Welsh Journals

PRIVATE ENTERPRISE versus MANORIAL RIGHTS: MINERAL PROPERTY DISPUTES IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY GLAMORGAN IN a recent essay in Family and Inheritance (1976), E. P. Thompson stated: 'It is my impression that there was, from the 1720's onwards considerable activity in the field of customary law Customs of manors were scrutinized in new ways by stewards and by lawyers, whose employers saw property in new and more marketable ways.' In his book Whigs and Hunters (1975), Mr. Thompson described one form of conflict resulting from this revived interest in customary rights. This article examines another such conflict which took place in mid-eighteenth-century Glamorgan. Unlike the disturbances of the 1720s in the forests of Windsor and east Hampshire, with which Mr. Thompson dealt, the Glamorgan disputes had no repercussions on a national scale. They are, nevertheless, of interest, both because they bring to light the tensions arising from the economic changes of the period and because they produced profound disturbances at the local level-disturbances which were remembered by local people for half a century or more. In the year 1764, Gabriel Powell, steward of the seignories of Gower and Kilvey, compiled a survey of the property in his charge for his master, Henry Somerset, fifth duke of Beaufort.1 This document appears anachronistic; most other surviving manorial surveys from Glamorgan date from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, and by the mid-eighteenth century the manorial system to which they belonged was steadily disintegrating under the impact of new social and economic conditions. But the survey is only anachron- istic in the sense that the power of the dukes of Beaufort had itself become something of an anachronism by this time, resting as it did on prerogatives and privileges granted over four hundred years earlier. The middle decades of the eighteenth century saw a large- scale-and not unsuccessful-attack on these rights, conducted with determination and ingenuity by the local gentry, to whom they were becoming increasingly irksome. Exacerbated by family rivalries and political differences, this conflict seriously undermined the duke's 1 The original copy is in University College of Swansea Library, with a xerox copy in the National Library of Wales; R.I.S.W. MSS.