"Living off the Fat of the Land"?

Wealth and Status amongst Early Modern Yeomen and Husbandmen

During the early modern period those that worked, owned or leased land were frequently described as yeomen or husbandmen.  However, during the eighteenth century the meaning of these ancient terms was changing. The term ‘yeomen’ was used to encompass a wider range of rural dwellers; by the early eighteenth century, the modern term of farmer was being used as an occupational label.^[1] This expression came to describe both yeomen and husbandmen, describing anyone who worked the land, replacing the older definition of ‘husbandman’.

The term yeoman is of obscure origin; it usually suggested a freeholder who possessed land to the value of 40 shillings [£2.00]. These men were respected as they “occupied a lower position in the same hierarchy of rural society, which was headed by rural gentlemen”.^[2]  By the early modern period many yeomen were involved in market gardening, providing livestock and produce to the towns. Their positions in society stemmed from their ancient lineage and acreage, as “land was the most secure form of investment”.^[3]

Husbandmen were small farmers, below yeomen but above labourers, who worked their own rented or freehold land. They depended on family labour, unlike yeomen, who hired workers; nevertheless husbandmen generally supported their families and produced a modest surplus.^[4]

American historian, Daniel C. Beaver, claims that the mean value of yeomen’s inventories fell over time in Deerhurst and Forthampton, as husbandmen claimed yeomen status. (However, the value of yeomen’s inventories did not fall in Ashchurch.) He claims that the increased availability of new goods made rural dwellers’ homes more comfortable. This change in the domestic environment could have led to the “acceptance of a new yeomanry” after 1660, which was based on a new criterion of materialism rather than the previous gauge of land ownership.^[5] Nevertheless, English historian, Lorna Weatherill, maintains that wealthy farmers were being increasingly left behind, as they were not embracing the new fashionable ways of living with their escalating materialism.^[6]

This article will examine a selection of yeomen’s and husbandmen’s probate documents to determine if individuals were changing their domestic consumption habits. It has been proposed that the century 1660-1760 saw the decline of basic and traditional goods, which were replaced by desirable commodities that increased comfort and enhanced the interior or had a polite function.^[7] A selection of probate documents from Tewkesbury will be examined to determine if rural dwellers faced similar social pressures as urban inhabitants to make their living space as aesthetically pleasing and as comfortable as possible. There appear to be more surviving yeomen’s and husbandmen’s wills than inventories, but some of the inventories provide an insight into individuals’ domestic goods. Although most yeomen lived and farmed in the countryside, several lived in the suburbs at a time when the outskirts of Tewkesbury still contained numerous farms and orchards.

Two wealthy yeomen’s inventories survive; the first document, which belonged to Abraham Griffin in 1663, recorded a house with at least eight rooms, two cheese chambers and a dairy.

He lived at The Lodge which appears to have been a house situated at Tewkesbury Park.^[8] Griffin’s house was comfortably furnished as he owned feather beds with down pillows. He also possessed a glass cup, when fragile and translucent hand-blown glass was rare; most people owned goods made from wood, pewter, earthenware and brass. Griffin also owned a large quantity of display pewter, being thirteen dishes, a basin, a flagon, two cups, a saucer and two salts. These with two counterfeit dishes were valued at £2.^[9] Pewter had a practical application, as well as its decorative function and intrinsic value. Weatherill claims pewter plates and dishes were in use in 1675, but were not common.^[10] 

Griffin’s inventory was valued at £411.7s. [£411.35p], but most of this was invested in his livelihood. He had:

Fifty acres of barley, pulses and wheat, valued at £120.
A chattel lease with sixteen years left valued at £30.
Six mares and eight store pigs valued at £44.
Twenty-one milch kine [milk cows], six calves and ten yearlings, valued at £100.
Three miskings [tubs] of soil, valued at £5.
Hay in the High Meade, valued at £13.6s.8d. [£13.32p]
Hopeful debts from his son and grandson of £25.3s. [£25.15p]
A desperate debt due from John Phelpes of Tewkesbury for £4.2.4d. [£4.11p] 

 

Griffin was a widower with four sons and two daughters, but relations were not cordial as his eldest son and two brothers-in-law were cut from his estate with one shilling each [5p]. However, Griffin’s three youngest sons were made executors and received all his goods. His servant, Jane Milton, was also well-rewarded for her loyalty as she received £20 “in satisfaction of all her service”.

The other surviving wealthy yeoman, Richard Mansell of The Mythe, had movable goods valued at £338.17.8d [£338.88p]. Despite the inventory being drawn up forty years after Abraham Griffin’s, Mansell owned basic and functional domestic goods. His only luxuries appeared to be feather mattresses and some pewter in the form of nine dishes, a plate, a tankard, a basin, a salt and four spoons. Mansell’s livestock of eight ewes and lambs and nine other sheep was valued at £7, and he also owned a gelding colt, valued at £2. Mansell’s small quantity of ‘muncorn’ (wheat, barley and hay) was valued at £4, and another quantity of malt was valued at £9.10s. [£9.50p]. His cash with the value of his wearing apparel amounted to £30.10s. Mansell did not appear to value new and fashionable goods, which would have been silver, pictures, glassware, chinaware, window curtains, looking glasses and stylish furniture. The ownership of these objects would imply a lifestyle that was involved in social competition and the home entertaining of one’s peers. Instead, Mansell’s wealth was in debts and money, being £273.^[11]  

