Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), p. 150

As Amy Erickson acknowledges in the afterword to this collection, it is ‘worthy of note that in 2019 a book on the significance of female landholding … should even be required’. However, ‘it is still the case that a book on land may be written without reference to women, and yet it does not require the word “men” in its title. But a book on women’s use of land must have “women” in the title’. Over the last 30 years in particular, work on women and property ownership has expanded, with Erickson’s own 1993 monograph Woman and property in early modern England (rev. ante AgHR 43.1) remaining one of the most significant and influential contributions. Despite the patriarchal biases of primogeniture (an inheritance practice which favoured the first-born son) and the doctrine of coverture (in which men assumed legal ownership of their wife’s property upon marriage), women nonetheless found ways to own property. Yet they are conspicuous by their absence from many histories of landscape and agricultural change.

The editors of this collection, Women and the land, 1500–1900, offer new histories of land and property in which women’s lives are situated at the centre. Bringing together the work of historians, literary scholars and historical geographers, a broad conception of ‘land’ is taken to include landscape, residential buildings, and commercial and personal property. In its feminist agenda, the book has two main aims: to bring together work that quantifies women’s land ownership in England between 1500 and 1900, and to develop a better understanding of what owning property meant to women across this 400-year period.

The quest for quantifying the proportion of land owned by women in England is ongoing but there is general consensus that female landowners represented a significant minority. In her study of the nineteenth-century acquisition of land for railway building, Janet Casson finds 12.4 per cent of plots acquired were owned by women, a figure that broadly correlates with estimates of between 10 and 20 per cent identified in studies elsewhere. Casson further notes that female landowners were not exclusively drawn from the wealthiest sections of society.

Several chapters in this collection demonstrate the effectiveness of adopting a life-cycle approach to assess women’s property ownership. Jennifer Aston’s study of mid-nineteenth-century Birmingham wills highlights married women’s important role in continuing and creating their own businesses when their husbands died, as well as their role in preserving wealth over generations through transfer of their estate, personal property and heirlooms. Joan Heggie’s work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century property transactions recorded in the Yorkshire and the North Riding Registers of Deeds reveals distinctive patterns across life cycle and region in female involvement in the property market. She finds that married women were increasingly able to participate in property transactions alone over the course of the period, suggesting the importance of the 1870 Married Women’s Property Act and subsequent legislation. Judith Spicksley’s chapter considers how much land passed to unmarried women in early modern England. Spinster landowners were not numerous, and patterns varied regionally; however, probate material reveals that some received land as gifts from relatives and friends, as a form of formal security for credit and in instances where the male line had failed. Interestingly, she notes that bequests of animals and livestock in single women’s wills indicate that many more had access to land than probate documents suggest.

Unsurprisingly, the rebuttal of the ‘separate spheres’ ideology binds this collection together. While historical enquiry has shown time and again its flaws as a scheme for understanding male and female behaviours and roles, it continues to underpin many studies of agrarian development and society. This book situates women as key players in the economics of land and demonstrates their agency in its management. Using the quintessential example of Lady Anne Clifford, Jessica L. Malay details the role she carved out as a landowner in Westmorland and her queen-like approach to creating a ‘benevolent feudal state’ in the north. Stephen Bending echoes this in his chapter on Elizabeth Montagu’s design and management of Sandleford estate. She did not buy a physical design from ‘Capability’ Brown but a mode of employment for local inhabitants. Her estate redesign was in part benevolent, scheduled around the harvest to provide the poor with employment on the estate at times of the year when labour was scarce; equally, the harvest festivals she hosted sought to both display the pastoral pleasures of the landscape and assert her landowning power. Using depositions of church and secular courts, Amanda Flather considers the spatial dynamics of land in relation to gender. She demonstrates that early modern female relationships with the land were not static or rigid but were shaped by a range of factors (including age, status and seasonality). Her chapter acknowledges the important role landscape plays in identity formation and flags this for further attention.

Chapters in the collection also consider female perceptions of land. Jon Stobart’s exploration of Lady Sophia Newdigate’s eighteenth-century journal recording her tour of southern England and Derbyshire demonstrates her intellectual consideration of the landscape. Stereotypical female concerns such as domestic arrangements and social activities featured more rarely in her journal than her appraisal of design, architecture and artwork. Focusing on the account ledgers of fifteen elite Georgian women, Briony McDonagh highlights female aptitude in account keeping. Her work indicates the importance of estate management as an ‘intellectual exercise’ for female landowners and like Stobart, she connects their appraisal of the land with their physical experience of (and familiarity with) it, as they walked or rode across their estates.

In considering how structure and agency operated, the authors of this collection question how women navigated patriarchal society, with a view to integrating them into historical narratives and ideas of progress. Through the case study of the abduction and forced marriage of wealthy seventeenth-century heiress Arabella Alleyn, Amanda Capern carefully considers the dynamics of female agency: in this case, landownership was both empowering and a millstone around Alleyn’s neck. This book makes no claim to be the final word and there is scope here for moving beyond the insertion of women into established narratives of land and agrarian development. Women were a significant minority of landowners but, as several chapters indicate, this does not mean that landless women lacked an economic, intellectual or emotional relationship with land. Overall, this is a rich and useful collection that answers existing questions concerning female engagement with the English landscape as well as raising new ones.