Highnam Under the Guises: the Management of a Vale Estate, 1755–1838

Trans. Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society 134 (2016), 11–38

Highnam under the Guises: the Management of a Vale Estate, 1755–1838

By NICHOLAS HERBERT

Presidential Address delivered at Gambier Parry Hall, Highnam, 9 April 2016

I researched and wrote about Highnam in 1970 for the Victoria County History of Gloucestershire (included as part of Churcham parish in Volume Ten of the series). Inevitably, given the experience that comes later from studying a wide range of places and the limited time (and the space within the published volume) that can be devoted to each parish in a countywide reference work, articles written for the History in earlier years of work can become a source of some dissatisfaction. With Highnam, I realized that, in particular, I had not discerned or treated adequately aspects of its story during the late Georgian period – and Highnam’s location made it a place difficult not to be reminded of in the course of many journeys from Gloucester to parts of Gloucestershire beyond the Severn. So, this study represents to some extent unfinished business on my part; but I hope that fuller historical detail, for a place that for most people today is in danger of becoming just part of a car journey to somewhere else, will be welcome.

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For those in any way familiar with its history, Highnam, a western neighbour of Gloucester city just beyond the River Severn, will be associated most readily with its landowners in the Victorian and Edwardian years. It is they who have left what is most noticeable about the place today, the Gothic Revival church of the 1850s, paid for and richly furnished and decorated by Thomas Gambier Parry, painter of frescoes, art collector, and philanthropist, and the estate cottages, park lodges, and ornamental planting added in the time of Thomas and his son, the composer Sir Hubert Parry. Less obvious now are changes carried through in the Georgian age by their predecessors, members of the Guise family, changes that in their time were just as significant and had as much, or more, effect on Highnam’s physical and social structure.1

1. The study is based in general on the following sources, all in Gloucestershire Archives [GA]: estate accounts surviving for substantial parts of the Guise ownership (D 326/F 2, F 4–9); rent books of the same period (D 326/E 4–6); an estate survey and map of 1757 (D 326/E 2; D 2426/P 1); a survey of 1805 (D 326/E 3); sale particulars of 1838 (photocopy 888); an estate map of 1841 (D 2426/P 2); probate inventories for Highnam, and parish registers for Highnam and Lassington (in Gloucester Diocesan Records [GDR] in GA); and the Highnam tithe award of 1844 (GDR, T 1/53); for general background, see also the account in the Victoria County History of Gloucestershire [VCH Glos.] X, 11–29. My thanks are due to Heather Forbes, County Archivist, for permission to reproduce parts of the two estate maps; and to her staff, particularly the unfailingly patient Vicky Thorpe, for their friendly assistance. 12 NICHOLAS HERBERT

One of oldest established of Gloucestershire landowning families, the Guises had their principal estates at Elmore where they were based from the 13th century and can still to be found today; 2 at Rendcomb, which was their chief residence from the late 17th century to the mid 19th; and at Brockworth. Those of the family who became owners of Highnam in the mid 18th century were from a junior branch (Fig. 1). In 1747 Henry Guise of Gloucester, a second cousin of the Guises of Elmore and Rendcomb, acquired a half share of Highnam manor and estate in right of his wife Mary Cooke,3 whose family had been settled there since the beginning of 17th century. Their son John Guise became sole owner in 1769 by buying out his cousin William Jones, who had inherited the other half from his mother Anne Jones (née Cooke). On the death of his kinsman Sir William Guise in 1783 John secured an interest, in remainder, in his estates and, under a new patent, a continuation of the family baronetcy. From Sir John, Highnam passed to his son Sir Berkeley William Guise, who became owner of the main Guise estates in 1807, and it was held more briefly by Sir Berkeley’s brother Sir John Wright Guise, who sold it to Thomas Gambier Parry in 1838. It is on John Guise and his son Berkeley William and their management of the Highnam estate that this account will focus.

Fig. 1. Owners of the Highnam estate.

A memorial inscription to Sir John Guise in the south aisle of Gloucester cathedral celebrates in sonorous phrases an ideal country gentleman, as might be expected at that period and from the

2. For the family, see J. Maclean, ‘Elmore and the family of Guise’, Trans. BGAS 3 (1878–9), 49–78; VCH Glos. VII, 221–2; XIII, 63–4, 123. 3. A connexion between the families had existed since 1712, when Mary’s brother Dennis Cooke married Henry’s sister Theodosia Guise (d. 1716): GA, D 326/E 29; P 83/IN 1/1. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 13 fact that the monument was put up by his widow. There appears to be a lack of the type of evidence (personal letters, diary entries and the like) that would help towards gaining a more objective impression, and my account of his dealings with Highnam is based almost entirely on the bland and formal information provided by rent books, title deeds, and the accounts of his estate steward. Those records do, however, provide enough circumstantial evidence to suggest that he was an able, respected, and probably generally well-liked man. He inherited his half share of Highnam, following the death of his father Henry and mother Mary in 1749 and 1750 respectively, at the age of 17 and, when he came of age four years later,4 he was the first young heir to take over for more than a century: William Cooke, Mary’s grandfather, had succeeded to the estate in 1643 and lived for another 60 years, thus telescoping the period of tenure of the next two generations of his family. So it is perhaps not surprising that John Guise found himself in possession of what in many ways was a very traditional estate, one where there was plenty of scope for improvement, for increasing its profitability and bringing it into line with current ideas of estate management and agricultural practice.

Highnam in the early 18th century It would be convenient to describe Highnam in the accepted historian’s shorthand as an ‘estate village’ or an ‘estate parish’, but neither is entirely appropriate. The dwellings of the estate formed not one village but the three separate hamlets of Highnam, Linton and Over,5 and at the time it passed to the Guises it was not strictly a parish in its own right; it had some of the functions of a separate civil parish (maintaining its poor and repairing its roads), but ecclesiastically it formed part of the parish of Churcham (Fig. 2). Nevertheless, Highnam had most of the characteristics that such terminology implies: all but a few acres were in the ownership of a single landowning family, its owners were usually resident in the manor house on the estate, and they presided over a tenantry that remained almost entirely engaged in agriculture. The main element of the ‘estate village’ that it lacked (until the arrival of Thomas Gambier Parry in mid 19th century) was a parish church in the patronage of the big house: the three hamlets were served by the vicars of Churcham, though many of the inhabitants apparently attended the slightly nearer church in the small parish of Lassington, to the north of them, where many of them chose to be buried.6 A small chapel standing in the grounds of the manor house, Highnam Court, may once have served the hamlets as a chapel-of-ease, but by the 17th century was used only as a private chapel by the owners.7 During the Middle Ages Highnam had been owned by Gloucester’s great Benedictine abbey of St Peter, one of its core block of manors (including also Churcham, Maisemore and Hartpury) which, situated close at hand just across the Severn, provided the monks with not only an income from rents and other manorial profits, but also supplies in kind – agricultural produce, timber, firewood and building stone – as well as pleasant, and healthier, places of rural retreat for the abbot and senior members of the monastery. At Highnam after its manor house and demesne land came to be leased out in the early 16th century the abbot reserved the right to take up residence

4. During the remaining years of his minority he was in the guardianship of his cousin Mary Cooke, surviving daughter of his uncle Dennis: GA, D 326/F 70–1; The National Archives [TNA], PROB 11/759/409. 5. In this study ‘Highnam estate’ is used to refer only to the three hamlets, though lands in the adjoining parishes of Lassington and Rudford, owned or held on lease by the Guises, were managed as part of the estate during the period. 6. GA, P 196/IN 1/1; see VCH Glos. XIII, 129–33. 7. GA, D 326/E 1, f. 1v.; GDR wills 1708/187. 14 NICHOLAS HERBERT

Fig. 2. The estate at the beginning of the Guise ownership (from a map drafted by the author for VCH Glos. X, with alterations). when plague was rife at Gloucester,8 while at Over on the east side of their manor, within sight of the abbey church, the abbots had a second residence, named the Vineyard from another asset that their manor provided. The post-Dissolution owners, members of the Arnold family and then the Cookes, maintained Highnam as a compact manor estate and used Highnam Court as their principal residence. The house itself was badly damaged in a Civil War battle, when a force of royalists recruited in Wales took up position at Highnam to attack the parliamentary stronghold of Gloucester, but were caught in a bold pincer movement mounted by Edward Massey and the city garrison, in concert with a force under Sir William Waller which crossed the Severn at Framilode downstream.9 The owner of Highnam in the later years of the war, William Cooke, after some prevarication, supported parliament, which left him as one of few members of the gentry of west Gloucestershire in a position to rebuild his house under the Commonwealth. By the Restoration of 1660 he had managed to re-establish himself as a trusted royalist, so much so that he served as high sheriff of the county a few years later, and when Charles II’s government carried out a purge

