Suchergebnisse

Social and economic histories of the long eighteenth century have largely ignored women as a class of landowners and improvers. 1700 to 1830 was a period in which the landscape of large swathes of the English Midlands was reshaped – both materially and imaginatively – by parliamentary enclosure and a bundle of other new practices. Outside the Midlands too, local landscapes were remodelled in line with the improving ideals of the era. Yet while we know a great deal about the men who pushed forward schemes for enclosure and sponsored agricultural improvement, far less is known about the role played by female landowners and farmers and their contributions to landscape change.

Drawing on examples from across Georgian England, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 offers a detailed study of elite women's relationships with landed property, specifically as they were mediated through the lens of their estate management and improvement. This highly original book provides an explicitly feminist historical geography of the eighteenth-century English rural landscape. It addresses important questions about propertied women's role in English rural communities and in Georgian society more generally, whilst contributing to wider cultural debates about women's place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain. It will be of interest to those working in Historical and Cultural Geography, Social, Economic and Cultural History, Women's Studies, Gender Studies and Landscape Studies.

This chapter explores the relations between women, land, property and the law.
The first part of the chapter outlines single, widowed and married women's legal
position as property owners, paying particular attention to the doctrines of primogeniture
and coverture and their impact on women's property rights. It explores
the circumstances by which women most commonly became landowners, outlining
the four main routes to landownership for women, as well as the practices
by which married women were sometimes able to circumvent the restrictions of
coverture. As a corollary to this, it also explores the impact of various changes
to the early modern legal system – including the shift from dower to jointure
arrangements, the emergence of strict settlement and the declining power of the
ecclesiastical courts – on women's property rights.
The second half of the chapter sets out to assess the significance of women
as a class of landowners in Georgian England, quantifying the scale of women's
landholding in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries using a large sample
of data drawn from the parliamentary enclosure awards. In doing so, it responds
to considerable uncertainty about the scale of women's property ownership.
Little quantitative information is available on the proportion of land owned by
women, although a handful of studies have used rentals and leases to examine
female landholding – as opposed to landownership – within small groups of
manors. The results of the sampled enclosure awards are presented below, comparisons
between this data and the earlier, smaller studies explored, and the new
data used to throw light on four key issues: the legal and marital status of female
landowners, the scale of individual female landowners' holdings, the geography
of female landownership and the thorny issue of change over time.

Using material drawn from across
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, this chapter charts single,
widowed and married women's contribution to estate management. It explores
women's role in the financial management of landed estates as well as other
more 'hands on' aspects of estate management, including setting and collecting
rents, negotiating with tenants about rent, tenancies and repairs, supervising
home farms, managing timber resources and otherwise determining estate policy

Women like Jane Ashley, Amabel Hume-Campbell,
Anna Maria Agar, Sarah Dawes and Mary Cotterel were all involved in pushing
through parliamentary enclosure awards, while Elizabeth Prowse introduced
wide-ranging agricultural improvements after the informal enclosure of the open
fields at Wicken. The contributions of these women and others like them to a
bundle of related practices – including parliamentary enclosure and agricultural
improvement, but also non-agricultural sources of estate income – are discussed
in this chapter.