The Land Tax Assessments and the Small Landowner

Abstract

It is now many years since historians first turned to the land tax assessments to elucidate the position of the small landowner in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A. H. Johnson pointed out as long ago as i909 that the evidence of the land tax suggested the crucial period for the survival of small owners to be not the age of heavy parliamentary enclosure, but rather the then little-explored decades of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.1 Shortly afterwards H. L. Gray made use of the assessments in his discussion of Oxfordshire farming,2 and then, in the very first issue of the Economic History Review, appeared Davies's well-known statistical tour de force,3 the starting point for a number of subsequent inquiries.4 Davies's figures showed that, in the counties he investigated, small owners increased both in number and in acreage owned over the period I780-i832 (although there was, he said, a downward trend evident after I802). And of course, as a result of Davies's and subsequent work, the evidence of the land tax assessments has become one of the pillars on which the modern view of the effects of the enclosure movement and the agricultural revolution has rested. The purpose of this short article is not to challenge the broad conclusions arrived at from the land tax evidence that small owners generally prospered between about I780 and i 8I5, and were by no means washed away by the high tide of parliamentary enclosure but rather to point out that interpretation of the assessments is fraught with difficulties more serious than is generally realized, and that in consequence anything but the most broad and general conclusion may be quite invalid. It is indisputable that the land tax assessments remain a valuable source for agrarian history, but as a source they cannot, in this writer's view, bear the weight of detailed interpretation which has been placed on them.5