8. Gloucester Cathedral Library [GCL], Reg. Abbot Malvern, I, ff. 53–54v. 9. Bibliotheca Gloucestrensis (Glouc. 1825), II, 26–9, 196; GDR, B 4/2/C 24 (copy of will of Sir Robert Cooke, 1643). HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 15 of dissident members of Gloucester city corporation in 1672 he was one of the new aldermen brought in to replace them.10 Cooke’s mansion, an early example in the English provinces of the new style popularized by Inigo Jones, remained the dominant feature of the estate, together with the grounds appropriated to their manor house by the abbots of Gloucester. When the Guises became owners in the mid 18th century, those grounds retained an elaborate series of ponds which the monks had developed to help provide a supply of fish on the days when they were required to observe the no-meat rule. A small stream passing through the site to join the Severn formed ten ‘stews’ or ‘stanks’ culminating in an 11-acre expanse of water called the Great Pool, which also powered one of the estate’s corn mills (Figs 3 and 12).11 Apart from the house and its grounds, another feature that caught the eye of those passing on the main roads from Gloucester to Ross-on-Wye (Herefs.) and Newent in the later 17th and early 18th centuries12 was a tract of enclosed parkland occupying a low ridge on the west side of the estate and grazed by a herd of deer. That too was in part a legacy of the abbots of Gloucester but had been enlarged by the lay owners of Highnam to make a private park that was

Fig. 3. Highnam Court and chapel with the Great Pool in the foreground (engraving by T. Bonnor, published in S. Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire, 1779).

10. VCH Glos. IV, 114, 378. For further detail on the Cooke family at that period (including, on p. 250, confirmation of the date of the house as mid 1650s), see N.R.R. Fisher, ‘Colonel Edward Cooke of Highnam . . . and Henry Somerset, First Duke of Beaufort’, Trans. BGAS 115 (1997), 24–64. 11. GA, D 326/E 1, f. 2. 12. Bodleian Library [Bodl.], MS Top. Glouc. c 3, f. 192; Historical Manuscripts Commission 29, Portland, II, p. 294. 16 NICHOLAS HERBERT unusually large in proportion to the size of the estate; two paled enclosures, the Great Park and the Little Park, together covered 300 a. and adjoining them, and also reserved to the exclusive use of owners, was 93 a. of woodland.13 The remainder of the estate, not occupied by the grounds of Highnam Court or the parkland and woods, was divided among numerous small or moderate-sized tenant farms. Back in the mid 13th century, in the heyday of the manorial system, Gloucester abbey’s Highnam manor supported over 70 individual tenant holdings;14 rural decline in the later Middle Ages had reduced the number to around 40 by 1607, when many tenants held more than one house, reflecting presumably a long process of amalgamations;15 and when John Guise inherited in the 1750s, 31 farms16 were held by lifehold leases or by copyhold under the estate, though a pattern of sub- tenancies, only sparsely glimpsed in the surviving records, suggests that the total of separately- worked farming units was around 25 or 26. In Highnam hamlet were 15 small farmsteads with a few cottages, most of them ranged along the lane running between the Ross and Newent roads, and with a smaller cluster around Highnam Green, a roadside green on the Newent road. The lane was named Bubbington’s Lane in 1607,17 but by the 18th century it was generally known as Two Mile Lane, referring to its distance out from Gloucester on the Ross road.18 At the junction of lane and road, a small dwelling called Two Mile House incorporates the shell of a late medieval chapel, where, it seems, travellers on their way out from Gloucester and bound for the Forest of Dean or the Welsh hills beyond once made offerings for a safe journey.19 Another 11 small farmsteads, with four or five cottages, formed the roadside hamlet of Over at the western end of the raised causeway and bridges that carried the main road out from Gloucester. Less exclusively agricultural than Highnam, Over had an inn, a smithy, a handful of tradesmen and a productive corn mill driven by a leat from the River Leadon (Fig. 4). There was also a fishery covering adjoining parts of the Severn and Leadon,20 and beside Over bridge a private wharf where deliveries of coal were landed for the use of the big house and which would prove most useful for the supply of building materials, agricultural supplies and other items required for the estate improvements made under the Guises. Travellers probably knew Over best for its inn, which traded under the sign of the Talbot (an ancient breed of hunting dog), but came to be known simply as the Dog. Standing on one of busiest roads in the county, the way into Gloucester from all points west, this was no village alehouse, but a recognized inn offering accommodation: an inventory of one of its innkeepers, in 1681, shows that the building had seven sleeping chambers, while his 35 pairs of sheets and 13 pewter chamber pots also suggest a good turnover of guests. The innkeepers at that period also rented the adjoining Vineyard house21 under the bishops of Gloucester, who had been awarded it as part of their endowment at the Reformation. The old house on its moated site was falling to ruin, but 40 a. of land attached gave the keeper of the Talbot his own small farm and a useful source of fodder for customers’ horses.

13. GA, D 326/E 2; D 2426/P 1. 14. W.H. Hart (ed.), Historia et Cartularium Monasterii Sancti Petri Gloucestriae (Rolls Series 33, 1887), III, 110–19. 15. GA, D 326/E 1. 16. Ibid. E 2. 17. Ibid. E 1, ff. 14v., 16, 18v. 18. Apparently a rough measurement from the city’s boundary on Alney Island, rather than from its centre (the local turnpike trust sited its second milestone further east, at the junction with the Chepstow road). 19. GCL, Reg. Abbot Malvern, I, f. 53; VCH Glos. X, 26–7. 20. GA, D 2426/T 7. 21. GDR inventories 1681/2, 1713/203; wills 1681/206, 1713/4, 1727/4, 1729/95. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 17

Fig. 4. Over hamlet, 1757 (detail of GA, D 2426/P 1, with main features named); Over bridge, carrying the main road out from Gloucester, stood further downstream than its later (1820s) single-arch replacement.

Today, almost all the old houses at Over have gone, although with one large farm, the public house and a modern housing estate on the Vineyard site, it has a residual identity; but the third hamlet of the estate, Linton, is represented only by a single farmhouse built in the early 19th century just south of the Ross road. In that area were formerly two or three cottages, together with the corn mill supplied from the Great Pool, but the main settlement was at Lower Linton, a cluster of farmsteads in the meadows further south; when John Guise inherited the estate there were still four, from which several of the larger holdings on the estate were farmed. The site was a less unlikely one for such a hamlet than now appears, for the lane leading to it from the Ross road once continued on through Murcott in Minsterworth parish22 and seems to have been once the usual route people took from Gloucester on their way down to Newnham and Chepstow

22. GA, D 2426/P 1; D 326/E 1, ff. 44, 46, 47; VCH Glos. XIII, 167. There are remains of stone pitching (now grassed over) on a section of its course north-west of the hamlet site, probably what led mapmakers of the 1880s to dub it a ‘Roman Road’: OS Map 1:2500, Glos. XV.SW (1889 edn). 18 NICHOLAS HERBERT

(Monmouths.).23 The later course of the Chepstow road, leaving the Ross road further west, may have been developed only in the mid 18th century by the local turnpike trust.24 Among the tenant holdings on the estate, only a few were comparable in size to farms today. An old home farm of 250 a., based on a farmhouse in Two Mile Lane, was formed mainly of demesne land that the owners had once farmed themselves, but which in recent years had been leased out among tenants; three other farms ran to over 100 a., but the others ranged from 6 a. to around 70 a. (Figs 5 and 6).25 The small farms were probably worked by the tenants’ families with occasional hired help, particularly at the hay and corn harvests when itinerant bands of reapers and mowers descended on the Gloucester area.26 The larger farms had some farm servants, most of whom evidently lived in at the farmhouses,27 for the estate then had only a handful of what would be

Fig. 5. Farmhouse on Two Mile Lane, Highnam: held with a 28-a. farm by the Murrell family in the 1750s, and later divided to form two labourers’ cottages. Photo: author, 2016.

