Abstract
The Agricultural Revolution changed the British country estate, and in particular fostered a greater emphasis on improving the efficiency of farming. Yet notions of efficiency were not simply bound up with speed; Hipperson demonstrates that walking played a part in promoting productivity. She shows how land agents found that their surveillance of land, livestock and labourers required fine-grade observation, and that these duties were often best discharged at walking pace. The chapter also examines a very different sort of nineteenth-century walker—the landless labourer who was often the subject of this surveillance. Hipperson examines how landowners quantified and adjusted for the depletion of their labourers’ energy, through walking often long distances to work, so shedding light on contemporary notions of efficiency in an agricultural context.
Raffles, walking with the uneasy gait of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country journeying on foot, looked as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet and industry as if he had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871–2), chapter 41
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Notes
- 1.
George Eliot, Middlemarch (Harmondsworth, 1995 edn), 450.
- 2.
Ibid., 452.
- 3.
Pamela Horn, Labouring Life in the Victorian Countryside (Gloucester, 1987), 2–3, 64; Kim Taplin, The English Path (Woodbridge, 1979), 11.
- 4.
Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture: The Origins and Uses of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1993), 10–12, 114.
- 5.
Mark Freeman, ‘The Agricultural Labourer and the “Hodge” Stereotype, c.1850–1914’, Agricultural History Review, 49(2) (2001), 172–86; Alun Howkins, ‘From Hodge to Lob: Reconstructing the English Labourer, 1870–1914’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996); K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985), 5–14, 381–91.
- 6.
Richard Jefferies, ‘Notes on Landscape Painting’, in his The Life of the Fields [1884] (London, 2013), 140.
- 7.
Richard Jefferies, ‘Mind under Water’, in ibid., 172.
- 8.
Ibid. Raffles would certainly have made the worst of all poachers, having the ‘air of a swaggerer, who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of fireworks’: Eliot, Middlemarch, 450.
- 9.
A good example of this type of self-narrative is John Wilkins, The Autobiography of an English Gamekeeper (London, 1892).
- 10.
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover [1928] (Cambridge, 1993), 143.
- 11.
For discussion of the ambiguous social situation of gamekeepers, see P. B. Munsche, ‘The Gamekeeper and English Rural Society, 1660–1830’, Journal of British Studies, 20(2) (1981), 82–105.
- 12.
The Journals of George Sturt, ‘George Bourne’, 1890–1902, ed. Geoffrey Grigson (London, 1941), 31.
- 13.
Ibid., 45.
- 14.
Ibid., 44–5.
- 15.
For recent examples of work in this area, see Paul Readman, Land and Nation in England: Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of the Land 1880–1914 (Woodbridge, 2008); Matthew Cragoe and Paul Readman (eds), The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950 (Basingstoke, 2010); Ian Packer, Lloyd George, Liberalism and the Land: The Land Issue and Party Politics in England, 1906–1914 (Woodbridge, 2001); Jeremy Burchardt, The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873 (Woodbridge, 2002).
- 16.
J. V. Beckett, ‘Agricultural Landownership and Estate Management’, in E. J. T. Collins (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. VII, 1850–1914, 2 vols. (Cambridge and New York, 2001), 701. Beckett flags up the weaknesses of the calculations, without disputing the implications.
- 17.
Ibid., 694.
- 18.
Robert Herrick, ‘A Good Husband’, from his Hesperides [1648], quoted in Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1500–1660 (Cambridge, 2002), 294.
- 19.
Sarah Webster, ‘Estate Improvement and the Professionalisation of Land Agents on the Egremont Estates in Sussex and Yorkshire, 1770–1835’, Rural History, 18(1) (2007), 47–69; David Spring, The English Landed Estate in the Nineteenth Century: Its Administration (Baltimore, 1963), esp. ch. 4; F. M. L. Thompson, Chartered Surveyors: The Growth of a Profession (London, 1968).
- 20.
Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy 1500–1850 (Cambridge, 1996), 1–4.
- 21.
Anon., The Complete Assistant for the Landed Proprietor, Estate and House Agent, Land-Steward, Proctor, Architect, Surveyor, Builder, Auctioneer, Appraiser, Upholsterer, Cabinet-Maker &c &c &c (London, 1824), 127–8.
- 22.
Ibid., 130.
- 23.
G. A. Dean, The Land Steward (London, 1851), 292.
- 24.
Quoted in Spring, English Landed Estate, 105.
- 25.
Josephine E. Butler, Memoir of John Grey of Dilston (Edinburgh, 1861); my thanks go to Carol Beardmore for directing me to this.
- 26.
Complete Assistant, 129.
- 27.
John Claudius Loudon, Self-Instruction for Young Gardeners, Foresters, Bailiffs, Land-Stewards, and Farmers (1847), 159–60.
- 28.
John Maynard, ‘Patmore, Coventry Kersey Deighton (1823–1896)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- 29.
Coventry Patmore, How I Managed and Improved my Estate (London, 1886), 32.
- 30.
Ibid., 33.
- 31.
Ibid., 9.
- 32.
Ibid., 4.
- 33.
