Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 285

Professor Rubinstein is the doyen of academic researchers in the much neglected area of British wealth, a subject normally abandoned to the print media. Even in that area he has been seriously influential, partnering Dr Philip Beresford at the Sunday Times to give Dr Beresford’s extraordinarily popular annual Rich List deep roots in British history. In this work Professor Rubinstein commences the creation of an essential academic resource for those who wish to discover more about what manner of people created modern Britain in the early nineteenth century. The criterion he uses is a sum of £100,000 left between 1809, when data about wealth at death first appeared in usable form, and 1914. He uses data he has gathered from PROB 8, the National Archive collection of probate calendars at Kew. These mostly consist of the probate records from the Prerogative Court at Canterbury, the Prerogative Court at York and the probate records from the Episcopal Court of Chester, and of Richmond and those of Scotland dating from 1825. Professor Rubinstein points out that until 1858 the probating of estates in England and Wales was wholly a monopoly of the Church of England. In all, the 818 records in this book make fascinating reading. The base-line of £100,000, the modern equivalent of which would be £8 million, gives an idea of the people catalogued there. A typical entry is that for the Hon. Henry Cavendish, a famous scientist who never married and died in 1810 leaving £900,000 (£72m). Cavendish, like many of the wealthier testators recorded here, was high aristocracy. His grandfather was the Duke of Devonshire and his mother was the daughter of the first Duke of Kent. More typical of the group as a whole is Sir Francis Baring, a banker from Exeter who died, also in 1810, leaving £250,000 (£20m) probated, but a further £426,000 (£33m) in other forms. Despite these biographical details, it is quite astonishing just how many people then worth the equivalent of £8 million or more, particularly in London, where much mercantile and retail wealth was concentrated, are completely unknown to us today. There is much work here for future historians, and for those interested in how the wealth of the Empire returned to the UK. Many of the wills, such as that of Charles Snell Chauncey, who died in 1809, have led Professor Rubinstein to ‘trade with the West Indies and estates in Grenada and St Vincent’ which in turn leads to slavery, which is never mentioned even though not abolished until 1833. In an amusing note on the difficulties he encountered in trying to read the clerks copies of wills, known as ‘copywills’ Professor Rubinstein writes that ‘The first time I tried to read one [a copywill], at Somerset House, where they were kept at the time, I assumed at first glance that they were in Arabic and were the wills of British Levant merchants’. There are many forward references to the Return of Owners of Land, and to Bateman’s 1883 summary of that great work, which are used to indicate where the wealth left in the early 1800s may have gone, and to try and make up for lack of other references in any other place to the life of the deceased.

The book is mainly for scholars and academics, but should be of special interest to all economic historians and social historians and to people interested in genealogy and social history.