Suffolk Farming in the Nineteenth Century
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REDSTONE MEMORIAL VOLUME SUFFOLK FARMING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY .•• I-•• ta •• ,. •• t I ... " ........ ' ...., "• .... ' ... I••• • t • t • ,............,._~?J!) ' V. B. Redston e : a photograph taken in May, 1928, for the University of Chicago, in connexion with his work on the Chaucer records. Lilian] . R edstone at work in the Public R ecord Office: 1928 . REDSTONE MEMORIAL VOLUME SUFFOLK FARMING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Edited by JOAN THIRSK, B.A., Ph.D. Senior Research Fellow in Agrarian History Leicester University assisted by JEAN IMRA Y, B.A. Assistant Archivist Ipswich and East Suffolk Record O.ffice 1958 SUFFOLK RECORDS SOCIETY VOLUME I © Joan Thirsk 1958 PRINTED BY W, S . COWELL LIMITED AT THE BUTTER MARKET, IPSWICH, SUFFOLK Contents Memoir: V. B. Redstone and Lilian J. Redstone 7 The Suffolk Records Society, 1958 14 List of Donors 14 Preface 14 Abbreviations and Rules of Transcription 15 Introduction: Suffolk Farming in the Nineteenth Century 17 Section I Routine Husbandry 38 II Agricultural Improvement 60 III Agricultural Depression 92 IV Landlords and Tenants 103 V The Agricultural Labourers 116 VI Marketing 158 VII Suffolk Farmers at Home and Abroad 164 Index 173 Illustrations Frontispiece : V. B. Redstone and Lilian J. Redstone. Line drawing: Details of Ransome's plough patented for Scotland, 1810, p. 78. Front end-paper: Map of Suffolk showing parishes mentioned in the text, with soil types according to Arthur Young, 1797. Final end-paper: Map of the hundreds of Suffolk, according to Bryant, 1826. 5 Vincent Burrough Redstone, F.S.A., F.R.Hist.Soc. 1853-1941 Lilian Jane Redstone, M.B.E., B.A. 1885-1955 This first volume of the Suffolk Records Society is published as a memorial to Lilian Redstone and her father. Any modern historical study of Suffolk and its people, if it is properly based on the original materials, is in a sense one more memorial to the Redstones. It was largely through their example, especially Lilian's, that the Record Offices were established in Bury and Ipswich to preserve and make available such materials - the local counter parts of the central records of the Public Record Office in Chancery Lane. Without a home of their own and an expert keeper the written records of local history were exposed to neglect and destruction, and the historian's job of recreating and examining the past was so much less possible to perform. The principal object of the Redstones, as it is of this Society, was to help the historian. The devotion and generosity with which they accom plished their object are our first reason for remembering them here. The Redstones were as keenly aware as anybody that written records were only one (even if generally the most important) type of indispensable historical evidence: they wrote history themselves and knew that it con cerned every aspect of the lives of men and women. The frontispiece shows them working with manuscript records, because such a picture is appro priate to the volume. They were interested as wholly in the signatures of men and women across the landscape - in the siting and working of farms or of towns, the construction and function of chapels or of chariots. It is equally valid and proper to visualize Redstone demonstrating to Fellows of the Society of Antiquaries the surviving fabric of the gaol of St Audrey's Liberty at Melton, or in earnest altercation with the late St John Hope; and to recall in imagination the purposeful, rather stocky figure of Lilian within the last decade accompanying three antiquaries across the flat, remote fields of South Elmham to examine the provoking ruins of the minster. A memorial to the Redstones is not a simple undertaking. They saw the value of these things . Though they never failed to encourage, their standards were exacting. At least we cannot doubt how delighted they would be that in Suffolk, fortified by the work of the Record Offices and by kind financial support from our looal friends and from the Pilgrim Trust, we have felt able to risk the economic difficulties of modern publishing and found the first independent county records society to be established by local initiative since the Second World War. The Redstones were not the only searchers and transcribers of Suffolk records. But in the days of their honourable predecessors, from Sir Simonds D'Ewes (1602-50) to David Elisha Davy (1769- 1851), such work was exclusively a private hobby. It was generally based on private collections that 7 MEMOIR were dispersed at the owner's death, and it is notable good luck that volu minous collections of Suffolk transcripts are preserved intact and accessible in the British Museum. Nor were the Redstones the first to be concerned with making Suffolk records available. Samuel Tymms edited a selection of Bury wills and inventories