Mansell gave his estate at The Mythe to his eldest son, and his three acres of meadow at Avon Ham was bequeathed to another son. Money and household goods were left to his three sons, married daughter, and two grandchildren. He was sixty-five when he died.^[12] His will was written in a genteel way, similar to that of a member of the gentry, reflecting his social standing as he gave £3 to the poor of Tewkesbury. He also requested that the minister of Tewkesbury Abbey was to be bought a ten-shilling ring, which he was to accept “as a token of his love”. The gift was given for the minister to preach a sermon for him. Mansell also paid his executors twenty shillings for their assistance and as “a token of his love to them”.^[13] The two inventories imply that wealthy yeomen did not subscribe to the urban pressures of using luxury items as social capital, preferring to invest surplus income in livestock and land, since status was tied to land.^[14]

The majority of rural dwellers, like the bulk of less affluent townsfolk, lived simply with few luxury items. In some instances, husbandmen had subsidiary occupations, suggesting that self-sufficiency was not providing enough income. An example of this is the inventory of Thomas Charnoke, a husbandman: his inventory, valued at £16.12s. [£16.60p] in 1698, listed only his household goods.^[15] Nesta Evans suggests the lack of agricultural equipment in his inventory and will could imply that he had retired.^[16]

Although it was widely believed that husbandmen were the less wealthy rural counterparts of yeomen, by the eighteenth century less affluent members of the farming community self-styled themselves as yeomen. This can be seen from some probate documents: the goods of three yeomen were of low monetary value being £1.6s. [£1.30p], £3 and £14.5s. [£14.25p].^[17] Weatherill used an economic division of estates valued in excess of £60 to distinguish between yeomen and their poorer counterparts, the husbandmen.^[18] The results overall suggest that the title of yeoman was sometimes claimed in order to gain status.

David Marcombe argues the term yeoman was often a status description; it did not always explain what somebody did, as they could have been involved in trade.^[19]

Kenelm Bubb described himself as a yeoman in his will, but was one of Tewkesbury’s first cotton merchants.^[20] He was eighty-four at the time of his death and a widower. He married Elizabeth Fish in 1679, whilst working as a glover. Bubb’s first two sons died in infancy and his first wife died in 1685. He later married Hester Bradford, at least twenty years his senior. Bubb’s surviving son, Richard, a shoemaker, was born in 1683 and died in the same year as his father, aged sixty. Bubb owned property in Church Street resulting in the alley behind his property becoming known as Kenelm Bubb’s Alley.^[21] His estate was given to his son, his grandson, who was a carpenter in Worcester, and other grandchildren.

This article has attempted to illustrate some of the complexities of defining status amongst Tewkesbury’s farming community at a time when people’s living environment was changing. Beaver claims that husbandmen and yeomen could have been purchasing new household goods, which led to a re-evaluation of the term ‘yeoman’.^[22] However, the evidence of six inventories ranging from 1663 to 1752 implies that, although the definition of yeoman status did evolve, it was the tradition, rank and stability of yeomen status that appealed to husbandmen, as even wealthy yeomen valued land and capital as a higher priority than making their homes warmer and more visually appealing.

References

1. Mark Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 36.

2. Keith Wrightson, English Society, 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), pp. 27, 31.
3. Overton, above, p. 37.
4. Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 34.
5. Daniel C. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict in the Vale of Gloucester, 1590-1690 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.70.
6. Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), p. 171.
7. This idea has been suggested by historians such as M. Overton and others: Production and Consumption,1600-1750 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2004); N. J.G. Pounds, The Culture of the English people (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour; C. Shammas, ‘The Domestic Environment in Early Modern England and America’, Journal of Social History, 14 (1980), 3-24.
8. A History of the County of Gloucester, Victoria County History, ed. by C.R. Elrington, Vol. 8 (London: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 110-118. [In 2013 Tewkesbury Park is a golf club and hotel complex. Editor]
9. The counterfeit dishes may have resembled silver. Inventory of Abraham Griffin, 1663. Tewkesbury Wills and Inventories, ed. by Bill Rennison and Cameron Talbot, (Tewkesbury Historical Society, 1996), pp.126-8.   
10. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, p. 30. [In 1660 £100 was worth about £11,000  retail price index in 2009. Editor]
11. Gloucestershire Archives [GA], Inventory, 1703/51, p.1, Richard Mansell, 1703.
12. Norah Day, They Used to Live in Tewkesbury (Stroud: Sutton, 1991), pp. 338-48.
13. GA, Will, 1703/51, p.1, Richard Mansell, 1703.
14. Carl B. Estabrook, Urbane and Rustic England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 128-9.
15. Thomas Charnoke, 1692, Tewkesbury Wills and Inventories, ed. by Rennison and Talbot, pp. 277-8.
16. Nesta Evans, The Occupations and Status of Male Testators in Cambridgeshire, 1551-1800 in Tom Arkell and others, When Death Do Us Part, pp. 180-181 (2000).
17. Matthew Keyes’ inventory only recorded his tools. GA: Inventory, 1752/37, p.1, Matthew Keyes, 1752; Inventory, 1733/21, p.1, John Tomkins, 1733; Inventory, 1722/268, p.1,Thomas Church, 1722.
18. Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, Table 8.2, p. 184.
19. D. Marcombe, English Small Town Life, University of Nottingham (Nottingham, 1993), p. 95.
20. GA, Will, 1743/98, p.1, Kenelm Bubb, 1743.
21. Day,pp. 38-41, 338. [Unpublished papers in the Bryan Linnell Archive suggest that Kenelm Bubb lived in 92 Church Street,1726-32. Editor, transcribed by Wendy Snarey]
22. Beaver, Parish Communities and Religious Conflict, p.70.