23. J. Ogilby, Britannia (1675), plate 15, marks its junction with the Ross road (then the site of Highnam mill) as ‘to Newnham’, and Bodl. MS Top. Glouc. c 3, f. 94 (of c.1700) notes landmarks on the Gloucester to Newnham route as Over, Highnam mill and then Minsterworth. 24. A detailed description in 1607 of the boundaries of the fields adjoining (called Grove Furlong and Saisons) includes no mention of it: GA, D 326/E 1, ff. 2v., 4v., 45. 25. Ibid. E 2. 26. G.L. Goodman, ‘Pre-Reform elections in Gloucester city, 1789–1831’, Trans. BGAS 84 (1965), 141; cf. Glouc. Jnl, 3 July 1759 (notice concerning the press gang). 27. e.g. GDR wills 1672/92, 1718/88, 1726/26; inventories 1684/326 (mentioning the ‘men’s chambers’). HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 19

Fig. 6. End range of farmhouse on Two Mile Lane: held with 26 a. by the Gooding family in the 1750s; the house later divided as three labourers’ cottages. Photo: author, 2016. described in later usage as labourers’ cottages (i.e. dwellings with no farmland attached), and those were mainly occupied by people directly employed in the home grounds, park and woods, or by the few tradesmen. Highnam had substantial remains of the medieval semi-communal system of farming, including open fields where the tenants had scattered strips and the right of pasturing livestock after the harvest. The fields had been depleted by piecemeal inclosure and parts turned to pasture and orchard during Tudor and Stuart times when the Vale and Severnside area of Gloucestershire established itself as an area of mainly pastoral farming. By 175728 a total of 200 a. of open-field land remained, the bulk of it in Highnam hamlet lying between the village and the park and woods. As in most Severnside parishes, a significant feature of the old farming system was a large tract of meadow land, most of it also held as scattered strips and all of it open to pasture for the occupiers’ cattle after the hay harvest; known collectively as Mickle mead, it covered c.190 a. of the level land in the south part of the estate adjoining the Severn. There were a few smaller open fields and common meadows and pastures adjoining Over and Linton hamlets. Most farms had as much or more of their land in small closes and orchards, which added further to the interwoven pattern of landholding. Those studying farming in the early modern era become used to the complexity provided by scattered strips in open fields, but at Highnam the individually-held closes

28. GA, D 326/E 2; D 2426/P 1. 20 NICHOLAS HERBERT were also much intermixed, not always as might be expected, forming a neat cluster adjoining each farmhouse. This pattern, presumably a result of the amalgamation of holdings or earlier agreements to inclose parcels of open-field land, must, like the surviving open fields and common meadows, have involved a certain amount of co-operation among the farmers (and possibly minor altercation) when driving livestock to and fro. The central enterprise on the farms29 was dairying, producing the cheese for which the Vale of Gloucester had become well known. The smaller farms had dairies of no more than five or six cows, the larger ones up to c.15; dairy rooms and equipment for cheese-making are almost a standard feature of surviving probate inventories of the early 18th century. The nearness of Gloucester presumably enabled a good trade in butter, and perhaps milk in liquid form. Some farmers also kept beef cattle (‘fatting cattle’), often Welsh beasts brought by drovers to Gloucester and other local fairs and markets. Almost all the farms kept pigs, fed partly on the whey left over from the cheese making, and there were a few small flocks of sheep. Mills, presses and hogsheads used in the production of cider, for which Severnside had a reputation second only to Herefordshire, were another ubiquitous feature. In the open fields the arable land was subject to a traditional rotation of crops: over a period of three years (farming years beginning at Michaelmas) part of the land was sown in autumn with wheat, part sown in early spring with barley or beans, while a third part was left to lie fallow, a practice which by the mid 18th century most writers on agriculture had come to regard as backward and wasteful. The crops on the smaller farms were presumably produced only for the household, for bread-making and cattle fodder, but for some of the larger farms, again benefiting from the proximity to Gloucester which had the largest corn market in the county and an extensive malting industry, wheat and barley must have also been cash crops. Probably more vital to the economy of estate was the extensive Mickle meadow, land in which was usually valued at as least twice as much as the open-field arable30 and, if properly managed, produced an ‘aftermath’, a second good crop of hay in late summer. The meadow benefited from periodic flooding by the Severn, at least when the inundation was moderate in scale and controllable by floodgates sited on the river bank.31

The estate under John Guise, 1755–94 It is clear from the situation revealed in the estate accounts and rentals that survive from 1768 and 1771 respectively that the changes John Guise made on the Highnam estate were in hand well before he became sole owner, and so were made with the agreement of his aunt Anne Jones and her son and heir William Jones. Securing their cooperation was probably not a problem: Anne, though she was presumably fond of her childhood home and retained her half share until her death in 1768, was a widow in her 60s when Guise inherited his share of the estate, while William was well settled, since his marriage in 1735, in estates of the Jones family further down river – at Nass in Lydney, where he had a substantial mansion, and at Ruddle in Newnham. Always described in surviving title deeds as ‘of Nass’,32 it is doubtful that either used Highnam Court as a residence, or that a refurbishment of the interior, including fine rococo plasterwork dated on stylistic grounds

29. This paragraph based on GDR inventories for Highnam, in particular 1696/12, 1696/83, 1698/12, 1699/76, 1701/25, 1702/64, 1710/138, 1721/11, 1726/144, 1728/7, 1731/4 and 1751/40. For background to the region’s agriculture, see W. Marshall, The Rural Economy of Gloucestershire (1789), I; T. Rudge, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Glos. (1807). 30. e.g. GA, D 326/E 4 (notes of rents paid by Thos. Hull, Mrs Trigge and Rich. Peters). 31. Ibid. F 4 (24 Oct. 1794); F2 (memo. of cost of mowing, 1773); E2 (s.v. farm of Wm. Butt). 32. Ibid. E 29; D 177/III/10; VCH Glos. V, 63; X, 37–8. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 21 to c.1760, was other than at the behest and the expense of the young joint heir.33 It was possibly because that work was under way that Guise took a tenancy of what was a more modest (though fashionably modern-fronted) house at Withington, which with its attached farm he kept for the rest of his life;34 the carriage of wagonloads of equipment to and from Withington long remained a frequent item in the Highnam estate accounts. He seems to have become permanently settled at Highnam Court in or soon after 1769 when, for £26,000, he bought the Jones half of the estate from his cousin William.35 In June of the following year he married Elizabeth Wright, who brought with her a handsome marriage portion of £13,700;36 presumably that derived from funds left in trust by her father Thomas Wright, a London salt merchant who died in her infancy, or from her late uncle Sir Martin Wright, a justice of King’s Bench.37 A detailed survey and map of 1757 (Fig. 7), identifying the lands of each tenant on the estate,38 and two surviving documents from the same year – the buying in (in his sole right) of the lease of one small farm in Highnam and the purchase (jointly with Anne Jones) of a small piece of freehold land in Linton39 – suggest that John Guise was already forming plans to reorganize the farms into more viable units and, as a necessary part of that process, inclose the remaining open fields and common meadows. He may already have been thinking of making more profitable use of the parks and woodland and re-establishing a home farm on which he could introduce more up-to-date practices and encourage his tenants to do likewise. What assets he had inherited from his father towards financing his plans, beyond a small estate in Upton St Leonards and some leasehold property in Gloucester city,40 is difficult to discover, partly because both his father and mother died intestate. Henry Guise appears, however, to have been a reasonably prosperous man: in 1730 he was in a position to risk a loan of £2,000 in an attempt to rescue the Gloucester to Hereford turnpike trust from severe financial problems and unpopularity with road-users,41 and at his marriage to Mary Cooke two years later he undertook to settle freehold property to the value of £400 a year.42 That his son was left well supplied is suggested also by the absence from the surviving title deeds of any mortgage raised by him on his estate; although his accounts do record the payment of interest on some modest loans secured by bond.43 Whatever John’s financial position, the generation of more income from the estate to support his new status in the county provided an obvious motivation, as did the then current vogue for

33. For the house, see Country Life, 12 and 19 May 1950; D. Verey and A. Brooks, Gloucestershire 2: the Vale and the Forest of Dean (2002), 539–40. The surviving estate accounts of the early 1770s reveal only later parts of his refurbishment of the house, as well as improvements to the grounds that included a walled kitchen garden and ornamental planting. Cotswold tiles carted from quarries at Througham (‘Drufham’) in Bisley, a regular item in the accounts, were presumably used on the house and its outbuildings (the farmhouses and cottages were all, or most, roofed with thatch until the early years of the next century). 34. VCH Glos. IX, 253, and Plate 11; GA, D 326/F 4 (20 Oct. 1794); F 7 (6 Aug. 1806); I. Taylor, Map of Glos. (1777) marks it as if still a seat of Guise, though it was by then sublet. 35. GA, D 326/E 29. 36. Ibid. F 29. 37. TNA, PROB 11/746/11; PROB 11/933/12. Part of Sir Martin’s estate came to Elizabeth later, apparently through her cousins: GA, D 326/ F 6; F 7 (entries in 1808–10). 38. GA, D 326/E 2; D 2426/P 1. 39. Ibid. D 326/E 28, T 116. 40. Rents for those properties appear in some of the Highnam estate accounts. 41. Glouc. Jnl, 11 June 1734, a letter in which Henry urged further measures to solve the trust’s problems; his concern as its chief creditor and as a trustee was no doubt enhanced by his marriage into the family whose estate its roads traversed. 42. GA, D 326/F 21. 43. Ibid. F 2 (list at back of volume). 22 NICHOLAS HERBERT