for the Camden Society in 1850. Between 1882 and 1885, W. C. Metcalfe printed the heraldic and genealogical Visitations of Suffolk of 1561, 1577 and 1612, John Cordy Jeaffreson gave, in the ninth and tenth Reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission, detailed accounts of the manuscripts of the Corporations of Ipswich and Eye, while W. H. Richardson printed the Annalls of Ipswich, compiled by Nathaniel Bacon during the Civil War. In 1889-90, Lord John Hervey was bringing out his transcripts of Domesday Book for Suffolk, arranged topographically in Hundreds, with Latin and English on opposite pages. Then in the 1890s a start was made on the records of Bury when Thomas Arnold edited three volumes of Memorials of St Edmund's Abbey in the Rolls Series. In six volumes ent itled Suffolk Records and MSS. (1904-7), W. A. Copinger provided a useful index to Suffolk references in the main public repositories, and S. H. A. Hervey anticipated (again rather as a private hobby, un professionally) the work of the Suffolk Records Society with his series of 'Suffolk Green Books', beginning in 1894 and coming to an end soon after the First World War. The circumstances of two world wars have in them selves done much to make the preservation of historical records a public interest and responsibility. In Suffolk this process has been inseparably associated with the name of Redstone. Vincent Redstone was twenty-seven when he came to Suffolk in 1880 as an assistant master at Woodbridge School. When he was two months old his father, a Hampshire man and Master of the Alton Union Workhouse in that county, died of scarlet fever. So almost from the start he owed his upbringing to an Infant Orphan Asylum, at Wanstead, and there a master who read historical novels aloud to the children on Sunday evenings aroused his first interest in history. After a period of instruction at Winchester Training College he returned to W anstead as a member of the staff. His readiness to return, and assuredly the evidence of all his subsequent life, attests the excellence of that institution. His wife, too, was educated in an orphanage. When, in 1903, Redstone's knowledge of Suffolk history brought Sidney and Beatrice Webb to his home for dinner and tea one day, Mrs Redstone remarked in her diary: 'They seem interesting people.' One notes with respect Mrs Redstone's implicit reserve. Certainly those indefatigable and important authors of English Poor Law History might, with no exaggeration, have recorded a similar judgment of their hosts. It was not until he reached his late thirties - 'soon after 1889' - that Redstone was interested in local historical documents by a clerk in the Woodbridge solicitor's office which handled the business of the Seekford Trust. He taught himself to read these documents, and then taught his eldest daughter, Mabel. Lilian, the youngest of the three daughters, learnt palaeography after Mabel left home to teach in 1900. Thus when Ethel Stokes - possibly the most remarkable, doughtiest character in the history of the preservation of British records - came over to W ooclbridge, Lilian 8 MEMOIR was able to do some transcription for her, and their friendship began. Redstone had already published his Bygone Woodbridge (1893) and Annals of Wickham Market (1896), and become Hon. Secretary and Hon. Editor of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, posts that he held from 1898 to 1905. These years were marked by solid and valuable contributions to the Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute, nor did his own contributions cease when he relinquished those posts to become Hon. Excursion Secretary. In 1902 he won the Alexander Prize Medal of the Royal Historical Society with his essay on 'The Social Condition of England during the Wars of the Roses'; displaced now, naturally, by modern re searches, but based, like everything he wrote, on a foundation of original materials. (After he had read it to the Society he received a letter of con gratulation from Charles Hewitt, of the Royal College of Surgeons: 'I think you astonished the bigwigs: what an execrable speaker is Professor G--!' The poor Professor in question was seventy-four.) The Suffolk Institute published Redstone's edition of the Suffolk Ship Money Returns in 1904, and three years later his Calendar of Pre -Reformation Wills at Bury. In 1908 he edited Memorials of Old Suffolk, an excellent volume in an uneven but estimab le series, and contributed largely to it. Much of the best work in that book has not been noticed and assimilated, let alone superseded, even by the more scholarly among modern writers on Suffolk history. Lilian set off for London to work at the Public Record Office in August 1904. It was not her first visit to Chancery Lane: she later wrote, when Miss Stokes had been killed in 1944: 'My father and I were welcomed at Miss Stokes' home in Maida Vale when we spent happy school holidays at the P.R.