Gentry Finances and the Civil War: The Case of the Buckinghamshire Verneys

Abstract

Mt ) rODERN studies of seventeenth-century landed society have too often divided the century at the Civil War. There are those that concentrate on the problems of rising and falling gentry in an attempt to unearth economic and social divisions in the body politic before i640. Others examine the role of the Civil War as a generator of various legal and financial developments which encouraged the consolidation and expansion of large landed estates and underpinned aristocratic social and political dominance in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The division is increased by the differing approaches of scholars to the two halves of the century. Important case studies in 'Tawney's century' either end in i640 or become more sketchy thereafter.' Work on the later seventeenth century has tended to concentrate on specific institutions and instruments such as mortgages and strict settlements, and on the mechanisms of the land and marriage markets.2 The view that the period I 64060 was one in which large amounts of property were redistributed at immediate and lasting cost to those on the losing side has been decisively revised, but studies of the Civil War have concentrated exclusively on the twin themes of Royalist landowners and their problems and the government's use of Royal and confiscated lands to pay creditors and bolster its finances.3 The time has come to look at the economic effects of the Civil War without such an emphasis on political affiliation and to reappraise the effects of falling rents, high taxes, war damage, disruption, and free quarter on landed society as a whole. It is a task which requires both a general survey of regional variations and also case studies of the type more common for the first forty years of the century: this article is an example of the latter.4