Fig. 7. Highnam hamlet and its open fields, 1757 (from GA , D 2426/P 1, with field names added). agricultural improvement. The 1760s saw a high-water mark in the inclosure movement and the dissemination of the new ideas about cropping and livestock-rearing popularized by Viscount Townshend, Robert Bakewell and others. Estate improvements were much discussed, and no doubt sometimes boasted of, among his fellow Gloucestershire gentry as they congregated at the county assizes, quarter sessions, and less formal social gatherings; and an added incentive was HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 23 probably the fact that Highnam was an estate very much on show. Almost all of his peers had at some time or other to pass along its roads on their way to Ross, Monmouth, Chepstow, Hereford and South Wales, and one can speculate that, if it was not appropriately nurtured, he might imagine his fellow landowners, as they looked around them from horseback or their carriages, noting and commenting on neglected farm buildings, the slovenly way the tenant farmers were allowed to carry on, wondering perhaps why young Mr Guise did not do something about that ancient park with its decaying trees. The immediate task was to establish control of the farmland on the estate, which may be a surprising statement to any who picture an 18th-century lord of the manor and estate-owner as an all-powerful monarch of his little kingdom. Even on a manor like Highnam, where the big house was such a major presence and its occupant virtually the sole landowner, his power to make changes was limited by long-established custom, particularly that governing land tenure and agricultural practice. At Highnam the bulk of the farmland was tenanted on leases granted for terms of lives; a few of the smaller holdings were still held by more the traditional form of lifehold known as copyhold, by which tenancies were granted in the manor court and confirmed by copy of the court record, but during the 17th century the tenure of most, including all the larger ones, had been converted to leases for lives. That was the type of tenure that many estate-owners in the West of England, advised by their lawyers, had come to favour, partly because it gave them more flexibility in inserting clauses and covenants specific to each farm and freed them from a large body of custom governing copyhold. The leases44 were granted to an individual to hold for a notional 99-year term and the lives of three named persons, usually the lessee himself and two other family members, to run for as long as the last life survived or, as more usually happened, until mortality prompted the lessee to renew his lease with a full complement of lives. Those named did not have a right of succession to the farm, but were there only to determine the length of the lease; the lessee to whom the grant was made could decide who would succeed him, whether a family member or another, and make provision accordingly under his will or by an assignment during his lifetime. A small ‘chief rent’ of a few shillings was paid annually, probably representing the value of the land way back in the Middle Ages but now of marginal relevance: at Highnam it was often allowed to fall well into arrears by the estate steward.45 The landowner’s profit took the form of a substantial entry fine paid by the lessee at the granting or renewing of the lease. Thus, as with life insurance or an annuity, the parties entering the bargain were, to put it crudely, gambling on the longevity or otherwise of the lives: in notes on Ashleworth parish written c.1700, Chancellor Richard Parsons allowed himself a bit of grim humour when he wrote that ‘the air is not very healthy, having been of late very profitable to the lord of the manor’.46 Things became more complicated and the estate owner and his steward had even more parties to keep track of when a lessee decided not to farm the land himself but sublet it by an annual agreement; or he might sell his lease to another person, whose tenure remained bound by the terms of the original lease while the extant ‘lives’, who might have left the parish and no longer have anything to do with it, still determined when the lease would fall in to the estate owner. It was this mode of tenure that determined the social structure that John Guise found at Highnam, a group of fairly independent farmers who (subject to the restrictions of the system in the open fields and common meadows) were able to farm much as they pleased, to rebuild or

44. Frustratingly, only two original counterpart leases from the Cookes’ time appear to survive (GA, D 326/E 66–7), together with recitals from others (e.g. in ibid. E 68, T 118; D 333/T 24) and brief details in some of the Highnam wills in GDR. 45. GA, D 326/E 6; and see note by John James, 1790 (on a loose paper in the same volume). 46. J. Fendley (ed.), Notes on the Diocese of Gloucester (BGAS Glos. Record Series 19, 2005), 219. 24 NICHOLAS HERBERT alter their houses, and if they did not wish to work the farm themselves, to dispose of it to an undertenant. They, rather than the landlord, carried responsibility for taxes and other burdens on the land, in particular the land tax levied at four shillings in the pound of its annual value, so that under the Cookes several of the larger farmers paid more in taxes, tithes and parish rates than the owner,47 because he did not occupy much farm land himself and what he did occupy was largely free of tithes, as former monastic demesne. It is clear that such tenants regarded themselves, and were regarded by others, as not far removed from freeholders.48 On some manors by the 18th century most tenants for lives, whether by copy or lease, were non-resident, holding their lands purely as an investment, and the farmers who actually worked the lands were mostly subtenants under annual agreements. At Highnam a small number of farms did belong to outsiders: one of the larger leaseholds had been bought by an archdeacon of Gloucester, Nathaniel Lye, who died in 1737 leaving it to his heirs, the Southbys, a family of landowners in Berkshire;49 and another belonged to Jackman Morse, vicar of Awre and Huntley, who when a curate at Churcham had married a local farmer’s daughter.50 But the identification (from wills and parish registers) of those who lived at Highnam suggests that about two thirds of the leaseholders still worked their land. Some families holding farms in the 1750s, Goslings, Goodwins and Branches among them, had been around for generations, were closely connected by marriage and probably regarded themselves as permanent a part of the scene as the occupants of the big house. Overall, when considering an estate like Highnam at the period, we should banish the (essentially Victorian) picture of tenant farmers turning up dutifully at Lady Day and Michaelmas, bringing their half-yearly rents to be entered in the steward’s ledger before sitting down to a dinner that ended with the drinking of the squire’s health. Even when we appreciate that negligible inflation in land values made the need for an annual rent less pressing, and that there were some advantages in respect of repairs and ease of property management, this seems to us a curious system to be accepted for so long by so many landlords; also, the rates at which the entry fines were set are often puzzling. Side-stepping such questions, I will merely refer the reader to an authoritative analysis of the subject;51 the point of providing here what is probably an unsatisfactory summary is to illustrate the restriction on a landowner’s freedom of action that this form of tenure – by which he resigned control for an indeterminate time and was able to realize the value of the land only sporadically – imposed. To secure a regular income in rents, reorganize the pattern of farms and promote more efficient farming, the landowner had first to unravel the complex arrangements into which the farmland was locked and introduce ‘rack-renting’ (something that sounds to us a pejorative term, but in the 18th century denoted merely annual tenancies or short-term leases at an annual rent that reflected the current value of the land). The accounts and lease books reveal that John Guise adopted a patient and pragmatic approach when replacing the old tenures, introducing various interim arrangements and taking, it seems, full account of the wishes and circumstances of individual tenants. In some cases a leaseholder was prepared to give up his lease in return for a lump sum payment and an annuity that reflected

47. cf. GA, D 2426/R 1, p. 40, listing valuations on the tenants for their parish rates, 1697. 48. The Highnam tenants almost without exception styled themselves as ‘yeoman’, a term once usually reserved for freeholders, but by the 18th century used generally for anyone with a reasonably secure tenure. 49. At Carswell, in Buckland parish (now in Oxon.): TNA, PROB 11/686/233; VCH Berks. IV, 453. 50. GDR wills 1765/20; GA, D 24226/R 1, p. 32; and for his wife Anne (Prestbury) and her family, GDR wills 1718/88; 1727/201; 1729/160. 51. C. Clay, ‘Lifeleasehold in the western counties of England 1650–1750’, Agric. Hist. Review 29 (1981). 83–96. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 25 the value of his land;52 sometimes, where a tenant preferred to retain his lease but did not want to continue farming the land, he sublet to Guise in return for annual rent, Guise becoming pro tem a tenant under his own tenant;53 sometimes a leaseholder preferred to retain his farmhouse with a close and orchard or two or a small plot in the common meadows or pastures, intending perhaps to still keep a cow, a few pigs, or make his own cider, but was content to give up his open-field land;54 while in other cases Guise left a widow in occupation of her farmhouse for the remainder of her life.55 At the end of the 1760s, having unstitched to a large extent the old system of leases and by that gained control of the bulk of the land subject to common rights, Guise was in position to carry out the other main part of his reorganization: the inclosure of the open fields and common meadows. The estate accounts show that some parts of the open-field land on the west side of Highnam hamlet, comprising Forehill, Twelve Acre, Northway (or Nurdway) and West fields, were already inclosed by the summer of 1770, and work continued during the following winter, with the planting of hawthorn hedges and the digging of ditches around the new closes in progress.56 That

