Landowners and the Civil War

Abstract

W v hat enduring effects on English landed society should be ascribed to the Civil Wars and the sales of property under the Commonwealth and Protectorate? Professor Firth concluded that a large class of landed proprietors owed their origin to these events, a class consisting of rich citizens and soldiers, and other scholars have suggested that this influx promoted more rational methods of estate management.1 It is not proposed on this occasion to discuss the sales of those properties which were confiscated by the state. During the Interregnum the state appropriated and sold the property of the Crown, of the Church and of those royalists who were unable or ineligible to compound for their delinquency and so regain possession of their estates by paying a fine. By acquiring such property some new landowners appeared in the countryside. But at the Restoration the sales of confiscated property were invalidated. Some purchasers of Crown and Church property stayed on after i 66o as leaseholders, but the number appears to have been small; as to the sales of the confiscated estates of the private royalists, all I know confirms Mrs Thirsk's conclusion that 'royalists regained their land in all but exceptional circumstances'.2 The burden of the argument that the land transactions of this period led to permanent changes seems, therefore, to fall upon the royalists whose estates were sequestrated not confiscated and who paid a fine to compound for their delinquency and so regained possession of their property. Such royalists had sometimes to sell land in order to raise money for their fines and such sales, which in form at least were voluntary, were not undone at the Restoration. It has been commonly suggested that a large amount of land was sold under private contracts made for this purpose. 'Much land', writes Mr Hill, 'passed by private sale into the hands of those with ready cash.' In the same context Sir Keith Feiling refers to Clarendon allowing 'a vast mass of property to remain in Puritan hands' at the Restoration.3 The view that a large amount of land was sold by royalists during the Interregnum does not lack contemporary warrant. Thus Clarendon himself wrote of the cavaliers that, 'The Army ... sequestered all their Estates and left them nothing to live upon, till they should compound; which they