The Seventeenth-Century Freeholder and the Statistician: A Case of Terminological Confusion

Abstract

A DEBATE on the social distribution of landownership in early modern England occupied the pages of this journal few years ago. The concern of both authors, whatever their differing conclusions, was with the emergence of England's distinctive landed structure of the eighteenth century, which has been considered precondition for industrialization.' But the ambiguity of contemporary term, and the preoccupation of both authors with total acreages, rather than total numbers of holders of the land, has perhaps led to seventeenthcentury landownership being seen inadvertently as less variegated than was the case. It has also led to some difficulties in reconciling the figures of Thomas Wilson and Gregory King with what else is known about the process of agricultural change in this period. Reliance upon the assumptions of the statisticians has, moreover, recently caused one of the protagonists to advance conclusions about the fate of the peasantry which appear to fly in the face of other evidence. The word in question is freeholder. Strictly, it refers to form of tenure; but by the seventeenth century it had acquired strong connotations of social status, and unless this ambiguity is borne in mind, confusion is likely. Adam Martindale, for example, consistently used as an indicator of status: reminiscing probably in the I 66o's about his sister's dissatisfaction with her lot, he remarked that Freeholders' daughters were then confined to their felts, pettiecoates and wastcoates ... the proudest of them (below the gentry) durst not have offered to weare an hood, or scarfe . . . ; and again, he notes that later he had for his pupils the sons of a great number of free-holders and considerable yeomen in the neighbourhood. Baxter, similarly, avowed at about the same time that his father had only the Competent Estate of Freeholder.2 That this change in meaning should have come about probably owes something to the fact that freehold land conveyed title (albeit idiosyncratic, as the Levellers argued) to political role, thanks to the nature of the 40s. freehold county franchise, and the emphasis on freeholder militia. Those with political role are of course likely to be viewed as more worthy than those without. But