The Leicestershire Farmer in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

Most of what we know of the working of open-field farming is based upon literary evidence, often incomplete, usually arising from one side or the other of a heated controversy over enclosure, and often late in date. None of this material can be regarded as wholly satisfactory as a basis for the study of farming history. Fortunately, however, there exists in many parts of England a mass of contemporary record material about local farming which is precisely what we need to form an unprejudiced judgment. I refer to the tens of thousands of inventories to be found in various provincial probate registries, dating mostly from the early sixteenth century to the early eighteenth, which were drawn up for the purpose of administering a man’s estate after his death according to the terms of his will. These documents vary greatly in the amount of detail they contain, but they are so numerous that one can easily find a large enough sample with all the detail one could wish for. In the Leicestershire County Record Office there are hundreds of bundles dated between 1500 and 1750, containing several thousand inventories in all, and of these by far the greater part are those of farmers, large and small, from the squire down to the cottager and the labourer.¹