Land Agent Research Articles

Landed estates and the place of public houses: Agricultural and industrial change in the English East Midlands, c.1860–1930

This article uses the records the Manvers and Portland estates in Nottinghamshire and north-east Derbyshire to consider the provision and management of licensed premises between the 1860s and 1930s. Using archival materials of land agents and solicitors, it examines the changing place of public houses in a range of local communities affected by agricultural decline and industrial change in the region. These include: small agricultural villages on the Manvers estate, where pubs were let with farmland; and, on the Portland estate, urbanising settlements and new colliery villages constructed in rural locations. The pub is presented as a place to see how agents balanced older social relations and responsibilities with the broader economic and social geographies remaking the region. The sale of estate pubs offers important insights into the process by which regional breweries assembled their own pub holdings, the legacy of which shaped the geography of drink well into the twentieth century.

The survival of three large agricultural estates on the north Hampshire-south Berkshire border during the interwar period

Abstract Historians credit the interwar period with the demise of the great agricultural estates but many survived, reduced in area and refocussed on new priorities. Three estates lying in close proximity in north Hampshire and south Berkshire had very divergent interests, but there were similarities, and significant differences, in the manner in which they survived the interwar period. One invested in a programme of renewal of houses and farm buildings, and another adopted a more commercial approach to managing its diverse interests and the third retrenched, cutting investment but maintaining the status quo as an agricultural and shooting estate. All three survived, relatively intact and financially stable, and remain in operation today. An examination of estate financial performance before and after the Great War provides the context to the strategies pursued by the owners and their Land Agents, and their place in the broader rural landscape of the 1920s and 1930s.

Who should deliver agri-environmental public goods in the UK? New land managers and their future role as public good providers

Agri-environmental policies in the UK stand on the threshold of significant change, with wide acceptance that radical changes are needed to ensure a better delivery of public goods in future. The UK’s departure from the EU presents an opportunity to fully realise the “Public Money for Public Goods” principle in the new suite of Environmental Land Management schemes. A likely priority will be the delivery of conservation goals at a landscape scale, which will require the recruitment of a broader range of actors and institutions than at present, including an emerging group of what we call in this paper ‘new land managers’. Understanding the changing dynamics of rural land occupancy, and the characteristics and motivations of these new land managers, will be essential in the future for the effective delivery of these public schemes. Data on land market trends is nevertheless patchy and poorly researched. For this paper, we drew on a survey of land agents in England, all of whom were members of the Central Association for Agricultural Valuers (CAAV), in order to gather information and reflections on contemporary land markets. A key finding is that agricultural policy reform and retrenchment is seen by many of these experts as a significant driver of future change. Taken together with other interacting factors such as the overall tax burden on businesses and the economic and personal situation of farmers and their succession status, many of our respondents predicted significant structural change, with more land coming on to the market for resale. At the same time, increasing demand for land from “lifestyle/non-farming landholders” and the growing presence of people entering the market interested in enroling land for carbon sequestration and natural capital improvements, will mean a shift in the types of individuals and organisations holding land. Those holding and managing land in coming years are likely to comprise an ever more diverse and fragmented community of land owners and occupiers The task for policymakers then, is to deliver a suite of interventions specifically tailored to the various types of landholders in order to engage them effectively into public goods delivery under ELMs.

Conrad Seabaugh & Company: An Inside Look at an Illinois Hinterland Merchant

Conrad Seabaugh & Company: An Inside Look at an Illinois Hinterland Merchant

Fixing Ownership: Land Agents, Settlers, and Property Relations in Two Eastern Townships, 1840–1865

The general fluidity and ambiguity of property relations during colonization meant settlers, who were often "squatters," relied on land agents to fix their relationship with property-owners. In turn, the latter needed the agent's on-the-ground expertise to manage their affairs and responsibilities for "improvements." Land agents thus became intermediaries between cash-poor settlers and absentee owners. George Bonnallie, active in the northern part of Stukely Township and western Orford Township had a repertoire of routine practices he pursued. Organized in a typology, they provide detail about late colonization and reveal the part played by entrepreneurial intermediaries in fixing property relations in areas still peripheral to the market economy. With in-coming settlement completed in these townships by the mid-1860s, after municipal reform, and with the arrival of speculation by local notables, neither property-owners nor settlers needed the suite of routines deployed to enable settlement. A standardized market for land transfers had developed.

