Welsh Journals

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ESTATE SURVEYS AS SOURCES IN HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY THE plight of tenant farmers in Wales during the nineteenth century has attracted considerable attention in academic studies, and indeed was one of the foremost problems discussed by members of the Royal Commission established by Gladstone in March 1893, the terms of reference being, 'to inquire into the conditions and circumstances under which land in Wales and Monmouthshire is held, occupied and cultivated." During a period of widespread agricultural depression, of acute social and political antagonism between the gentry and the peasantry, the subject was one which aroused tempers, deepened prejudices and exaggerated grievances on both sides. Although certain facets of the leasehold problem remain with us to this day, it is perhaps a more opportune time to cast a clearer eye upon an imprecisely-analysed theme in Welsh rural life, namely the actual structure of estates in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from a geographical point of view. 2 When looking for sources of material one is constantly aware of the relatively little use made hitherto certainly by geographers, though this criticism is less validly applied to historians of estate deeds, many valuable collections of which are now housed in the National Library of Wales. The Napoleonic period which witnessed many marked, if ephemeral, changes in the economy of rural Wales, has been the topic of considerable research, with special reference to studies of the 1801 Acreage Returns,3 but those documents provide only the most general impression of patterns of land utilisation on a parish basis, with the result that the Tithe Apportionments are often regarded as more satisfactory by virtue of their information relating to field patterns, land use in individual fields, farm boundaries and ownership character- istics. While it is true that the stimulus given to British agriculture by the French Revolutionary wars was perpetuated by the Corn Laws well into the middle of the nineteenth century in parts of Wales, 4 the date of the tithe surveys, for the most part carried out in the 1840's, is frequently too long after the date of Parliamentary enclosure to give an accurate picture of the agrarian scene at the height of prosperity. For example, seven of the ten Acts relating to enclosure of common lands in Merioneth were passed between 1806 and 1811,5 so that any analysis of farm size and land use based on the Tithe Schedules would be distorted in some localities by the inclusion of the large intakes of upland pasture. One must, therefore, choose data which is nearer the decades of maximum upheaval at the beginning of the century. Fortunately, such information does exist in the form of well-organised