IT IS NOW well established that the absentee landowner was a widespread phenomenon in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The period saw the landed classes increasingly involved with political and business interests in the capital, while also, as road travel improved, enjoying the pleasures of the new spa towns, Tunbridge Wells, Bath, Scarborough and their like. Increased speculation in the land market, and inheritance from geographically ever-widening marriage alliances, also made it likely that proprietors would be absent from at least some of their property. Hands on management of their estates was rare for absentees if their duties and interests in London were time consuming, and their properties far from the metropolis. Though farm rentals were one of their chief sources of income, many absentee landowners possessed only a basic knowledge of agrarian issues and practices. Consequently, it was commonplace for landowners to employ agents, known usually as stewards, to manage their estates in their absence, and to keep in contact with them through correspondence. Some owners seldom wrote to their steward except when problems arose. These principally included choosing new tenants, negotiating the terms of a lease, purchasing or selling land, or most frequently collecting rent arrears. Other proprietors wrote on a more regular basis. The importance of these letters to the agrarian historian of the early-modern period is obvious; they make up the bulk of the primary sources used in this chapter, the main objective of which is to examine and evaluate the management skills displayed by stewards on differing types of property in Woodland High Suffolk (Map).

A Comparative Introduction to Woodland High Suffolk

At the outset it is necessary to describe the main characteristics of landownership in Woodland High Suffolk. The national data discussed here were originally verified in the late 1870s by John Bateman from The Return of Owners of Land 1872–73 (England andWales), commonly known as The New Domesday. His figures for the proportion of land owned by large landowners and the density of resident seats are almost certainly higher than they would have been 150 years earlier. Nationally, the larger estates were generally to be found in the north of England or on the poorest soils. Land prices were relatively low in these areas, enabling proprietors to accumulate more extensive tracts.