‘Compiled from Official Records’: Mapping Kansas Territory before the Civil War

ABSTRACT Tension between pro- and anti-slavery factions during the delineation and mapping of Kansas Territory in the 1850s, as Euro-American settlement moved west of the Mississippi River, permeated local politics and commerce. Despite the standardized surveying system employed by the U. S. General Land Office, this tension was reflected in township or sectional state maps that were produced during this time period. Using government surveys and reports documenting the progress of township surveys, commercial map publishers and land agents produced maps with the purpose of promoting quick land sales and profits. Yet the profit motive is not the only one apparent in these maps, and the history of their production is rife with intriguing stories involving conflicts of interest for government employees and the pro- and anti-slavery politics that dominated this critical period in U. S. history.

A local focus: Implementing policies for land-use change in the Wairoa District

This paper explores community attitudes to policies designed to promote increased afforestation in the Wairoa District in Northern Hawkes Bay. The approach adopted involved face-to-face interviews with over 80 local residents, including farmers and iwi representatives, as well as policy makers, land agents, forestry experts, and scientists in Hawke’s Bay and elsewhere in the country. Group meetings were also held with farmers, iwi and others in the Wairoa District. Community engagement extended from mid-2019 to early in 2020. Concerns raised about increased afforestation included its impact on employment and pastoral land use and on the provision of public services. Such concerns are grounded in some part in Wairoa’s history and traditional dependence on the hill country as the source of its identity and social well-being. Increased tree planting confronts the perceptions and experience of many land users and other community members. Resistance is heightened where the policy goals appear to conflict with economic well-being or to undermine existing values. At the same time there is evidence of a broad consensus in favour of tree planting to meet environmental needs. Current policies challenge land users’ capacity to adapt and respond to the opportunities these policies provide. Building capacity requires the provision of information and other evidence to increase understanding among all stake-holder groups

The Marquis of Anglesey: working and social relationships on a Dorset estate (c. 1812–1844)

Abstract The Marquis of Anglesey on his Dorset estate was an absentee landlord who maintained close relationships with his estate through extensive correspondence with his land agent William Castleman. The surviving letters are a very rich source by which to examine the minutiae of rural life and a way to reconstruct social and working relationships within the nineteenth-century English landed estate. By focusing on a range of customary and unwritten rights, this article will consider issues such as how tenants navigated renegotiation of their leases, sought rent abatements or compensation for damage to their crops from hunting. Working and social relationships on such an estate were closely interlinked, as is widely shown here. The article also raises more contentious estate issues such as who had the rights to fallen and standing timber, the customs affecting courts, the repair of churches, and the responsibilities for building and maintaining schools. Throughout, the issue of ‘social control’ is assessed. Together the range of documented work and social interactions provide a fuller picture of the functioning of a southern English great estate in the early nineteenth century, and allow us to examine this rural community beyond the remit of its agricultural history.

The Great Famine in Kinsale. By Catherine Flanagan. Pp 75. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2018. €9.95. - Castle Hyde: the changing fortunes of an Irish country house. By Terence Dooley. Pp 62. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2017. €9.95. - The shawlies: Cork's women street traders and the ‘merchant city’. By Susan Marie Martin. Pp 63. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2017.

The Great Famine in Kinsale. By Catherine Flanagan. Pp 75. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2018. €9.95. - Castle Hyde: the changing fortunes of an Irish country house. By Terence Dooley. Pp 62. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2017. €9.95. - The shawlies: Cork's women street traders and the ‘merchant city’. By Susan Marie Martin. Pp 63. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 2017.

