Renting The Revolution: A Reply to Clark

Abstract

Book reviews ought really to be written about the book the reviewer asked to review, not used as a platform for proclaiming the remarkable results of the reviewer's own, as yet unpublished and therefore untested findings.' Professor Gregory Clark, by quoting material from the Charity Commission records to declare that, despite the sweep of our work and the careful methodology that has been deployed, we have produced a rental series that is obviously deficient will not do. Our study of rents between 1690 and 1914 contains 5,355 observations for estates ranging from a 767 acre estate at Bradford, Wiltshire, in 1827, to the 290,000 acres of land held by the Ecclesiastical Commissioners and covering practically (if not actually) every county in England in the years 1900 to 1914. The average size of the individual properties 12,832 acres. Readers will realize it a database of estates rather than farms, but thereby it aggregates countless thousands of farm observations. At its thinnest in the early 1690s it covers only 6,562 acres, but from 1741 over 50,000 acres are covered annually, from 1774 over 100,000 acres, from 1796 over 200,000 acres, and at its most extensive the database covers over one million acres in every year from 1881 to 1892. From this body of data we produced two indices, for rent assessed and for rent received.2 It is, in other words, a very substantial body of data, carefully compiled and, in our view, reflecting the broad range of English farming over the period.