The Colonial Landscape of the British Caribbean

of maps: Merton, Corpus Christi and All Souls, for example, paid for detailed estate maps before 1600, but it took Christ Church until 1697 to commission its first — and that only of a 21⁄2-acre close in Buckinghamshire. Written surveys, too, were rare, and it was only in the early eighteenth century as agricultural profits rose that the college began to employ professional surveyors. While there are richly veined and well-illustrated chapters on the college’s livings, urban estates and mining interests, one way and another the main focus turns time and again to the college’s scattered rural holdings. These were not easily managed it seems, with tenants often wilfully taking advantage of ancient customs and practices, poor (or contradictory records) and an absentee landlord to promote their own interests. From around 1600 the college’s midland manors saw increasing enclosure, although often, it seems, Christ Church was unaware it that it was happening, notwithstanding that as arable was put down down to pasture its income from grain tithes would disappear. Curthoys has a good eye for the details of landscape change, of how when the Verneys enclosed land at East Claydon (Buckinghamshire) in 1741 they bought hedging plants from a nursery in Syresham (Northamptonshire), a mixture of aspen, crab and elm with the occasional oak, choosing the species best suited to wet or dry land. Grass seed was purchased, but some also came from the Verney’s own meadows which were left to go to seed. New waves of enclosure followed later, typically facilitated by Acts of Parliament, peaking in 1760–79 (still of good land) and 1790–1819 (typically light soils and wastes). As everywhere, at enclosure larger farms tended to be relocated out of villages into their new fields, and with this the old farmhouses were either subdivided into labourers’ cottages or pulled down. At Hillesden (Buckinghamshire), as this process took place what had been a long straggly village became four discrete hamlets. Not all enclosure went smoothly, as the case of Benson, Berrick and Ewelme (Oxfordshire) shows. Here, by 1829, the ghastly sounding main landowner, Thomas Newton, had spent thirty years trying to force through enclosure against the wishes of the area’s many small farmers who were supported by the local gentry and the vicar. Matters came to a head in 1830 when Newton attempted, for the third time, to introduce a Bill allowing enclosure. An infuriated crowd went to his farm, took sledgehammers to the house door, broke down his barn doors and destroyed his threshing machines — very much an echo of the Swing Riots which had begun in Kent earlier in the year in protest against enclosure and agricultural mechanisation. The demonstrators were soon brought to court: nine were transported, and five imprisoned. Given the book’s wide coverage in time, geography and subject matter, I think all readers of this journal would find particular subject matter of interest. My attention, for instance, was caught by pages (pp. 34-43) on the management of wood and timber in the seventeenth century and later. Although again disputes and poor stewardship again seem to have been commonplace, the dean and canons did their best to maximise the income from timber sales as these windfall profits came to them as individuals, rather than to the corporate body. Leases often enumerated the number and types of trees in each section of a wood (maiden and pollarded oaks, elm and ash in Chandlings Wood, just outside Oxford, in 1724), and included clauses like that which required three trees to be planted for every one that was felled. The book is easily read, well footnoted and indexed, and is a model other colleges and institutions should be encouraged to follow.