‘On the Relationship between Landlord and Tenant: A Lecture Delivered to the St. German’s Farmers Club, Cornwall, by Mr. John Wills, 10th June 1843’, in The Farmer’s Magazine, VIII (1843), 258.
- 34.
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser. 197 (30 June 1869), cols. 823–38, debate on ‘Agricultural Returns’, at col. 830.
- 35.
Ibid., 3rd ser. 306 (4 June 1886), cols. 999–1002, ‘Allotments and Cottage Gardens – Observations’, at cols. 1001–2.
- 36.
The shortcomings of the 1883 measure prompted demands for more legislation. Major reform came in 1906, with the passage of another Agricultural Holdings Act, which improved and extended tenant rights to compensation. For a brief summary discussion, see Readman, Land and Nation, 16.
- 37.
Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser. 281 (19 July 1883), cols. 1919–2023, debate on ‘Improvements’, at col. 1997.
- 38.
Ibid., cols. 1997–8.
- 39.
It is interesting that this same notion that the true value of land could only be arrived at once the land was walked was deployed by the Duke of Bedford, but with the opposite intention. Having expended vast sums on the improvement of his estates, he failed to make any significant profit and responded angrily to accusations that, to paraphrase Mill, he was making money in his sleep. The imagery of his riposte places him as the vulnerable walker, surveying his estate on foot for business rather than pleasure: writing of his Thorney estate he concluded that ‘a walk around the sea walls when the north-east wind is rising, would, I think, convince the unprejudiced that the theory of the unearned increment is here inapplicable’: H. A. Russell, Duke of Bedford, A Great Agricultural Estate: Being the Story of the Origin and Administration of Woburn and Thorney (London, 1897), 51.
- 40.
Readman, Land and Nation, 18.
- 41.
Horn, Labouring Life, 8.
- 42.
Burchardt, Allotment Movement, 121.
- 43.
Ibid., 119; Jeremy Burchardt, ‘Rural Social Relations, 1830–50: Opposition to Allotments for Labourers’, Agricultural History Review, 45(2) (1997), 165–75.
- 44.
Philip S. Bagwell, ‘The Decline of Rural Isolation’, in G. E. Mingay (ed.), The Victorian Countryside, 2 vols. (London, 1981), I, 31.
- 45.
Journals of George Sturt, 52; he did later conclude that he would have given the man employment had he had a job to offer.
- 46.
Susanna Wade Martins, A Great Estate at Work: The Holkham Estate and its Inhabitants in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1980), 240.
- 47.
Ibid.
- 48.
Overton, Agricultural Revolution, 125.
- 49.
Ibid., 125, 127.
- 50.
Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser. 87 (5 June 1846), debate on Poor Removal Bill, col. 48.
- 51.
Ibid., 173 (17 February 1864), cols. 697–8.
- 52.
Ibid., col. 702.
- 53.
Ibid., 178 (27 March 1865), debate on Union Chargeability Bill, col. 349.
- 54.
Ibid., 297.
- 55.
Ibid.
- 56.
Lawrence Goldman, ‘Fawcett, Henry (1833–1884)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- 57.
Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser. 186 (2 April 1867), col. 1013.
- 58.
Ibid.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Ibid., 217 (16 July 1873), col. 474.
- 61.
Ibid., 260 (6 May 1881), col. 1979.
- 62.
For more on Eadweard Muybridge, see Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (London, 2006).
- 63.
F. W. Pavy, ‘The Effect of Prolonged Muscular Exercise on the System’, Lancet, 107(2739) (1876), 319–20.
- 64.
Ibid., 319.
- 65.
W. H. Bo, ‘Knee-breeches for Labourers’, Lancet, 123 (1884), 190.
- 66.
Horn, Labouring Life, 102.
- 67.
He retired at 11.50 a.m. He had started at 9.25 p.m., stopping at 12.35 a.m. to eat ‘two eggs beaten up in a large glass of sherry’. ‘At 3AM he stopped and partook of a large loin mutton-chop and pint of Burton ale. About half an hour afterwards he vomited; and apparently threw up what he had taken. At 4AM he had some coffee and brandy; at 6AM a glass of sherry; at 7AM a coffee-and-brandy; 8.44AM part of a mutton chop, toast, and a cup of tea with an egg beaten up in; at 10.30AM a cup of beer and tea; at 11AM the same, and also at 11.30AM. Between 10.30 and the time of leaving off at 11.50AM he also partook of small pieces of jelly at intervals. Soon after 12 he vomited a second time.’ Pavy, ‘Effect of Prolonged Muscular Exercise’, 319.
- 68.
F. A. Mahomed, ‘Observations on the Circulation Made on Mr. Weston during his Late 500-Mile Walk’, Lancet, 107(2742) (1876), 432.
- 69.
F. W. Pavy, ‘The Effects of Prolonged Muscular Exercise upon the Urine in Relation to the Source of Muscular Power’, Lancet, 108(2782) (1876), 887–9.
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Hipperson, J. (2016). ‘Efficiency on Foot’? The Well-Run Estate of Nineteenth-Century England. In: Bryant, C., Burns, A., Readman, P. (eds) Walking Histories, 1800-1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-48498-7_6
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