Abstract

M if R HIRST iS understandably excited by his rediscovery of the ambiguous and confusing nature of the term freeholder, a circumstance as obvious to seventeenth-century observers-as Mr Hirst's excellent exposition of the hesitations and contortions of Thomas Wilson and Gregory King makes clear-as to later historians.2 It may be that his excitement will infect a wider audience. Freehold is a form of land tenure, and in the seventeenth century, as later, freeholds came in various sizes and were held by a great variety of people. Hence, in the strict tenurial sense, did not form an economically or socially homogeneous group. Nevertheless, both in the seventeenth century and subsequently the term freeholder has been used to denote a with something more in common than merely the ownership of some freehold This artificial homogeneity has been obtained by excluding the very smallest from consideration; in some instances it has been reinforced by also excluding the gentry and nobility, who also owned freehold Those who have used the term in this way-Thomas Wilson, Gregory King, Joseph Massie, and Patrick Colquhoun among others-have seldom made their cut-off points clear, with the result that any historian who compares the of one source with the of another source may be comparing categories which overlap but do not necessarily coincide. Hirst's argument appears to be that such historians as Mr Cooper and myself have failed to appreciate this, and that our conclusions are therefore invalid. Unfortunately, Mr Hirst does not adduce any evidence to suggest that my conclusions are misleading, or have actually misled anyone; on the contrary, he charmingly admits that although commentators have perhaps wittingly overlooked very large numbers of men ... this omission might not be very important in terms of the land. Since my own contributions have been concerned with trying to establish the rough outlines of the social distribution of the ownership of land, and not with the counting of individuals, that seems to dispose of the matter. Nevertheless it would have been more reassuring if it had been observed that my own introduction of into the discussion was prefaced by the remark that the freeholders below the rank of gentry were an even less homogeneous group than the gentry themselves, and contained in their ranks yeomen, small working farmers, and absentees; and that those who were dubbed peasants in landownership terms, for the sake of analytical simplicity, included many who were either not occupiers or too small to be farmers.3

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