52. Some examples (traced mainly through the sources cited above, in n. 1), are given in this and following footnotes (tenants and acreages are as in 1757); an initial ‘lump sum’ may have been standard but is only known from Griffith’s case; the annuities were apparently intended to continue to the termination of the original lease, as some were devised to heirs: GDR wills 1773/175; TNA, PROB 11/1094/42. John Griffith (45 a. farm at Over): in 1771 he gave up the lease (granted 1728 naming him as the last life) to Guise for £50 and an annuity of £36; the farmhouse and land later part of the Butt family’s farm: GA, D 326/T 118. Edward Southby (75 a. at Highnam): at or before the inclosures of 1769–71 it was surrendered, and £40 annuity paid; the land, which included a large area of open field, was absorbed in the farms of the Trigge and Cowcher families: GA, D 326/F 2 (entry for 6 May 1772); TNA, PROB 11/1094/42. Elizabeth Gooding (or Goodwin) (26 a. at Highnam): in 1764 her farm was valued at £20 p.a. but by 1769 was given up, and £22 annuity paid; various parts of the land were rented out temporarily and almost all later included in the new home farm; the house later occupied as three cottages: GDR, B 4/2/G 36; GA, D 326/F 2 (20 May 1769; 15 Jan., 28 Apr. 1770; 6 Apr. 1771; and rent receipts 5 June, 4 Dec. 1770) 53. John Gosling (farm of 18 a. called Showells at Highnam): in 1757 it passed to an assignee, who leased it to Guise for £14 a year; in 1765, on Gosling’s death, the lease fell in; the house later held from the estate rent free: GA, D 326/E 68. John Sims (21 a. with Two Mile House at Highnam): at the inclosures his widow Elizabeth retained it but her open-field land was added to the Trigge family’s farm and Guise paid rent to her for it; in 1778, at her death, the lease fell in and the whole was added to the farm of the Trigges and their rent increased by £14 for it; the house later extended and occupied as three cottages. 54. John Gosling (another farm, 23 a. with a house at Highnam Green): in 1765, on his death, the lease passed to his sister Anne, wife of James Holder; at the inclosures the open-field land was given up to Guise who paid rent for it, and in 1774 its land and rights in Mickle mead were exchanged for other land; in 1794, on Anne’s death, the lease fell in; the house was later demolished: GDR wills 1765/105; GA, D 326/F 2 (26 May 1772); D 2176/1/1/2. 55. Thomas Murrell (28 a. in Highnam): in 1757, on his death the lease passed, apparently, to his widow Elizabeth, but by 1770 it had been given up and the land was held at a rack-rent of £18 as part of Maidenhall farm (based on a freehold just within Lassington); later it was held with other Highnam farms; Elizabeth was left in occupation of the house with an annuity of £7 (?ex gratia, as the sum seems too small to represent the value of the lease); in 1777, on her death, the house was added to the Cowchers’ farm, and later formed two cottages: GA, D 326/F 2 (30 Jan. 1772). 56. GA, D 326/F 2 (27 Aug., 7 Nov. 1770; 27 Apr., 6 Aug. 1771; and for West field (a larger part of which lay in Lassington), see ibid. E 4 (s.v. farm of Nat. Symonds). For the newly inclosed land the estate accounts and rentals use the term ‘tyning’, which in the Vale area of Gloucestershire usually has the specific sense of an inclosure from open-field or common land. 26 NICHOLAS HERBERT created the neat pattern of fields, most of 10–12 a., that is first revealed to us in detail on two maps of the early 1840s.57 East Downs, to the east of the Newent road, was inclosed at the same period,58 while the smaller fields adjoining Linton hamlet and at Over, which had only a handful of holders of strips and rights of common, appear to have been dealt with earlier. Mickle mead, the large tract of common meadow in which all of the leaseholders had strips of land and pasture rights, presented a more complex task. Its inclosure was under way during 1769 and 1770, when the parts nearest to the riverside were formed into new closes of 20–38 a.,59 but it was not until 1774 that the more inland parts were taken in, and some small plots remained on old leases that did not fall in until some years later.60 The work of hedging and ditching in Mickle mead must have been hampered by an event that occurred in the autumn of 1770, one of the highest and most destructive Severn floods ever recorded;61 though the only mention of it in the surviving records is a payment made by the estate steward to a boatman to row him into Gloucester62 – probably he had to embark from the grounds of Highnam Court and land well up Westgate Street, somewhere near the site of the present Shire Hall. A more significant reason for the time taken by the inclosure of Mickle mead was possibly that the leaseholders, though they might be prepared to release their open-field land, were more reluctant when it came to common meadow and pasture, which they saw as more basic to their farming; some no doubt wanted to continue to keep a cow or two with a supply of hay. One, at least, of the smaller common pastures on the estate, Over Pigham, was not inclosed until c.1780.63 The creation of a pattern of fewer and larger farms was put in hand with the inclosures still under way. By June 1770, when John Guise’s marriage settlement gave occasion for a summary of the constituents of the estate, he had converted the bulk of the farmland to rack-rented holdings, bringing in an annual rental of £821, while a much smaller area, estimated at an annual value of £292, remained in the hands of tenants on leases for lives.64 In April of the following year he made a new set of tenancy agreements,65 to run for three years, long enough for a tenant to carry out a full rotation on his arable land, but short enough to take the farms away if he proved unsuitable or inefficient. In the Highnam area a farm continued in the tenure of the Trigge family, based on what (confusingly after Guise had formed a new home farm) was often still called Home Farm; its constituent parts were, however, much changed, some large old demesne arable closes being replaced by the newly inclosed land of the former Forehill field. Another of the old farmsteads, on the west side of the lane,66 occupied by the Cowcher family, included the former arable of Twelve Acre field. A third farm was based on Highnam Farm (now the Highnam Business Centre) in the angle of Two Mile Lane and the Newent road; and another, which had no farmhouse and was tenanted by a Gloucester man, had land in the East Downs area. At Over the cluster of small farms was resolved neatly into just two, one with its land lying mainly north of the main road, based on a small farmhouse at the site of the present Over Farm, and the other, which came to be held for many years by the Butt family, south of the road and farmed from a house and buildings which

57. Ibid. D 2426/P 2; GDR, T 1/53. 58. GA, D 326/F 2 (23 May 1771); E 4 (s.v. farm of Wm. Giles). 59. Ibid. F 2 (5 Apr., 9 Nov. 1769; 22 Feb., 7 May 1770); E 4 (s.v. farms of Thos. Hulls, John Guise). 60. Ibid. E 2 (plan, inserted at ff. 39v.–40); E 4 (s.v. farm of Wm. Butt). 61. Glouc. Jnl, 26 Nov. 1770. 62. GA, D 326/F 2 (16 Nov. 1770). 63. Ibid. E 4 (s.v. farm of Wm. Giles, and tenancy of Mrs. Welch). 64. Ibid. F 23. 65. Ibid. E 4. 66. Called ‘Rose Cottage’ in 2016. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 27 stood at the roadside.67 Linton was formed into a single farm, based on the houses and buildings at Lower Linton. Considerable land remained in the owner’s hands in the early 1770s, some of it later redistributed to the new farms and the rest formed into a new home farm, which after the departure of a tenant in 1782 was based on Highnam Farm. The final pattern (Fig. 8) took years to emerge, with adjustments to the constituents of farms continuing during the rest of John Guise’s ownership.68 In part those resulted from the gradual falling in of the remaining leases. One farm, 36 a. based on a house called Over’s Elm at the roadside to the west of Over,69 remained on an old lease until the death of the last life in 1791;70 and the lease of a small house and a few acres at Highnam Green that ended in 1794,71 the year of Sir John’s death, seems to have marked the final extinction of the old tenures. By then the pattern of six substantial and compact farms that existed during his son’s ownership – the three based on

Fig. 8. The estate at the close of the Guise ownership (GA, D 2426/P 2, with farm names added).

