English Landed Society Research Articles

English Landed Society in the Great War: Defending the Realm, by Edward Bujak

English Landed Society in the Great War: Defending the Realm, by Edward Bujak

English Landed Society in the Great War: Defending the Realm. By Edward Bujak. Bloomsbury Studies in Military History. Edited by Jeremy Black.London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. x+192. $114.00 (cloth); $102.60 (e-book).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsEnglish Landed Society in the Great War: Defending the Realm. By Edward Bujak. Bloomsbury Studies in Military History. Edited by Jeremy Black.London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. x+192. $114.00 (cloth); $102.60 (e-book).Ian PackerIan PackerUniversity of Lincoln Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 92, Number 2June 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/708570 Views: 48Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Edward Bujak. English Landed Society in the Great War: Defending the Realm. Bloomsbury Studies in Military History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. 208. $114.00 (cloth).

Edward Bujak. English Landed Society in the Great War: Defending the Realm. Bloomsbury Studies in Military History. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Pp. 208. $114.00 (cloth).

Domesday Book and the transformation of English landed society, 1066–86

AbstractThis article presents the first fruits of a long-term project which aims to identify all the landholders named in Domesday Book, and to build up a picture of English landed society before and after the Norman conquest. The first part describes the project's methods and illustrates them with a selection of short profiles of individuals whose careers add distinctive colour to the emerging picture. The second offers firstly an analysis of the social distribution of landed wealth in England in 1066 and 1086, quantifying the numbers of landholders in different groups defined by the amount of the land assigned to them in Domesday. We then turn to a spatial analysis of landed society, using maps to illustrate the geographical distribution of landholding. In doing so, we offer fresh perspectives on the transformation of English landed society in the aftermath of conquest.

The Origin of the ‘Name and Arms’ Clause and the Development of the Lineage Culture in Fourteenth-Century England

The concept of lineage became important within English landed society in the fourteenth century because, with the decline of knighthood, lineage came to be the identifier of chivalric society. This was manifested in various ways but the most critical was in whether, or how, landholders chose to settle their lands. At this period, there was a tension between the preservation of the lineage and the claims of female heirs which ensured a wide variety of reactions and thus different types of settlements or none. The strongest reaction was displayed by those landholders who chose to settle their estates, or part of them, on one who would not otherwise have inherited upon condition that the beneficiary adopted the name and arms of the settlor.

Shorter notice. The Emergence of a Ruling Order. English Landed Society, 1640-1750. James M Rosenheim

Shorter notice. The Emergence of a Ruling Order. English Landed Society, 1640-1750. James M Rosenheim Get access J Hoppit J Hoppit University College London, UK Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 114, Issue 458, September 1999, Pages 992–993, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/114.458.992 Published: 01 September 1999

Shorter notice. The Emergence of a Ruling Order. English Landed Society, 1640-1750. James M Rosenheim

Shorter notice. The Emergence of a Ruling Order. English Landed Society, 1640-1750. James M Rosenheim

Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century III. Self-Help and Outdoor Relief

An ultra-slow motion serial whose episodes appear at intervals of twelve months needs a recapitulation of the story so far, however excellent the retentive capacity of scholars in comparison with soap opera audiences. The characters in question are the landowners, great and not so great, and the landed families who were already wellestablished on their estates and in their country houses in late Victorian Britain: and also the newcomers who have continued, throughout the twentieth century, to purchase landed estates and country houses. The main plot concerns the structure and distribution of landownership, and I have suggested that reports of the virtual disappearance of great estates in the last hundred years have been greatly exaggerated. There have been great changes, but while some individuals or entire families have fallen off the boat others have clambered aboard, so that in the 1990s perhaps one-third or more of the land of Britain is held in sizeable estates of 1,000 acres and upwards, compared with radier over one-half in the 1890s. The changing composition of the cast of landowners, and the wildly fluctuating fortunes of particular members of the cast, have fascinated many observers of the social and political scene, and these features provide the sub-plots. The undoubted decline of landed and aristocratic political and social predominance, leading to the virtual elimination of their influence on public life, and the equally undoubted decline, impoverishment, and extinction of some once great and famous landed families, have tended to become confused as cause and effect in some accounts.

Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: II, New Poor and New Rich.

The notion that the great leviathans of wealth, who had for so long been accustomed to taking first place in a nation of snobs which contrived simultaneously to accept, admire, envy, and criticise their opulence, might actually become impoverished first began to gain some currency in the 1890s. True, this had been anticipated by a few specially pessimistic and debt–ridden landowners in the immediate anxieties aroused by the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Lord Monson, who had inherited from a cousin estates liberally furnished with dowagers and other inescapable expenses, and who was in despair at the tendency of income to fall while outgoings remained fixed, exploded to his son in 1851: ‘What an infernal bore is landed property. No certain income can be reckoned upon. I hope your future wife will have Consols or some such ballast, I think it is worth half as much again as land’. A similar but more sober banker's view had been put by Evelyn Denison, a classic gentlemanly capitalist, in 1847 when he announced his intention to sell much of his land ‘not because I am of the class of encumbered landlords, for I have luckily extricated myself from that, but because I do not think it worth while to keep a security paying 2 per cent, when I can get an equally good one paying ’.

Presidential Address: English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property: Collapse and Survival

The death rattle of the landed order, like the death knell of capitalism, has been clearly heard dozens of times over the last hundred years and more. Yet there is a suspicion that the sounds have been mis-heard misinterpreted, for collapse and decomposition have never followed the symptoms of sickness and crisis. The Churchill family have played their part in crying ‘wolf’. In 1885 the 8th Duke of Marlborough, reflecting on ‘the organised agitation against the present ownership of land’, asserted that ‘were there any effective demand for the purchase of land, half the land of England would be in the market tomorrow’. He had inside information, the Blenheim estate being heavily indebted. A generation later his son, the 9th Duke, having helped stave off disaster by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, wrote in his turn to The Times. Under the heading ‘Old Order Doomed’ and the shock of the 1919 Budget, with its ‘confiscatory’ increase in death duties to a rate of 40 per cent on estates of £2 million and over, he stated that ‘[the] fortresses of territorial influence it is proposed to raze in the name of social equality’ and forecast that ‘the new tax must make it impossible for the heirs of these men—[the landed magnates]—to carry on the tradition’. Whether the heirs have carried on the tradition is debatable, but it is indisputable that in 1989 his grandson, now the 11 th Duke, is still seated in Blenheim Palace, surrounded by an estate of 11,500 acres. That may be no more than half the acreage owned by his great-grandfather but it is nevertheless a very large estate, and a principal reason for placing the IIth Duke among the 200 wealthiest people in Britain.

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

The Heiress-at-Law: English Real Property Law from a New Point of View

By the common law rules of inheritance women in English landed society fell into two classes. Some were altogether excluded from inheriting; others were entitled to succeed to the family estate. The woman thus entitled, the heiress-at-law, is clearly a figure due historical attention. Yet she has never been singled out for long-term consideration. Where she has been the main subject, discussion has always been chronologically limited, and her history has not been carried any distance through the course of legal changes that are relevant to it. Usually she has been discussed as but part of the family, and attention has been focussed largely on eldest sons and their relations with younger children, with younger sons or with daughters not heiresses, as the case may be. To focus on the heiress and to follow her history over the long run, from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth, is the purpose of this article.