The delivery of mixed communities in the regeneration of urban waterfronts: An investigation of the comparative experience of Plymouth and Bristol

The raison d’être of spatial planning is to secure public benefits or goods through the regulation of private development. Under neoliberalism, where economic growth is privileged over community interests, the ability of planning to deliver public goods can be compromised. The aim of this research was to investigate the delivery of mixed communities in the regeneration of waterfront sites in two outwardly comparable, but in detail, rather different port cities, namely Plymouth and Bristol. The range of dwelling types, extent of affordable housing and associated practicalities of delivery were evaluated using planning application data, 2000–2017 and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholder groups (local planning authority [LPA] officers, developers, land agents and politicians).The results indicate that there is a standard ‘model’ of delivery for port regeneration with city centre harbour-side land yielding high density apartment developments and with houses becoming the prevelent house type in suburban waterfront locations. Planning policies for social mixing have not, in general, been successfully implemented in waterfront sites due to the greater priority afforded to development viability and the political pressure to unlock and accelerate economic growth. The exception to these findings was where public land had been used. For both cities, just two per cent of the dwellings delivered on privately procured sites were affordable housing units compared to over 25% on public land. This paper highlights the effect of neoliberalisation on the English planning system, which enables developers to acquire sites without regard to local development plan policies. Such policies allow developers and landowners to negate planning obligations to provide affordable housing to the detriment of public good and trust in the system.

Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley by Rob Harper

Reviewed by: Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley by Rob Harper Philip N. Mulder (bio) Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley. By Rob Harper. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 250. $45.00 cloth) Rob Harper's eloquently told stories, constructed from reams of accounts, letters, papers, and other sources, reintroduce Ohio's residents in the eighteenth century. Unsettling the West brings us into multi-cultural towns and examines the interests and interactions of the many parties maintaining the tenuous peace they built. The stories [End Page 381] themselves present some of the very best historical glimpses of life and local negotiations in early Ohio. Harper's portrait differs from many others that have blamed settlers intruding into the region for instigating wars with Native Americans. Harper identifies speculators and their patrons, government officials, who upset the peace when they periodically expanded their imperial interests and state building. Virginia's royal governor Lord Dunmore was one such instigator. In 1774, after violence rocked the Ohio River Valley, Dunmore condemned the settlers. He claimed he could not check their wanderlust, the chaos they caused, or the Native American reprisals that followed. Dunmore was lying. Harper reveals the governor's support of land agents who smashed the locally negotiated compromises, and he tracks the purposeful infusion of arms and soldiers into the area to amplify grudges and spats when it served others' interests. The pattern repeated to create several wars. The months and years between those major conflicts, however, held periods of relative calm, peace that endured despite the bitter fallout from the wars themselves. The people living along the Muskingum, Scioto, and other tributaries to the Ohio River worked for stability because they had much invested: homes, communities, livelihoods, and trade. Many had already been displaced elsewhere and were struggling to regroup and rebuild their lives. Their efforts to get supplies of food, animal skins, and manufactured goods created trade networks and personal obligations. In many locales, such connections produced family relationships, marriages, and children who grew up in a profoundly multi-cultural setting. Peace depended on constant negotiation within this complex and diverse world, and the dimensions and interests multiplied. Most residents of Ohio recognized their interdependence, yet they struggled to contain those who dismissed mutual interests. Individual newcomers might act on preconceptions or misunderstand situations; others, more concerned with momentary advantage, cheated or harmed a resident. Among many British-American colonists, notions of their own superiority poisoned daily exchanges with their Indian [End Page 382] neighbors. Colonists tried to manipulate Indian disputes, including Iroquois imperial claims in Ohio and Shawnees denial of Iroquois influence there. Native Americans responded variously to the threat of newcomers' encroaching farmsteads, and factions among all parties argued over strategy: to what degree should they compromise? Some Native Americans built coalitions to drive out the colonists or at least to demarcate physical and cultural separation. Others had concluded that the newcomers and their goods would not go away, so they searched for the most advantageous interactive relationships. As long as they had some local stake, most bargained for mutual arrangements. When more detached officials saw opportunity, however, violence spread. Governments, prompted by powerful concerns, supplied troops and materials that could escalate skirmishes into war. Land speculators, absentee profiteers, aspirants to higher status, and patrons within the imperial system disrupted local obligations with their designs and ambitions. Their connections to higher governmental officials funneled in the ambitions, the supplies, and the arms that replaced manageable local spats with bloody war. They unsettled the region building states that disrupted local constructions and compromises. Philip N. Mulder PHILIP N. MULDER is the author of A Controversial Spirit: Evangelical Awakenings in the South and is currently researching the interactions of religious groups in the Ohio River Valley. Copyright © 2019 Kentucky Historical Society