67. Demolished c.1841, it stood opposite the entrance to the lane leading to Lassington. 68. For the process, see in particular GA, D 326/E 4. 69. Ibid. T 115, deed 23 Nov. 1796. Dilapidated by 1805 and later demolished, the farmhouse was at the site of Pope’s Cottages built by Thomas Gambier Parry. 70. On the death of Jos. Prestbury: GA, D 326/E 4 (s.v. tenancy of Mrs Welch); Q/REl 1, Highnam, 1779, 1790; P 83/IN 1/1 (burial 1791). 71. See above, n. 54. 28 NICHOLAS HERBERT

Two Mile Lane at Highnam, the northern and southern farms at Over and the single Linton farm – was fairly complete, although there were also two smaller holdings which under his son were absorbed into the larger farms. In 1796 the total acreage of those eight farms was 1,306 a. and their total annual rental £1,579.72 The estate accounts give some detail of farming on John Guise’s new home farm, but reveal little in the way of innovation, certainly nothing comparable to the more complex crop rotations and improved breeds of sheep and cattle introduced on the Cotswolds after inclosure. He, and presumably his tenant farmers, remained essentially dairy farmers, although with larger herds. The farms remained predominantly pasture and meadowland, and during the Guises’ ownership, except in the former Great Park, the ploughland was not extended beyond the area of the old open fields or the arable closes that had existed in the 1750s. John Guise planned to introduce turnips,73 that favourite root crop of the improving farmer, but they were little adapted to the local soil conditions, and on the home farm clover was the usual fodder crop that replaced the old fallow year in the rotation.74 As additional cattle feed, oilcake was used, supplied by river from Bristol.75 A good-sized flock of sheep was maintained, partly of the traditional Ryeland breed of the adjoining parts of Herefordshire and west Gloucestershire, and some cattle were fattened for sale. Livestock was bought and sold at the fairs and markets of Gloucester, Chepstow, Ross and Newnham, and some beasts were driven to London for sale. In an attempt to improve the land, both on the home farm and the tenanted farms, Guise employed specialists in land drainage, something much discussed by agriculturalists at the period with differing methods promoted. One of the drainers he used, Robert Viner of Pitchcombe, thought it worthwhile to mention in an advertisement that ‘he has worked for John Guise, esq., and other gentlemen of the county’,76 which may, however, reflect Guise’s status in the Gloucestershire hierarchy rather than any great reputation as an agricultural improver. How closely he was involved in the management of the home farm is not evident; after some years he rented a large part of it to his steward John James in 1779, but the remainder continued to be worked on his own behalf until his death in May of 1794. His stock then included 18 dairy cows, 8 beef cattle, 10 rams and 56 ewes with lambs and yearling sheep and 84 a. of growing crops; the livestock, with the farm’s stock of hay, was sold at auction for just over £1,000.77 While still completing his inclosure and farming reorganization, he had turned his attention to the expanse of parkland on the west side of Highnam. No doubt it was pleasant to be able to impress his friends and fellow gentry with gifts of venison, but he decided that the land should be applied to more profitable use. The ancient timber trees ornamenting the parks were felled during the early 1770s and sold to Butler and Price, Gloucester timber-merchants, gaining a useful £1,400 for the estate funds,78 and the herd of deer was dispersed in 1775.79 The land was then put out to ‘tack’ (made available to farmers on the estate and in the adjoining area to graze their stock), which raised £126 in fees in the first year.80 For a few years in the 1780s a large grazier of Westbury-on-

72. GA, D 326/T 115, deed 23 Nov. 1796. 73. Ibid. F 2 (5 Aug. 1769; 12 Aug. 1771). 74. e.g. ibid. F 2 (accounts for harvest work, at front of the volume). Whether his tenant farmers did likewise has not been discovered; according to Rudge fallowing was still a usual practice in the Vale at the start of the next century: Agric. of Glos. 104–7. 75. GA, D 326/F 2 (8 Jan., 8 Oct. 1771; 4 Aug. 1772; 29 June 1773). 76. Ibid. (22 May, 24 Nov. 1772); Glouc. Jnl, 18 Jan. 1773. 77. GA, D 326/F 8 (valuation of the stock, on a loose paper in the volume); F 4 (12 Oct. 1794). 78. Ibid. F 2 (6 Apr. 1771; 27 Mar. 1772; 27 Mar. 1773). 79. Glouc. Jnl, 17 July 1775. 80. GA, D 326/E 4 (note included in rental of 1776). HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 29

Severn was found willing to rent the whole.81 Later, parts of the land were used to increase the arable on the estate, a process that was encouraged by the outbreak of war with France and the resulting effect on corn prices. A few acres were under crops by the harvest of 1791, and during the next two years land on the west side of the old Great Park was cleared, drained and levelled for ploughing and a new corn barn built for it near the Newent road;82 by 1796 some 49 a. was under crops and rented out with a farm of the Guises in the adjoining part of Rudford parish.83 Other parts of the former parkland continued in use for grazing during the 1790s, producing tack fees of between £40 and £70 a year.84 Although these various changes can be traced in some detail from the estate accounts and rent books, what is lacking is any mention of the extensive negotiations with the tenants that the new tenures, inclosures and reorganization of the farms must have involved. Some of the leasehold tenants, holding land farmed by their fathers and grandfathers, may have seen little reason to change traditional practices. Promoters of inclosure and agricultural innovation, such as William Marshall, who wrote an account of Gloucestershire agriculture in 1780s, noted among the farmers of the Vale an ingrained resistance to change, ‘an obstinacy in the old way, a want of a due portion of the spirit of improvement, a kind of indolence’,85 and it is unlikely Highnam did not have one or two of what Arthur Young once referred to as ‘the Goths and Vandals’ of the old open-field system.86 How much those attitudes prevailed and how much opposition was encountered we can only surmise. What was achieved under Guise and later under his son Sir Berkeley William must have depended much on the ability and character of the two men they employed to manage the estate: John James, who served until his death in 1791 and was described by Sir John in his will as ‘my faithful servant and steward’,87 and Thomas Smith, who succeeded James and continued as steward until near the end of the family’s ownership. Over-zealousness in his employer’s interest led John James to antagonize the vicar of Churcham during negotiations for a lease of the Highnam tithes,88 but James was evidently capable of diplomacy in his dealings with the tenants. It probably helped that neither he nor his successor was the type of high-powered lawyer or professional land agent who ran some estates, but both from backgrounds not far removed from that of the tenants. James was the son of a miller and small farmer of Eastington,89 and Smith came from a farming family in Taynton parish.90 Behind the day-to-day work of his steward, the gradualist approach adopted by Guise would have helped the process; he was evidently no hustler, determined to push through his changes all at once in the face of opposition.

81. Ibid. L 21 (deposition by Samuel Selwyn, 1797). 82. Ibid. F 4 (11 Sept., 10 Nov., 1 Dec. 1791; 21 May, 15 Nov. 1792; 22 Mar. 1793). 83. Ibid. T 115, deed 23 Nov. 1796; D 2426/E 1 (plan of tithe-free lands, 1797); and for the tenant, Thos. Phelps, cf. ibid. Q/REl 1, Rudford, 1795. 84. Ibid. D 326/F 4 (entries for 1792–7); Glouc. Jnl, 6 May 1793. 85. Marshall, Rural Econ. of Glos. I, 54–5; see also comments by S. Rudder in his New History of Gloucestershire (1779), e.g. 409, 597, 637. 86. A. Young, General View of the Agriculture of Oxfordshire (1813), 35. 87. TNA, PROB 11/1246/120, leaving James £100 which he did not live to receive. 88. GA, D 326/L 21 (memo. of agreement 1786; observations by Revd Thos. Parker); from 1785 Sir John leased the tithes under the vicar, adjusting his tenants’ rents accordingly. 89. TNA, PROB 11/ 1207/15; VCH Glos. X, 133; Glouc. Jnl, 12 Apr. 1773; cf. references to ‘my father’ in GA, D 326/F 2 (5 Aug. 1769; 23 Feb. 1771). 90. TNA, PROB 11/1925/41; inscriptions to Smith family in Taynton churchyard. 30 NICHOLAS HERBERT

