some gusto he eventually settled on a young heiress of 16 and, in the face of bitter opposition from her parents, eloped with her to Gretna Green, for good measure taking along his father as a witness to the wedding. Once his wife came of age, Mastin was able to get hold of her money and to speculate in the land market, concurrently history review studying Latin, Greek and Hebrew in preparation for holy orders. Meanwhile he lost little time in perpetuating the Mastins and his wife (stoically, no doubt) had borne him seven children before her twenty-fifth birthday. Ordained in 1777, Mastin became vicar of Naseby in 1783, held a number of other curacies and continued to enjoy income both from his own small landholdings and as agent for others. Although he writes sparingly of spiritual matters, limiting himself to commenting upon where and when he conducted divine services, he was probably a pretty rotten parish priest. What with field sports, fêtes-champêtres with the gentry, visiting friends,taking the waters at Buxton, attending the Lord Mayor’s Feast at the Guildhall in 1820 (in what capacity?), recovering from broken bones sustained on the hunting field, writing essays for the Board of Agriculture, and farming his glebe, there could have been little time left for pastoral duties.

The tone of Mastin’s memoirs are characteristic of their time in the sense that he rarely gives way to any sort of emotion. Typically, when he lost both his wife and his brother on the same day in 1811 he calmly reflected that ‘these were events hard to be borne by those not perfectly resigned to the will of God’. The litany of family deaths was probably of less concern to Mastin than the repeated visitations of gout which he suffered as the years wore on. On Easter Sunday, 1814 he col-lapsed with gout and had to be carried from Naseby church only to recover to take part in the ‘fêtes and great rejoicing’ celebrating the overthrow of Bonaparte the following month. It is perhaps typical of a man too stingy to stump up two guineas annually following his election to the Society of Antiquaries that he should note sniffily after the village party that ‘surely never was money spent more imprudently than such large sums were in Pomp, Show and extravagant vanity’.

Read alongside the History of Naseby with its evocation of the local landscape, agricultural practices and customs, Mastin’s memoirs represent a useful additionto the corpus of contemporary descriptions of eighteenth-century rural England. The memoirs, occasionally amusing and always informative, embrace both local and national politics, the contemporary land market and its financing, farming, racing, turnpiking, and, in particular, the complexities of ecclesiastical pluralism. The History, if by now of peripheral value to students of theCivil Wars, is replete with detailed descriptions of the landscape over which the Battle of Naseby itself was fought. It also offers comments on the state of the rural economy in Mastin’s time, notably the problems of inflation and the advance in poor rates arising from the decline in cottage-based weaving. Although a sturdy promoter of enclosure against the opposition of locals ‘blind to their own interests’, Mastin makes the interesting observation that poor rates in the 1820s were increasing both in parishes in the process of enclosure and those remaining in open field. Rarely judgmental and always to the point, Mastin’s writings are characterized by the sort of common sense and eye for detail which only a sound practical grounding in matters of theland allows. He has been well-served by his editors who have resisted any temptation to modernize the text of the History and have confined their editing of the Memoirs to the addition of paragraph breaks and subheadings along with apposite and well-constructed footnotes. If this is a taster for the Hatley Memorial series there is every reason to look forward to future volumes.