"Wild Hares and Red Herrings": A Case Study of Estate Management in the Eighteenth-Century English Countryside

Abstract

During the summer of 1762, at the death of George Bubb Dodington, Lord Melcombe, his estates in Somersetshire and Dorsetshire, by force of law and extended litigation, became the property of his kinsman and political rival, Richard Grenville, Earl Temple.1 Subsequently, for almost a score of years, Temple personally expended considerable effort in the attempt to make these hard-won properties profitable. Although he achieved moderate success in Somerset, the enterprise in Dorset was a burdensome disappointment. Nevertheless, for posterity Temple's West Country adventures did yield a substantial treasure-a relatively complete documentary record now preserved in the collections of the Huntington Library at San Marino, California. From this wealth of materials I want, in this paper, to explore problems of estate management arising from Temple's acquisition of the Dorset estate of Eastbury in particular-especially those posed by absentee ownership, relations among landlords and between landlords and tenants, and the use and abuse of game laws and the laws of trespass on Temple's West Country estates.2 Richard, Earl Temple, is a well-known figure in eighteenth-century British political history. As the older brother of George Grenville, brother-in-law of the elder William Pitt, and patron of John Wilkes, he played an active-though usually a supporting-role in major political events of the reigns of George II and George III. He was not only an active parliamentarian for almost four decades, first in Commons then in Lords, he was also a notoriously powerful political patron who controlled or sig-