Welsh Journals

THE LAND AGENT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY WALES TO use the modem idiom, the nineteenth-century land agent did not enjoy a favourable press. To many contemporaries, particularly those sympathetic to the growing political demands of the industrial middle classes, the agent symbolised the immense political and economic power of the land-owning interest which reached its apogee in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Frequently a lawyer or retired military man, the agent was subject to the condemnation of poet, novelist, and pamphleteer for his avarice, peculations and lack of agricultural knowledge.1 It is, however, a fact of life all too evident in our own time that the misdoings of a small minority more often than not precipitate adverse criticism of the majority. By the very nature of his job as collector of rents, guardian of husbandry clauses in leases, supervisor of labour and political representative of his master, the agent, like the tithe-drawing parson, could hardly have avoided being unpopular with a large number of people. Every-day experience proves the virtual impossibility of attaining universal popularity by steering the middle course. Such was the dilemma of the land agent, all of whose doings were pre- scribed by the need to compromise between the demands of his master and the maintenance of the goodwill of the tenants under his charge. Forced into this unenviable position of, as it were, 'hunting with the hounds and running with the hare', the agent could hardly avoid becoming the subject of abuse and derision from all sides. The essayist in the Rural Cyclopedia of 1847 drew attention to the wide range of attitudes adopted by agents towards their vocation. No doubt recalling the rapacity of the Irish agents, he differentiated between the ignorant and largely unqualified men whose single- minded concern was the exacting of the last penny of the rent roll, and the qualified agents 'who are either so strictly gentlemen as to scorn everything paltry or dishonourable or so truly Christian as to be incapable of any conduct but such as is just, generous or noble'. *I am extremely grateful for the scholarly assistance of Mr. D. Emrys Williams of the National Library of Wales in the compiling of this article. 1 As G. E. Mingay has pointed out, although many eighteenth-century land agents were attorneys, others had been brought up on farms, farmed land themselves or were otherwise interested in farming. Mingay has described in detail the functions of the eighteenth-century land steward, which were in essence the same as those of his nineteenth-century colleague. (See 'The Eighteenth Century Land Steward' in E. L. Jones and G. E. Mingay (eds.), Land, Labour and Society in the Industrial Revolution (1967).) 2 Rural Cyclopedia (London, 1847), Vol. I, p. 67.