Agricultural History Review, Volume 63 Part 1 (2015), p. 176

As the era of ‘open access’ approaches, it is worth pausing for a moment to consider the old saying ‘that you can get what you want but lose what you have’. Guy Lawton’s painstaking edition of the Church Lawton manorial court rolls is a perfect example of the benefits of subscription publication of a scholarly edition of a historical text by a long-established learned society. Life has been proceeding in this vein for 170 years in most British counties. Scholars undertake such monumental editorial tasks as a labour of love, the societies undertake to publish them for their subscribers, and in this way documents see the light of day that would never be produced by commercial publishers. While the embargo periods built into initial ‘open access’ agreements appear to safeguard this ancient craft, fears remain that such things might disappear as the collateral damage created by the changing whims of an internet giant.

If so, let us appreciate what we have, while we still have it. In this instance, one could argue that the value of editorial work on these court rolls outweighs the intrinsic interest of the documents themselves. Church Lawton was a small manor of 1366 statute acres on the Cheshire-Staffordshire border. Its court rolls do not survive as a consecutive series through the period covered in this volume, because there were large gaps: 1643–57, 1701–34, 1740–70, and 1779–1840. While many of these gaps reflect genuine losses, the final hiatus might reflect a genuine lack of business, or more properly the steward’s genuine lack of interest in keeping the court, when the manorial lord held 92 per cent of the land in hand. So, it is fair to say that there are probably more exciting historical documents available in print.

However, there are few more painstaking editions of them. The rolls themselves detail patterns found elsewhere. Relatively vibrant Leet business in the 1630s halved in volume in the Restoration period, and halved again by the 1730s. The greatest casualty was the court’s regulation of petty affrays, which probably fell increasingly under the summary jurisdiction of the local magistrate. These court rolls are buttressed by extensive indices of persons and places, as they occur in every single surviving roll. In addition, the editor has done sterling work in setting the rolls in a much broader documentary context, by transcribing supporting material such as the 1660 Poll Tax, Hearth Taxes of 1664, 1669 and 1673, Land Taxes of 1781 and 1800, and the 1841 Census. In addition, he has also included a fascinating probate inventory of Church Lawton Hall in 1693, and a document designed to make the early modernist’s head swim, a 1741 itemised inventory valuation of a Newcomen Engine used to drain the Lawtons’ salt pan in the manor.

The editorial introduction is also well worth reading, not just because of its description of the composition of the rolls, the conduct of the court, or their value in pushing back the history of the Cheshire salt trade into the early eighteenth century, but because of the story of the Lawton family itself. Again, this is both idiosyncratic and very familiar – accumulation of wealth and status in the century following the Reformation, reaching a peak with John Lawton (d. 1736), his 21 children, his £100 income, his house, his salt pans, and his political career. The next century was one of decline, mismanagement and misalliance, as the estate fell into the hands of an exploitative steward, was turned around by an indefatigable widow, and was then eventually inherited by the uncouth husband of the lover of the diarist Anne Lister. Church Lawton Hall followed a similar trajectory, tracing its own slow decline from the 1880s, as it was first rented out, then used as a hospital and as a private school, then left to become derelict and vandalised, and then redeveloped as apartments in the late twentieth century.

While this edition is likely to be of most interest to its subscribers in Lancashire and Cheshire, it is a useful reference work, a handy source of examples of the post-medieval court roll, and an illustration of the workings of the regional economy explored in some depth by Charles Foster a decade ago. In this sense (and hopefully only in this sense), it provides another valuable illustration of the ‘world we have lost’.