The price of freehold land and the interest rate in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

Since the supply of land coming to the market in the eighteenth century was small and was still sought for social reasons, it was relatively unremunerative purely as an investment. About I730 it was estimated that four per cent was a good gross return on the purchase of land-the net return after allowing for taxation and maintenance may well have been less than three per cent-and this was at a time when the return on mortgages was from four to five per cent. A wealthy merchant or lawyer, a distinguished soldier or sailor, was prepared to incur a loss of income of one or one-and-a-half per cent in order to acquire an estate and establish himself as a landowner. It was the fee he paid for admission into the charmed circle of English landed society.2

An Open Elite? England, 1540-1880

An Open Elite? sets out to test the traditional view that for centuries English landed society has been open to new families made rich by business or public office. From a detailed examination of the landed elites of three counties between 1540 and 1880, the authors come to radical new conclusions about the landed classes. They describe the strategies of marriage and inheritance evolved by older families to preserve their position, and establish that the number of newcomers was always relatively small. The resulting work is a major reassessment of the social, economic, and political history of England since the Reformation. This abridged edition of what was immediately recognized as a major work of historical scholarship was first published in 1986 and is now available in Clarendon Paperback with a new foreword by Lawrence Stone.

The Power of the past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm

Introduction: Capitalism and its pre-capitalist heritage Pat Thane and Geoffrey Crossick 1. The politics of class struggle in the history of society: an appraisal of the work of Eric Hobsbawm Eugene D. Genovese 2. Working class and sociability in France before 1848 Maurice Agulhon 3. Men and women in the Parisian garment trades: discussions of family and work in the 1830s and 1840s Joan Wallach Scott 4. Craft traditions and the labour movement in nineteenth-century Germany Jurgen Kocka 5. Structures of subordination in nineteenth-century British industry Richard Price 6. The first of May 1890 in France: the birth of a working-class ritual Michelle Perrot 7. Civic rituals and patterns of resistance in Barcelona, 1890-1930 Temma Kaplan 8. English landed society in the nineteenth-century F. M. L. Thompson 9. British and European bankers 1882-1914: an 'aristocratic bourgeoisie'? Jose Harris and Pat Thane 10. Problems of Jewish assimilation in Austria - Hungary in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Peter Hanak 11. Alternatives to class revolution: Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War Ivan T. Berend 12. Vicissitudes of feudalism in modern Poland Antoni Macak Index.

L'Angleterre de 1540 à 1880 : pays de noblesse ouverte

Il y a environ vingt ans, J. H. Hexter identifiait un des grands problèmes non résolus de l'histoire de l'Angleterre, celui de la continuité de l'élite foncière anglaise, qui réussit à maintenir son hégémonie politique et économique pendant sept siècles. L'explication la plus ancienne de ce phénomène est acceptée par les Anglais comme par les étrangers et reprise par les historiens. Or cette explication demande à être vérifiée.Il est en effet généralement admis depuis le xvesiècle, que ce qui distingue l'Angleterre du reste de l'Europe, c'est la liberté d'accès des nouveaux riches aux premiers rangs de la société et du pouvoir. En Angleterre, nous dit-on, plus que partout ailleurs en Europe, ces nouveaux riches ont plus souvent réussi à se hisser au niveau des grands propriétaires fonciers, les squires, qui, à leur tour, les ont absorbés plus rapidement et plus volontiers. En un mot, l'élite anglaise serait depuis lontemps une élite ouverte.

Aristocratic Indebtedness in the Nineteenth Century: A Restatement

IT was an altogether unexpected pleasure to find Prof. Spring eager and willing to comment on my recent article.' It was even more gratifying to discover on how many points we agreed.2 As to his criticisms, these may be put under three headings: (i) that I inadequately summarized the nature and argument of his contribution to the debate of the I950s; (2) that the main point of difference between us concerns the extent to which there was or was not a fundamental change in the aristocracy's financial position in the mid-Victorian period; and (3) that I have overstated the importance of his own contribution to the developing historiography of nineteenth-century English landed society. Let me deal with each of these points in turn.

Landowners and the Civil War

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

English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century, by G. E. Mingay

English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century, <i>by G. E. Mingay</i>

English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century. F. M. L. Thompson

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsEnglish Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century. F. M. L. Thompson David OwenDavid Owen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 36, Number 3Sep., 1964 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/239454 Views: 3Total views on this site Copyright 1964 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.