The estate under Sir Berkeley William Guise, 1794–1834 Sir Berkeley William Guise, who succeeded his father in 1794, was in one respect less immediately involved with the Highnam estate. Under her marriage settlement his mother, Lady Elizabeth, kept Highnam Court with some of the adjoining pleasure grounds; and in 1805 she leased the house to John Somers Cocks, later Lord Somers, of Eastnor (Herefs.).91 A succession of gentleman lessees followed in occupation of the house, including in the 1830s the banker and plantation owner Samuel Baker.92 Sir Berkeley William, after he inherited the estates of the main branch of the family in 1807, took up residence at his mansion at Rendcomb, but was just as active in making improvements to his Highnam estate and as keen on maintaining its value. In part that was to finance a political career: for over 20 years, from 1811, he served as one of the MPs for the county of Gloucestershire.93 In county politics the Guises were firmly allied to the Berkeley family, the ‘Whig’ interest (to use the simplistic but convenient shorthand). John Guise at one time contemplated standing in the Berkeley interest as an MP for Gloucester city in partnership with his neighbour and friend Charles Barrow of Minsterworth,94 and he was an alderman and prominent member of the Whig- dominated corporation of the city. It must have enhanced his prestige that his turn to be mayor coincided with the city’s only visit from a reigning monarch during the 18th century: in July 1788 George III and his family came over from Cheltenham and were conducted by Guise around the cathedral, county gaol, infirmary and a pin-making factory.95 Naming his eldest son Berkeley in 1775 had made clear where his political loyalties lay, while the second name chosen may have been a compliment to the child’s fourth cousin, Sir William Guise of Elmore and Rendcomb. With Sir William, John Guise formed a close friendship which in part determined the inheritance of the principal family estates: Sir William remained a bachelor and his only immediate heir was his sister Jane, who was aged c.36 at the time of her marriage in 1770 to Shute Barrington, bishop of Salisbury (and later of Durham), so probably the head of the family marked out his kinsman of Highnam as a possible heir from an early date. By his will of 1783 Sir William left John Guise his Highleadon Court estate in Rudford parish and to Jane his other estates, to pass on her death if she remained childless to John and his heirs.96 During Jane’s ownership, her estates benefited from the attention of her husband, who was known as an improving landlord on his family estate at Mongewell in Oxfordshire.97 At Elmore, Barrington inclosed the open fields and common meadows by Act of Parliament in 1795,98 and by private agreement at the same period he inclosed Rendcomb, where Sir Berkeley William, when he succeeded in 1807, found the bulk of the farmland in one large ‘turnip and sheep’ farm, extending to over 1,000 a.99

91. GA, D 326/F 7 (4 Dec. 1805; 22 Mar. 1806). Somers, who later became recorder of Gloucester and had ambitions regarding its representation in parliament, presumably needed a base near the city: Hist. of Parl., the Commons 1790–1820, II, 175; III, 471–3. 92. GA, D 326/F 8 (receipts of rent 1816–22); photocopy 888. Baker’s son, the explorer Sir Samuel White Baker, spent part of his childhood there: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (s.v. Baker, Sir S.W.). 93. Hist. of Parl., the Commons 1790–1820, IV, 117–19. 94. Ibid. II, 165, 176; J.A. Cannon, ‘Parliamentary representation of the city of Gloucester, 1727–90’, Trans. BGAS 78 (1959), 145. 95. Glouc. Jnl, 28 July 1788. 96. TNA, PROB 11/1102/184. The will made provision for paying off a £4,000 mortgage on the Highleadon estate and also left John Guise a legacy of £1,000. 97. Young, General View of Agric. of Oxon. 24–6, 105, 152, 161, 303. 98. VCH Glos. XIII, 69. 99. Ibid. VII, 224; and see Glouc. Jnl, 20 Mar. 1820. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 31

At Highnam Sir Berkeley carried on with measures to increase the value of the farms. In 1805 they were given a careful survey and valuation by Nathaniel Kent, a leading consultant on agricultural matters, whose findings were followed by some further small alterations to the farms and by modest rent increases, raising their total annual rental from £1,626 to £1,935.100 Under Sir Berkeley, except for a few years when he installed a farm bailiff to work it for him, the home farm (Highnam farm) was tenanted. For many years, at the beginning of his ownership and then again from c.1820, the tenant was his competent and respected estate steward Thomas Smith, whom Sir Berkeley also entrusted with the management of the estates he inherited in 1807. A brother of Thomas Smith, followed by a nephew, farmed Linton farm in the same period and a son-in-law would later be employed as steward to Sir John Wright Guise for the Lassington and Rudford estates.101 One of the main items of expenditure in Sir Berkeley’s time was the provision of houses and buildings of a type appropriate to the enlarged farms created by his father. The old farmhouse of Highnam farm was rebuilt and enlarged, probably before 1805, and there was further work on the house and its outbuildings during the next few years.102 Over Farm was rebuilt in 1810 (Fig. 9),103 and several of the old houses in the hamlet were rebuilt or remodelled as cottages for farm labourers at the period.104 In 1822 a large new farmhouse for Linton farm was under construction close to the main Ross road,105 replacing the old house and buildings at Lower Linton nearer the river (Fig. 10); by 1841 the old site was occupied only by a pair of quite recently-built labourers’ cottages.106 Standing among their own fields and with planned ranges of cowsheds and barns, the new farmsteads contrasted with the earlier timber-framed and thatched farmhouses with their few small outbuildings and their dairies and cider-houses often integral to the dwelling house. The new farmhouses and buildings were brick-built, one of the advantages of the area being clay well suited for brick making. Sir John Guise had established estate brickworks, under the direction of Daniel Spencer of Gloucester, on a piece of land on the Severn bank east of Mickle mead,107 and in Sir Berkeley’s time the estate was supplied from a brickfield at Whitelands, at the south end of Highnam woods.108 Another concern of Sir Berkeley’s time was the development of the timber resources of the estate. With Highnam woods, his father had been content to continue what had probably long been the practice, the cyclical coppicing of sections to be sold to local timber merchants, among whom was Ephraim Smith,109 who lived on the estate for many years and was often employed also to do carpentry work for it.110 The charcoal-fired ironworks of the nearby Forest of Dean provided a regular market for the coppice wood, and oak bark was supplied to Severnside tanneries. When

100. GA, D 326/E 3; F 5 (22 Apr. 1808). For Kent, see P. Horn, ‘An 18th-century land agent’, Agric. Hist. Review 30 (1982), 116. 101. TNA, PROB 11/1925/41; GA, D 326 E 46 (statement by Rob. Jackman, 1848). 102. See the short description in GA, D 326/E 3; and ibid. F 8 (accounts for work at ‘the Farm’, e.g., 14 Oct.1812; 12 July 1813). 103. Ibid. F 8 (accounts for work on ‘Mrs Long’s new house’, 1810–11). 104. Several brick cottages of the early 19th cent. that remained at the roadside in 1970 have since been removed. The accounts, generally, record much unidentified building work at the period (after 1807 some evidently relates to the Rendcomb estate, but many figure the Highnam builder Sam. Murrell). 105. GA, D 326/F 8, 22 Aug.; 24, 28 Oct. 1822), building evidently continuing after that account book ends. 106. Ibid. D 2426/P 2; surviving in 1970, since demolished. 107. Ibid. D 326/E 4 (tenancy of Dan. Spencer). 108. Ibid. F 4 (20 Feb., 11 Aug. 1796; 24 June 1797); F 8 (22 Nov. 1811; 28 Oct. 1813); D 2424/P2. 109. Ibid. D 326/L 21 (depositions, 1797). 110. Ibid. T 115, deed 23 Nov. 1796; E 3; and e.g. ibid. F 4 (24 Oct. 1794; 16 Oct. 1798); F 5 (2 Jan. 1809). 32 NICHOLAS HERBERT

Fig. 9. Over Farm, rebuilt in 1810, with later enlargements. Photo: author, 2016.

