Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 220

Earls Colne is a place well known to many historians of early modern rural society in the English-speaking world and beyond. It owes its fame to its seventeenth-century clergyman and diarist Ralph Josselin. It was Josselin’s voluminous diary that first attracted the attention of the historical anthropologist Alan Macfarlane and which subsequently made Earls Colne the object of Macfarlane’s pioneering but ultimately unrealized (and unrealizable?) attempt at a totalizing historical reconstruction. French and Hoyle take advantage of the online resources this created to revisit a fundamental question in the history of English rural society – the disappearance of the English peasant and agricultural transformation.

A helpful introductory chapter, which deserves to be widely read, revisits the debate over the early development of agrarian capitalism in England triggered by the thesis advanced by the American historian Robert Brenner in the 1970s. What came to be known subsequently as the Brenner debate saw Brenner criticize explanations grounded in commercialization and demographic pressure and argue for the centrality of class relationships and the erosion of peasant property rights. Writing at much the same time, but largely ignoring the issue of landlordism and drawing directly on his researches in Earls Colne, Alan Macfarlane offered a very different reading of agrarian change which sought to undercut the debate over the transition from feudalism to capitalism by challenging both thesis and chronology, arguing for a more ego-centred and commercially-oriented English ‘peasantry’ from at least the middle ages. French and Hoyle skilfully summarize and critique this debate in the light of more recent research and make this the focus of the often very detailed chapters that follow.

The book moves from general debate to a consideration of Earls Colne’s particular characteristics. The authors are careful to acknowledge the potential problems of a single parish study, emphasizing Earls Colne’s particular character. Anciently enclosed, located in an area of wood pasture and practising a mixed agriculture, the village had a more diversified occupational structure that reflected in part its involvement in the north Essex cloth industry and, importantly, the urban influences of Colchester and even London. This was a complex, commercialized, and mobile society.

At the core of the book is a detailed analysis of changes in the pattern of landholding and the respective roles of landlordism, inheritance and land market. With two manors, half the land was held in demesne, but with much of this leased out and, with freehold accounting for only some six per cent, copyhold was the dominant form of tenure. In line with the experience of much of eastern England, after the climacteric of the 1549 rebellions and an arrested seigneurial reaction, the favourable terms enjoyed by copyholders by inheritance in East Anglia were consolidated in Earls Colne. Fines to the lord increased over the longer term by perhaps as much as thirty-fold, but represented only about a fifth of manorial income. At various points, the resident lords of the manor, the Harlakendens, sought to assert manorial rights. This gave rise to disputes between them and the previous owners, the earls of Oxford, and with various tenants. In analysing these, the book offers valuable evidence of the existence of faction and feud at even this local level. But the relative unimportance of income from copyhold as against demesne leasehold helped to explain why the manorial courts slowly declined.

Painstaking computer-generated reconstruction of the myriad land transactions recorded in the manorial courts allows the authors to map the pattern of landholding and land transactions over the period of study. The picture that emerges is highly complex. This was a fundamentally bifurcated market in which volatility, until perhaps the later period, was the norm, with a pattern of land retention for a little under half of the acreage over fifty-year cycles while, by contrast, many holdings were held for surprisingly short periods. While, over the longer run, there was some consolidation into larger holdings, the average holding size remained small, with many holdings often very small at less than one acre. Much copyhold land was held as an investment. Inheritance remained the largest factor in land acquisition, with many of those inheriting land, including the Harlakendens, ex-stewards to the earls of Oxford, being otherwise not very active in the further acquisition of land. Significantly, those acquiring land through purchase usually exhibited more activity subsequently. While there was a gradual tendency towards consolidation of larger holdings with the emergence of a few parish gentry and a significant presence of the middling sort, two factors worked against this. In practice, a pattern of partible inheritance saw accumulated holdings subject to the demands of younger heirs, while the disappearance of families into urban society saw plenty of very small holdings sub-let. Indeed, with minimal freehold, most of the demesne leased, and just under forty per cent of copyhold land sub-tenanted, the owner-occupier was an exception in Earls Colne. As an analysis of the pattern of office-holding suggests, it was acreage, not ownership, that mattered most.

Earls Colne does not England make. Nevertheless, the detailed work that Macfarlane’s original research project made possible means that it is unlikely that we will ever be able to better the insights into the land market that French and Hoyle’s study offers. Their work suggests that early market involvement, for smaller landholders with secure ‘peasant’ property rights and larger landholders alike, made the whole sector necessarily sensitive to the incentives offered by secular shifts in the price of grain. But, given the detail of the analysis offered, there is much more for the reader of the book to discover, not least a shadowy historical community study revealing something of the strengths and limitations of Earls Colne, given the absence of key records, had Macfarlane attempted a ‘total history’ there.