Welsh Journals

THE END OF THE GREAT ESTATES AND THE RISE OF FREEHOLD FARMING IN WALES IN his poem to Wales, composed in the late 1880s, Sir John Morris-Jones wrote: Mae'n wir nad yw ei gwerin Yn meddu ohoni gwys, Na'r Cymro ond pererin Ar ddaear Cymru lwys.1 If by gwerin Sir John meant the cultivators of the land of Wales, he was guilty of some poetic exaggeration, for the first statistics on the subject, those of 1887, reveal that in that year 338,596 acres of the cultivated land of Wales were owned by the men who farmed them. Yet, in so far as Sir John was seeking to portray rural Wales as a landlord-dominated society, his picture was essentially correct, for those 338,596 acres constituted but 10-2 per cent of the total cultivated surface of the country; the other 89-8 per cent was in the possession of landowners who rented their land to the cultivators of the soil. By the 1970s the situation had changed dramatically. The 1970 agricultural statistics reveal that, in that year, 617 per cent of the land of Wales was owned by its cultivators and that although the proportion was somewhat lower in Gwynedd and Glamorgan, it was substantially higher in mid- and west Wales. Indeed, in Cardiganshire, the proportion of owner-occupied land was the highest in Britain.3 Although freehold farming is less prevalent in Wales than in non-communist Europe as a whole,4 a change of the greatest significance in Welsh rural society has occurred. The dream of the Welsh land reformers, of destroying the grip of the great estate and of turning the mass of Welsh tenants into freeholders has been largely achieved. To all intents and purposes, the great estates have gone. In order to appreciate the extent to which their dis- appearance involved a break with the past, it is necessary to bear in 1 'It is true that her gwerin own not a furrow of her and the Welshman is but a pilgrim upon the land of Wales.' J. Morris-Jones, Caniadau (1907), p. 2. The poem does not appear to have been published before 1907, but the late 1880s is the most likely period for its composition. 2 Agricultural Returns, 1887, pp. 80-81. Agricultural Statistics, 1970-71, p. 92. Report of the 1960 World Census of Agriculture (Rome, 1971), V, 84-111. See also F. Dovring, Land and Labor in Europe, 1900-1950 (The Hague, 1956), pp. 148-53.