Agricultural History Review, Volume 59 Part 2 (2011), p. 331

This volume in the VCH’s Somerset series covers ten ancient parishes, including the town of Castle Cary, lying between the rivers Brue and Cary in the south-east of the county, in Catsash hundred. The area has a typical Somerset landscape of rolling green fields, streams, and hedgerows, but its homogeneity is misleading as it conceals much variety in landholding and agriculture, and some significant industry.

The town of Castle Cary, lying at the north-eastern edge of its parish, was a centre for secular and ecclesiastical administration in the Middle Ages, and had a weekly market, but for most of its history was modest in size. Though it had an earlier clothing trade, its growth came from the horsehair factories and linen mills started up in the early nineteenth century using local water power. At its peak the horsehair industry had three major factories, of which one still remained in 2000, producing high-quality webbing and other products.

For seven of the parishes little or no source material exists regarding medieval agriculture, and overall there are few manorial records, or large runs of estate material, except for Kingweston, mainly because most manorial lords were absentees and most parishes had fragmented ownership by the eighteenth century. In about half the parishes the manorial lands were sold off or the manor was divided, and only two parishes had resident landowners with substantial lands. Kingweston was the only parish where all the freehold was owned by one landlord, the Dickinson family, who from the 1740s bought the manor and all the remaining freeholds except the glebe, remaining there until the 1920s. In Alford the manor belonged to the Thring family for a hundred years from 1807 and, though they did not own all the land, as resident landowners they were influential in the parish and its main employer.

Elsewhere landholding was very diverse, allowing the creation of many small freehold estates and owner-occupied farms, and the fragmented landholding may be reflected in the constant division, amalgamation, and reorganization of farms’ lands: farm sizes generally increased during the nineteenth century, but many large farms were reduced in size by the early twentieth, and in any one parish some farms were reduced, others increased, and new farms were created. In the twentieth century many farmsteads were built on new sites, often to replace those in the villages, which were then converted into dwellings or holiday accommodation.

Though grass predominated by the early nineteenth century, all parishes still had some arable, and many were typified as dairy and corn. However, a wide variety of crops, including potatoes and teasels, were grown, attributed to the existence of the many small freehold farms, since large landlords tended to discourage variety. By the end of the twentieth century dairying remained important, but more diversification had appeared, with a range of crops, fruit, and products such as alpaca and ice cream, while mixed enterprises involved tourism and leisure activities. Farming remained strong in some parishes, such as Babcary, with about ten working farms in 2000, but in West Lydford no working farmsteads remained in the village, and its pasture was used by farmers from outside. One non-agricultural crop of significance came from Keinton Mandeville, where by the late eighteenth century large areas of the open-field arable were quarried for the slabs of Lias Keinton stone, which was lying near the surface and was used for buildings and fences in nearby villages and pavements throughout southern England.

The earliest land-use information is generally from tithe apportionments, which have been used here to produce more informative parish maps, showing the areas of the arable, grass, and orchards, and are greatly to be welcomed, since they also give a sense of how medieval fields have may been organized. The social history section allows the inclusion of interesting details such as the travelling drapers from Scotland who founded prosperous businesses in Cary, or the marble mason’s wife in Keinton with five children, who gave her occupation in 1861 as ‘slave to the rest of her family’. Regrettably, the copy-editing has become a bit slack, with a few misspellings, most noticeably on the hundred map. This may be a result of staff shortages, and it is sad to have to add that the last member of the Somerset VCH staff has been made redundant and, though work is continuing on a voluntary basis, this is no more than a short-term respite. Despite the energetic efforts of supporters in the local authorities and elsewhere, the end of work on the Somerset series, as for some other counties, is not far off unless a substantial source of funding is found.