William Gould, Land Agent and the Rural Community in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire 1783–1788

The land agent played an important role in community relationships. His position was frequently one of mediator and liaison between landowner and tenant, although his role often extended to settling disputes more generally. These relationships are often hidden in estate correspondence but in the case of William Gould agent to the Duke of Portland are more readily available through his diaries. This article will utilise this valuable resource to explore how the land agent of a large estate which was entering a period of industrialisation interacted with both agricultural and industrial communities.

William Scott Owen, 1853–1920: an English-born land agent in mid Wales

William Scott Owen figured prominently in Montgomeryshire history by being deeply involved with the lives of working people and active in local politics. He was an incomer from the south of England and a stalwart of the Anglican faith and the Tory party. He spent the whole of his working life in Montgomeryshire and came to be deeply respected in a part of Britain noted for its Nonconformity and Liberalism. Scott Owen was agent on the Gregynog Estate, which lies in the south east of the county, much of it now belonging to the University of Wales. This study of his life provides a vivid picture of the county in the late Victorian and Edwardian period and discusses why he became so well regarded.

Making the Case for Artaban: Robert Leigh, Katherine Philips and the Court of Claims

ABSTRACTBetween October 1662 and February 1663, Katherine Philips relied on a friend in Dublin to make fair copies of her play Pompey and deliver them to Sir Charles Cotterell in London. Robert Leigh is a likely candidate for Philips’s unknown transcriber. Though Leigh was Catholic and a descendant of Old Irish royalists, he was an undersecretary to Henry Bennet, moved within the same social circles as Philips, and often travelled between Dublin and London. As Bennet's Irish land agent, Leigh was also deeply involved in the kingdom's settlement process and attended hearings of the Court of Claims. By describing Leigh's work as a clerk and copyist at Dublin Castle and Whitehall, tracking his movements between the two courts, and detailing the personal connections he shared with Philips, this essay provides new insights into Philips's activities during the period when she translated Corneille's play and appeared at the Court of Claims.

The Duke of Portland and his Agent: The Education Act of 1870

This article explores the ways in which the Duke of Portland’s Welbeck Abbey estate in Nottinghamshire reacted to the caveats of The Education Act of 1870. The Duke had in the past taken little interest in any school within his estate until it appeared that the new legislation would significantly impact the control he exerted. The situation was somewhat complicated as the 5th Duke was reclusive by nature and consequently his land agent William Cripwell was required to act as his representative to what essentially became an estate in conflict. The resultant furore, particularly at Gringley, between school, parishioners and clergy reveal the fragility of rural relationships. The expectation that the Duke’s agent had the expertise and ability to deal with the problems, which arose because of the Act, are a sign of the increasing professionalism of the land agent and the movement to a role beyond that of a traditional agriculturalist.

Analysis of electric field influence on buildings under high‐voltage transmission lines

High-voltage cables especially bare cables generate intense electric fields. Within certain distances, the fields could have strong effects on human health. Since of housing planning factors, it is inevitable that there will be buildings located under bare cables. Whether the intensity of electric field exceeds safety level (5 kV/m at 50 Hz) has been a concern for both land agents and residents. To address the concerns, this study studies the electric field of 500 kV overhead transmission line exerted on building and proposes the scheme for field intensity reduction. The authors study shows that when overhead cable and building are in different relative locations, the maximum intensity and influence range in the window regions can be highly variable, which suggests an optimal building orientation to minimise the electric field generated by overhead transmission lines. They also studied the field distribution in window regions on each floor in two models. The results provide design basis for safe distance between buildings and transmission lines. A shielding scheme for building construction is proposed to reduce the field intensity. Experiment result shows that with shielding on the building roof at a certain angle, the influence of electric field can be effectively reduced.

