‘Unimportant minorities’: the landholding peasantry of Britain and Ireland, c. 1600–1850

Abstract

The conventional image of British rural society created by capitalist agriculture during the eighteenth century is summed up in Eric Hobsbawm’s words. Small farmers, we read, survived only in ‘thinly populated’ parts of Wales and Scotland, and ‘perhaps in parts of Northern England’ — and of course in Ireland, where J.E. Pomfret thought it pointless to distinguish between ‘farmer’ or tenant and ‘cottier’, as most landholders were miserably poor peasants.² As a result historians often ignore what Hobsbawm and George Rudé called ‘unimportant minorities’: the landholding peasantry of late-seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and early-nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland.³ This diverse group usually rented small plots of land from well-off private owners, or they held by some form of base tenure like copyhold. Their relations with the owners of the land they worked and with fellow members of farming and small-town communities are the subject of this book.

The fundamental structure of landownership and farming was already established by the mid-eighteenth century, and certainly by the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. England was a country of mainly large landlords, cultivated by tenant farmers working the land with hired labourers. This structure was still partly hidden by an undergrowth of economically marginal cottager-labourers, or other small independents and semi-independents, but this should not obscure the fundamental transformation which had already taken place. By 1790 … a ‘peasantry’ in the usual sense of the word no longer existed.¹