Welsh Journals

masters, or cause the latter to reflect a little before swindling the maltster, corn-chandler, or horse dealer? I wonder. Describing with great skill the rise of the gentry and the accumulation of estates, Leslie Baker-Jones rightly points out that prior to the full development of the commercial side of the economy, investment in land was one of the few outlets for capital surplus to that required for the business of farming. As a man accumulated land he grew in social status, but more importantly, he took on a burden of responsibility both to the land and to the generations who would occupy it after his passing. This basic truth of landownership underpinned the management approach of the squire and nobleman throughout Britain and has been all-too-easily dismissed by their detractors. A responsible landowner simply could not afford to harbour recalcitrant and feckless tenants (who, in many cases preferred to invest their money in coastal shipping activities rather than pay their rents!) and however much Dr Baker-Jones may disapprove, the employment of Scots or English agents with a no-nonsense 'commercial' approach saved many an estate from premature eclipse. Family settlements and other legal devices imposed inevitable burdens on estate finances which had to be met either from the rental or by committing future generations to mortgages. Confronted with heavy annual outgoings of this sort it is hardly surprising that an owner should attempt to charge an economic rent and collect as much of it as the financial circumstances of his tenants would allow. Baker-Jones roundly and justifiably condemns the absurd shenanigans of men like Thomas Lloyd of Bronwydd who tried with paranoiac zeal, to grab every penny of his outdated manorial dues, but he tells us little of long-term rental trends on Lloyd's or other estates along the Teifi. At the same time he is critical of the inadequacy of capital investment on many estates and censorious of the overt conspicuous consumption and ostentation of many gentry households. The former point is incontestable if not necessary inexplicable. As life leases were gradually converted to annual tenancies under which the estate bore the cost of structural repairs on the farm, it became all too clear that tenants (who had formerly been reponsible for their own repairs) had largely neglected their holdings, many of which had fallen into rack and ruin. Accordingly, many estates were faced with enormous rebuilding charges which, given the large numbers of small farms each with a complex of houses, barns, byres and so on, could not be met from estate income. To be sure, loans were available from the mid-nineteenth century from government-sponsored organisations like the Lands Improvement Company and the Land Loan and Enfranchisement Company and it would