Agricultural History Review, Volume 69 Part 1 (2021), p. 162

This collection of essays on noble estates in Norway, Demark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Britain is the first publication from the ENCOUNTER network (European Network for Country House and Estate Research), established in 2015. This network facilitates the comparative study of the social, economic and cultural role of country houses within rural society. Its first publication provides a wealth of research on Norway, Sweden and Denmark to Anglophone readers. Hopefully, the comparative approaches applied by ENCOUNTER and its conferences and publications will do as much to revivify the study of this subject as CORN (the Comparative Rural History Network) and its publications have done to re-animate debates in agrarian history more widely.

There is certainly scope for such a development. Studies of landholders and landed society exist in an odd combination of comparative and insular research traditions. Comparative studies of European nobilities have been going on for over forty years, stimulated by the republication (and translation) of Norbert Elias’ seminal work, The Court Society. However, as Elias’ work suggests, debates have centred on the role of the ‘absolutist’ princely court as a political mechanism to constrain and emasculate the European nobility. At the other end of the spectrum, the Brenner debate, and subsequent contests over the nature, timing and character of the ‘second serfdom’ in Central Europe have kept alive the comparative analysis of lordship and landlord power. Similarly, studies of the architecture of the post-Renaissance country house have always been comparative and European in scope. However, aside from the proponents of Arno Meyer’s interpretations about nineteenth-century aristocratic survival, the histories of estates, inheritance and the economic and social fortunes of nobles have tended to be either national in scope, or more often focused on the history of a particular property or family. This specificity is usually a function of the profusion of source materials in a particular estate archive, and results in work that reveals (even revels in) the inner workings of processes of administration, social relationships, cultural expression or material consumption. The disadvantage is that this work sometimes loses sight of the ‘big-picture’ concerns that can be used to thread together these particular examples or experiences.

The question is, how should such comparative analyses be undertaken? One way is to abstract general trends, shared phenomena or common explanations and to write about them at a fairly high level of abstraction (and tedium for the reader). The other way, adopted in this collection of essays, is to place thoroughly researched, lively and interesting case studies side-by-side in order to let the reader draw out relevant comparisons (aided by an effective synoptic introduction and conclusion). This works, up to a point. In truth, on one level there is not much that unites Yme Kuiper’s plea to overturn the urban bias in the history of the Netherlands, with Arne Bugge Amundsen’s discussion of the Danish Protestant ascendancy in seventeenth-century Norway. However, more broadly, this collection succeeds in raising important questions in the comparative study of estates and estate history.

Firstly, there is the question of categories and nomenclature. These essays have been written in English, but several contributors point out that some of the foundational concepts underlying comparisons within this study do not translate well into the language. The distinction between Gutsherrschaft and Grundherrschaft is basic to concepts of lordship and landholding in north-central Europe, but translates only moderately well as ‘demesne’ farming/estates versus tenancy or rental farming/estates. As Mikkel Venborg Pedersen and Carsten Porskrog Rasmussen illustrate, in practice, the heavy hand of the landowner could be apparent in Grundherrschaft systems, even without extensive formal labour services. Do we need more pliable, but transparent, terminology, and can ENCOUNTER begin to create it?

This question of language feeds into a deeper issue, that really needs to be addressed in a comparative study – the ‘institutional’ issue of inheritance practices and their effects on estate formation, transmission and diffusion. Students of agrarian history are familiar with the supposed differences in the effects of systems of primogeniture and ‘partible inheritance’. These essays are replete with such instances, whether it is the effects of the introduction of primogeniture on Norwegian estates after 1671 in Amundsen’s essay, or the tensions that existed within Stammgut inheritance practices in Baden-Württemberg in Menning’s study. However, as Menning’s study reveals, in fact this system had the paradoxical effect of holding estates together, because the increasing proliferation of heirs (and rentiers), meant that they could only be managed effectively as a single unit, and the heirs had a considerable financial interest in leaving the golden goose undivided. These essays explore the relationship between ‘institutional’ structures of noble status, privilege and rights, with the practices and practicalities of estate management, but they highlight how important comparative analysis could be in assessing their effects and their causal significance.

In addition, there is the question of change over time in the legal position and managerial practices of landed estates, and the causes and dynamics of change. These are detailed in some depth in quantitative analyses by Finch of the 1873 Return of Landowners in Britain and Ulväng through a detailed study of 530 manors in six regions of Sweden through to 1950. These analyses emphasize the importance of regional variation, as does Kuiper’s study of the Netherlands. In Britain, noble estates were largest where land was cheapest, or rather, where estates were managed extensively rather than intensively (incomes did not, necessarily, match acreages). In Sweden, noble estates remained surprisingly viable in regions of higher quality agricultural land, or with iron-production, where estate incomes remained more buoyant and family trusts were left intact. In the Netherlands, Kuiper makes observes that we should not generalize about the insignificance of nobles based on their marginality in ‘Golden-Age’ Holland and Zeeland, but need to look at the revival of noble fortunes and estates in Gelderland, Utrecht and Frisia in the later eighteenth century. Here, they look much more like their prosperous, innovative, intensifying neighbours across the channel in Southern England. As the studies of Denmark, Sweden and Norway each point out, although Meyer and others may well be correct to point out the enduring political, economic and cultural power of nobles in the long nineteenth century, political Liberalism introduced a raft of measures to dismantle their legal, fiscal, inheritance and lordship privileges and customs between 1770 and 1870 (with Britain and Ireland as latecomers). These essays provoke questions about the comparative effects and the relative extent of these changes in neighbouring countries.

So, this volume is extremely worthwhile for the questions it provokes. It is also well worth reading in its own right. It is very handsomely produced, illustrated copious in colour throughout, with very legible illustrations of contemporary maps and drawings. Each of the authors is an expert within each national historiography, but each writes extremely accessibly and concisely for a non-specialist reader, and each has clearly condensed a series of thorny, complex debates into concise syntheses, in which they plant their own detailed empirical research. This work will be of value to those interested in country houses and country house society in countries that do not, conventionally, feature largely in Anglophone studies. It will be very welcome for undergraduate and postgraduate students seeking a clear introduction into this wide variety of subject areas within these countries. Hopefully, too, it marks the start of a series of agenda-setting publications in this series, which bring together scholars from across Europe (and, hopefully, those studying colonial contexts, too), in order to re-think, re-define, and re-conceptualize this important and fascinating topic.