Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 1 (2011), p. 134

The Middletons were a middle-rank Yorkshire gentry family resident at Stokeld near Spofforth, much of whose estates were around Middleton, near Ilkley. A substantial accumulation of their archives remains in the possession of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society in Leeds and, from this, the Society has now printed a selection of papers outlining the financial problems of the family in the later sixteenth and mid-seventeenth century. The first section consists of papers relating to the absence of William Middleton (1551–1614) whilst abroad in 1578–82 (he left his wife in Yorkshire to go first to London and then to travel in Europe, going as far as Naples). In the second are printed accounts for 1653–55, after a later William Middleton had bought the estates back from the Commissioners for the Sale of Delinquents’ Estates through intermediaries.

The volume is not a success, and so it is important to explain why. In part the editors hit the nail on the head in their own preface: ‘Both [sets of documents] followed a time of national upheaval and personal misfortune and hence are not characteristic of the family’s fortunes in less troubled time’. So why are extraordinary documents privileged with publication, but not those reflecting the running of the estates in less disturbed conditions? First we have a volume of accounts kept by one Thomas Robinson, who ran the estates in Middleton’s absence, under the supervision of four commissioners acting as a debt trust, together with a few ancillary documents. These include the text of Middleton’s English passport and the novelty of a licence to travel around Naples at night, which is illustrated but not transcribed. The account is just an unadorned transcript filling 39 pages without any attempt to tabulate the data, or establish whether the attempt to build capital on the demesne at Stokeld (Middleton’s justification for leaving Yorkshire) was successful. It will provide useful material for an undergraduate or even MA student to cut their teeth on.

Second, the main document for the later period is a day book of expenditure, 1653–55. We do not seem to be told whose account this, but it appears to be that of a household steward and contains a mixture of expenditure for agricultural costs, household consumption and the personal costs of family members. This fills 32 pages. It is supported by some correspondence and deeds outlining the family’s reacquisition of the estate and the heavy levels of debt they carried over the 1650s and 1660s. The latter material is useful enough, but really ought form the basis of an article in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal or Northern History: it is hard to see what might be the justification for its publication in full.

There is then a quite extraordinarily weak introduction by the editors, which never discusses any of the questions one might like to have answered about this material. There is no attempt to calculate the income of the family at any time and, whilst the title of the volume refers to the family’s recusancy, the costs of recusancy to them, as opposed to their civil war royalism, are never explained. (In fact it would seem hard to attribute William Middleton’s problems in the 1570s to his Catholicism: the financial penalties on Catholics only really kick in in the 1580s.) The truth is that the introduction does not really exploit the documents, nor set them in a context of the family’s fortunes. A rental of 1578 is dismissed as an underestimate of income when compared to earlier and later ones (p. 55), but this is never explored or the comments justified. The later life of William Middleton, and his troubles as a recusant, is left undescribed (although the comments on him in J. T. Cliffe’s Yorkshire gentry from the Reformation to the Civil War (1969) suggest a much more interesting and historically rewarding figure than the editors acknowledge). Virtually nothing is said about the generation between William Middleton and his grandson who had to buy back his family’s estates. The latter William Middleton borrowed to recover his estates from Sir John Lowther of Lowther amongst others, but no use has been made of the Lowther archive at Carlisle, or the accounts that Colin Phillips published as long ago as 1979. It turns out too that the circumstances of the first William Middleton’s continental tour have been explored by the same authors in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 72 (2000), which has to be preferred to the summary account in the introduction of this volume.

In sum, this is far less than the book’s title promises. The editorial quartet explains that they started this project as part of a WEA Palaeography class. Their transcription doubtless brought them a great deal of pleasure, but whether they have been well advised to press on with publication has to be doubted.