The Rural Estate through the Eyes of the Land Agent: A Community in Microcosm c1812 – 1844

This article explores how the Castleman/Anglesey archive forms a micro-study of an estate and its associated rural community at work. It will survey the type of data which can be found within the land agent’s estate vouchers and diurnal correspondence and why they are important. It will begin by examining the concepts and ideology of the rural community and seek to explain why it is so hard to define. The article will then investigate how a micro-study can assist in understanding the ways in which estates reacted to periods of economic difficulties. This will include: why landowners left rent arrears to accrue, the types of petition which the local populace presented, the reasoning behind improving landscapes and the ways an estate contributed to the relief of the labouring poor. The Castleman archive reveals the multi-layered, complex nature of the rural community and the diverse role of the land agent in balancing the relationships which existed within it. In effect it acts as an historical prism.

Landowner, Tenant and Agent on the Marquis of Anglesey's Dorset and Somerset Estate, 1814–44

Abstract:This article uses the surviving correspondence between the Marquis of Anglesey and his land agent William Castleman to explore the relationship which existed between landowner, tenant and agent. The aim of this research has been to examine how these affiliations worked in practice through five broad but interconnecting themes which include: an investigation into the men who became agents, a survey of the changing patterns of land tenure, an evaluation of the estate's reaction to economic downturn, a study of the schemes used to alleviate tenant distress and an analysis of how these estate interactions were reflected in the repairs and improvements undertaken. Castleman was already an experienced attorney and land manager when he began to work for the estate and he and the Marquis developed, over time, a deep and trusting business partnership. Consequently their correspondence has created a historical prism which this article has used to illustrate the working partnerships within this West Country locality.

碳税对房价的影响—基于省际面板数据的研究

二氧化碳大量排放导致的温室效应问题推动着我国碳税政策的出台。碳税的开征会对房价造成怎样的影响？多大程度的影响？本文从消费者效用最大化和房地产商利润最大化的角度建模，将碳税引入其中，研究了碳税政策对房价的影响，并结合中国省际面板数据对这一影响程度进行了实证测算。研究发现碳税的征收将导致均衡房价的上涨以及均衡房屋交易量的下降，在其他因素不变的情况下，碳税的征收会导致平均房价预期增加0.0418%。结果表明，碳税政策在一定程度上能促进房地产行业节能减排，且不会给房价造成很大影响。 The greenhouse effect, caused by large numbers of carbon dioxide emissions, drives the introduc-tion of a carbon tax. What and how much will be the impact of carbon tax upon housing prices? To answer these questions, we build models involving the utility maximization of consumers and the profit maximization of land agents, where the carbon tax is taken into account. Furthermore, we try to measure that impact with provincial panel data. The results show that a carbon tax will cause a decrease in the balanced volume of housing transaction and increase the equilibrium housing prices by 0.0418%, holding other factors fixed. To conclude, the carbon tax policy can promote the energy conservation in the real estate industry, and does not have a significant impact on house prices.

Problems in and Sources for the Study of Economic Fluctuations 1660–1800

Economic fluctuations pose practical as well as theoretical problems. War, credit conditions (including bank failures), weather, external demand (important for a small economy, especially in war time) were the main influences affecting the level of activity. There was some synchronisation between Irish conditions and the level of demand in foreign ports until 1770. Thereafter English influences predominated. Runs of data for trade and revenue are not time-sensitive for conditions within the year. The precise dating of an upturn or of nadir points in activity remains difficult. Hence price data and exchange rates are vital. Commodity prices are abundant from the 1750s; Dublin exchange rates on London were published regularly only from the late 1770s (in contrast to a perfect run of London rates on Dublin). The letters of merchants and of land agents, where available, are a sensitive source.