Agricultural History Review, Volume 62 Part 1 (2014), p. 179

A full assessment of the contribution made by the gentry to the economic performance of Lancashire in the late eighteenth century is long overdue. This volume provides a contribution towards such an evaluation, from which future historians will derive considerable benefit.

Thomas Eccleston was an ambitious agricultural improver, based in Scarisbrick, Lancashire, who gained widespread fame during his own lifetime, not least because of his work draining Martin Mere. Eccleston was an extremely able self-publicist, from which much of his fame derives, and he was a correspondent of many of the leading lights of late eighteenth-century agricultural improvement, both at home and overseas. Virgoe rightly selects Eccleston for close scrutiny, and highlights south-west Lancashire as a place of significant agricultural developments during the industrial revolution. Eccleston stands out as an individual who enjoyed a prominent local reputation with active membership of agricultural societies, large-scale success with drainage, a champion of Elkington’s method of drainage, and sponsor of Lancastrian William Moorcroft, the first Englishman to obtain a formal veterinary qualification, and an experimenter with crops, rotations and implements. He is an important figure in English agricultural history, hitherto neglected by agricultural historians, much like his native south-west Lancashire.

Eccleston was a member of the ancient Scarisbrick family and his descendants were to become possessed of one of the largest, and richest, non-aristocratic estates in England in the nineteenth century. The Scarisbrick archive held at Lancashire Archives is substantial and significant, with the estate being particularly well documented for the century after 1750. This book is based on an impressive array of letters, diaries, accounts, surveys and memoranda of various types, as well as a range of contemporary published sources. The scale and diversity of the archive is made very apparent by this book, and Virgoe has clearly developed an unrivalled knowledge of the manuscript collection.

However, I do have some concerns with the book. The context is, for the most part, very poor with barely any acknowledgement of a great deal of academic work on agricultural history in recent years. As an example, only six articles and one review from the Review are cited, with only two of these being published in the last 20 years. Of the 150 or so items in the bibliography of secondary sources, only 11 were published in the last ten years. This failure to contextualize mars the whole book, significantly undermining Virgoe’s argument. That the book is written in praise of the gentry contribution is established early on in a phrase that could easily have come from the text of an eighteenth-century critic of Lancashire farming: ‘Farms were small and the farmers were conservative’ (p. 21). He goes on to argue that ‘[f]ew ordinary farmers could be pioneers since they did not have the financial resources to offset the risks of failure, particularly on the small farms of south-west Lancashire, and it was up to the landlords to be the innovators’ (pp. 152–3). But Virgoe simply does not address any of the literature that has challenged the role of the landlord-improver nor those works that have argued a case for the role of the small farmer in the agricultural revolution.

Readers of this journal may fill in some of these omissions for themselves, and those able to do so will find this book rewarding. Virgoe has established a case for Eccleston as an active writer, host, agricultural tourist, experimenter, adopter and promoter of innovations, and has thus achieved his first aim: ‘to put the case for Thomas Eccleston as an important agricultural improver’ (p. 1), although lack of reference to the full body of work on south-west Lancashire and a general lack of analysis prevent him from achieving his second, ‘to reappraise the position of Lancashire from that of an agriculturally backward part of England’ to one that could be regarded as ‘progressive’ (pp. 1–2). Parts of this book will be very familiar to those who are aware of Virgoe’s previous work, and those familiar with the historiography will be aware of numerous significant omissions. However, much of the text itself reads like an extended annotated catalogue with extremely long summaries of letters that ought to have been edited down. This archival coverage is impressive, with sometimes forensic accuracy regarding personnel, but with sometimes excessive detail that detracts from the two stated aims. There is a distinct lack of analysis, and, ultimately, contradiction and confusion in the argument.

Virgoe cannot really maintain his argument. In the concluding pages he confesses that ‘Eccleston was less of a true innovator’ (p. 192) and, in contrast to other contemporary practical ‘improving’ farmers, he was not motivated by profit – but by ‘personal ambition’ (p. 199). Eccleston had produced agricultural goods for urban markets, although his experiments with Galloway cattle, for instance, did not go down well with Liverpool butchers. Yet, in Virgoe’s eyes, such experiments remained valuable as ‘many ordinary farmers were illiterate’ (p. 192) and therefore unable to benefit directly from the activities of organizations such as Agricultural Societies. However, Virgoe does not demonstrate how much of an impact Eccleston had on the farmers of south-west Lancashire; undoubtedly he had some influence, but how is this to be measured and set against the innovations of ‘ordinary’ farmers, many of whom were literate, and were in a better financial position than Virgoe and many eighteenth-century commentators assumed? Ultimately Virgoe characterizes south-west Lancashire as a place which ‘made the best use of its own resources and farming traditions by producing mainly dairy products, potatoes and vegetables based on small family farms and small, ancient enclosures’ (p. 195). I remain perplexed, in such an environment, about the role of an ‘improving agriculturalist’.