Fig. 10. Linton Farm, built in 1822. Photo: author, 2016. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 33

Sir Berkeley succeeded to Highnam, the French war was creating a strong demand for timber. Commercial exploitation of their existing woodland and new planting for the benefit of their heirs became a preoccupation of estate owners, and the needs of the navy for ship timber caused planting to be seen as something of a patriotic duty; the government led the way with schemes for replanting the royal forests, including Dean. On the advice given by Nathaniel Kent in 1805, many ancient trees standing on the Highnam farmland were felled and sold in the following few years. Most of the timber was bought by William Nicholls,111 another timber-merchant, who had by then based himself on the estate, as tenant of the Dog inn at Over and the adjoining Vineyard land.112 Between 1798 and 1800 Sir Berkeley’s estate accounts record the planting of many thousands of oak and ash in the two former parks and in Piper’s grove, near the junction of the Ross and Chepstow roads. Also introduced were conifers;113 they were then becoming more widely planted in the area, which for its pine timber had long relied mainly on imports into the Severn from the Baltic countries. The result of Sir Berkeley’s extensive planting is shown 40 years later on an estate map prepared for Thomas Gambier Parry, with a belt of woodland surmounting the higher ground of the Great Park, and the Little Park almost all absorbed into the adjoining Highnam woods (Fig. 11).114 Other parts of the Great Park Sir Berkeley continued to develop for agriculture, so that by the 1830s 78 a. on its east side had been fenced off as arable or pasture fields and added to the Highnam farms.115 Although Highnam Court was occupied by lessees, its grounds were much altered under Sir Berkeley (Figs 12 and 13). During 1809 and 1810 he employed John Chadwick, recently a contractor for building part of the nearby Herefordshire and Gloucestershire canal, to remodel the old fishponds west and south of the house into more ornamental stretches of water116 (‘serpentine’ would probably have been the favoured description at the period); and in the winter of 1819–20 the Great Pool, lying in the angle of the Ross and Newent roads, was drained.117 In 1807 the old chapel standing in front of the house was pulled down and some its stonework used in building a new stable block.118 On the estate as a whole, a continuing concern of those years was the widening and levelling of parts of the increasingly busy roads leading through towards Ross and Newent. That work, much of it carried out by the Highnam surveyors of the highways or the estate, with the turnpike trustees defraying the cost, would no doubt have been applauded by Sir Berkeley’s grandfather Henry Guise.119 Sir Berkeley William Guise remained a bachelor and at his death in 1834 was succeeded in his estates and the baronetcy by his brother Major-General Sir John Wright Guise. The latter, after a distinguished career that included serving under Wellington in the Peninsula, had come to live

111. Ibid. E 3 (general remarks on timber); F 5 (receipts from Mr. Nicholls 1806–7). 112. TNA, PROB 11/1586/187; GA, D 326/F 4 (note of rents paid by Nicholls, 1798, on a loose paper in the volume); his widow Anna Maria held the inn in 1823: ibid. E 46. 113. e.g. GA, D 326/F 4 (24 Mar., 2 Dec. 1798; 20 Jan. 1799; 16 Feb., 16 Mar. 1800). 114. Ibid. D 2426/P 2. 115. Ibid. D 326/E 3 (s.v. farm of Thos. Cowcher); photocopy 888 (s.v. farms of Mrs Cowcher and Mrs Procter). 116. Ibid. D 326/F 5 (May 1809–Jan. 1810); F 8 (Feb.–Oct. 1810); for Chadwick, TNA, RAIL 836 (mins 24 Dec. 1793; 6 Apr., 15 June 1796). 117. GA, D 326/F 8 (Jan.–Feb. 1820). 118. Ibid. F 5 (3 Oct. 1807; 18 Apr., 3 May 1809); E. Gambier Parry, ‘Highnam Memoranda’, MS 1902, f. 7 (copy in ibid. D 2586/1). 119. Ibid. D 764/1; D 204/2/4 (min. 7 Dec. 1807); 2/5 (mins 11 Mar. 1815; 9 Dec. 1819; 25 Apr. 1820); D 326/F 8 (24 June 1820; 12 Jan. 1822); and see above, (at n. 41). 34 NICHOLAS HERBERT

Fig. 11. Highnam woods and the former parks, 1841 (from GA, D 2426/P 2). HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 35

Fig. 12. Highnam Court and grounds, 1757 (from GA, D 2426/P 1).

Fig. 13. Highnam Court and grounds, 1841 (from GA, D 2426/P 2). 36 NICHOLAS HERBERT c.1820 at Beauchamp House, standing beside the Ross road just within Churcham manor;120 the house, a former farmhouse known as Cursleys that the Guises leased under the dean and chapter of Gloucester, had recently been given a smarter road front and a new name, one presumably thought more appropriate to a residential villa.121 After only a few years in possession of Highnam, Sir John decided to sell the estate to pay off mortgages that his brother had charged on it; he kept, however, his neighbouring Lassington and Rudford lands, as well as Rendcomb and Elmore, taking up residence at Elmore Court in the 1840s. Highnam was bought for £126,000 by Thomas Gambier Parry, a wealthy young man whose father and grandfather had been directors of the East India Company;122 he took possession in 1838, although the sale was not finalized until 1840.

Conclusion The basic change at Highnam during the Guises’ ownership was the consolidation of the farming units, the 25–30 small farms, most under 70 a., being reduced to six of 200–350 a.; and within a few years of acquiring the estate in 1838 the new owner reduced the number to only four – by amalgamating the two farms at Over and discontinuing that of the Cowcher family on Two Mile Lane.123 Of the old farmhouses on the estate, a number had been divided to provide labourers’ cottages by the 1790s,124 and by the early 1840s the majority were in two or three (and in one case four) occupations.125 The number of separate households enumerated on the estate in 1841 was 64,126 while the number of detached dwellings (whether occupied by a single or several households) had remained little altered, with 43 recorded in 1757 and 41 in 1843.127 The open arable fields, common meadows and pastures, and part of the parkland had been replaced by inclosed and hedged fields, but in other parts of the farmland the intricate pattern of closes and orchards had given way to something more regular, as hedges were removed to make for more efficient grazing on the enlarged farms. More difficult to illustrate than changes to the landscape and buildings is the effect of this agricultural reorganization on the estate’s social structure; we can say, however, that under the new owner in the 1840s it was much more clearly stratified than when the Guises had succeeded the Cookes. Thomas Gambier Parry, although by all accounts a conscientious and popular landlord with a well-deserved reputation as a philanthropist through various projects he promoted and financed in Gloucester, as owner of the Highnam estate was very obviously the apex of the social edifice. The farmers were now very clearly answerable to their landlord, owing economic annual rents, dependent on him for repairs and improvements to their buildings, and with less freedom of action in the way they farmed. They dealt now with a steward who was not a local man (a Scotsman brought in by Parry)128 and did not farm any of the land himself, and their farms were

120. Ibid. D 326/F 8 (21 June, 18 July 1820). 121. Ibid. (June 1816– July 1817); VCH Glos. X, 13. 122. GA, D 326/E 34, E 46, T 115; D 2426/T 6; VCH Glos. XIII, 67. For Gambier Parry, see A. Boden, The Parrys of the Golden Vale: background to genius (1998). 123. GA, D 2426/A 2/1 (accounts for Nov.–Dec. 1841 s.v. ‘house and grounds’; and for Sept. 1841 and Nov. 1842 s.v. ‘tenants’ farms’); A 3 (rentals 1839–58); Gambier Parry, ‘Highnam Memoranda’, f. 180. The land of the two Over farms was from then all farmed from Over Farm, to which the Butt family moved, and their old farmhouse, on the south side of the main road, was demolished soon afterwards. 124. GA, D 326/T 115, deed 23 Nov. 1796. 125. Ibid. photocopy 888; GDR, T 1/53. 126. TNA, HO 107/355/1. 127. GA, D 326/E 2; GDR, T 1/53. 128. Alex. Barclay: TNA, HO 107/355/1; ibid. 1961. HIGHNAM UNDER THE GUISES 37 subject also to annual scrutiny and audit by a London firm of specialists in estate management.129 Under the small group of farmers was a stratum of some 35–40 farm labourers130 with no resources in land and dependent on the farmers for regular employment and wages. Roles in the community were now more clearly defined. There was no doubt who was the squire, who a farmer, and who a labourer, whereas back in 1750s – with large leaseholders employing hired labour, farmers holding under non-resident lessees, small farmers with modest leaseholds and farm stock working some days for larger neighbours, and landless farm servants and estate workers – such distinctions were more blurred at the edges. I would not claim the changes I have traced at Highnam as at all unusual. In their own time – in the wider context of a county where some Cotswold landowners by the more rapid process of parliamentary inclosure were refashioning into large farms open fields and commons covering up to 1,000 or 2,000 a., building model farmhouses and cottages and encouraging tenant farmers in innovative methods of crop rotation and livestock breeding – the Guises’ improvements at Highnam probably made little mark. Nevertheless, the estate, with its (reasonably) full documentation, provides a good example of gradual and less dramatic change affecting parts of the Vale and Severnside at the period.

129. GA, D 2426/A 3. 130. At the census of 1841, 35 inhabitants were described as ‘agricultural labourers’ and 12 others simply as ‘labourers’; and in 1851 the estate’s four farms were employing a total of 37 labourers: TNA, HO 107/355/1; ibid. 1961. In 1841, 24 craftsmen were also listed, a majority of them carpenters or masons, their numbers evidently swelled by employment on extensive alterations on the estate that Gambier Parry then had in hand.