Agricultural History Review, Volume 58 Part 1 (2010), p. 135

Before the rise of owner-occupation in the twentieth century, the traditional system of English land tenure involved landowners, who provided the fixed capital (the land and buildings) and tenants or farmers who provided the working capital (the stock and implements), paid a fixed rent, and kept any remaining profit from the farming operations that they organized and managed. There has been a recent move for some landowners to operate sharefarming contracts in which they provide not only fixed capital but also working capital such as dairy cows in return for a share of the profits, a system apparently imported from New Zealand. But until about the beginning of the First World War most English farmland was rented from a landlord by a tenant. Sharefarming – or sharecropping as it was called in the southern USA – or its continental European versions, métayage in France and mezzadria in Italy, had no place in England. It halved any incentive to improve, and thus Arthur Young explained the success of English farming and the comparative failure and poverty of continental European farming. Or so we thought.

Elizabeth Griffiths and Mark Overton, with the assistance of Michael Winter in a final chapter on the current situation, suggest that ‘farming to halves’, or sharefarming, was much more common in England than we have hitherto realized. In fact, they argue, sharefarming has existed in England from the medieval period onwards, but informally, as a matter of custom, deliberately uncodified, and consequently difficult to see in the manorial records or landed estate leases and rentals with which rural historians generally work. Sharefarming was especially associated with periods of low prices such as the seventeenth, late nineteenth or late twentieth centuries. It was used by landlords when tenants were hard to find, or short of capital, or needed to be established on reclaimed land, and among the peasantry, as the authors are happy to call them, to ease the flow of capital, expand businesses, and provide for old age. In very recent times it has been encouraged by tax laws, and is now being defined and categorized. The traditional English landlord-and-tenant system is thus revealed by Griffiths and Overton as an exceptional phase, lasting from the early eighteenth to the later nineteenth century, and emerging from the increased political power of the landed elite from the end of the seventeenth century. This reduced the risks of landownership so that landlords ‘effectively subsidised tenants’ (p.198) until the imposition of death duties in the early twentieth century reduced the attractions of landownership and precipitated the rise of owner-occupation in the twentieth century.

For this argument to be accepted we need examples of sharefarming from several centuries and many parts of England. From a close reading of the secondary literature on medieval land tenure Griffiths and Overton find examples of manorial tenants subletting for a share of the crop in the Midlands and East Anglia. In the early modern period there were examples from Cornwall to Cannock Chase and Yorkshire to the Wessex water meadows. Evidence from the four Norfolk estates of Raynham, Felbrigg, Blickling and Hunstanton in the seventeenth century provides considerable evidence for the various ways in which the system worked. In the eighteenth century, however, reduced risks and the emergence of a group of substantial tenants brought fixed-rent tenancies into the pre-eminent position which lasted until the late nineteenth century, although, they argue, sharefarming continued to exist among small tenants, and in the twentieth century increased considerably, so that by 2007 contract farming, partnership farming, and sharefarming together involved 2.3 per cent of all holdings, covering 6.6 per cent of the agricultural land in England and Wales.

There is clearly a substantial body of evidence to indicate that sharefarming of various types existed, and continues to exist, in many, if not most, parts of England for much of the last millennium. The question that remains, however, is the extent to which it existed. In parts of France and Italy it was clearly a significant, if not the dominant, form of tenure. Can the same be said of England? The nature of the evidence makes the judgement difficult, for surviving tenancy agreements will not reveal short-term sub-lettings or verbal agreements. There can be little doubt that what we think of as ‘normal’ fixed-rent tenancies were common from the sixteenth century onwards, so we are left with the question of which was the more common and this is not one that Griffiths and Overton attempt to resolve. But their work means that future historians of estate management will be unlikely to take rental evidence at face value. It also puts recent changes in the pattern of land tenure into historical context, and requires us to think again about the differences between England and continental Europe.