19th June 1809. Carving-up the Land.

Netley Cistercian Abbey, painted by Constable in 1833, is one of the best preserved monasteries in southern England and the inspiration for many artists and writers.

Netley Abbey.

Netley Abbey by Moonlight c.1833 John Constable 1776-1837 Purchased 1969 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01147

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today in 1809 Curwen’s Act was passed to prevent the sale of parliamentary seats and to decrease the number of seats which the British Government could manipulate for its regular supporters.

John Christian Curwen. 1756-1828. Social and agricultural  reformer.

Abuse in elections, until the 1832 Reform Act, was common as most seats were appointees of the landed aristocracy with possession going back to the Conqueror and especially with that stemming from Monastic Dissolution.(1)

 

However the political and social structure was to be controlled by landlords for the rest of the 19thc with  something like 4000 owning about four sevenths of the cultivated land, let to 250,000 tenant farmers who in turn employed in 1851 about 1 ¼ million labourers. By 1885 landowners still formed the absolute majority in Parliament.

Many of the beneficiaries of the Monastic Dissolution were privateers like Sir Francis Drake who bought the Cistercian Monastery, Buckland Abbey in 1581.

The property remained in the Drake family until 1946 when it was bought by a Naval Officer who gave the Abbey and grounds to the National Trust. Malmesbury Benedictine Abbey was sold to wool merchant William Stumpe who converted the part not sold as a parish church for weaving looms.

Henry Clifford 2nd earl of Cumberland and married to a niece of Henry VIII and related to the Hastings and Talbots of Shrewsbury and the Nevilles earls of Salisbury, held Roche Abbey near Maltby in Yorkshire. Families such as the Ports, Wyndhams, Pophams waxed fat on the proceeds of monastic sales.

Sir John Thynne acquired Longleat Priory for fifty three guineas: ‘when the abbots went out they came in’. Others were the Horners of Mells, and the Wemysses who acquired their Stanway estate from Tewkesbury Abbey, but seemed to have inherited a curse from their ancestors the Tracys, for Thomas de Traci’s involvement in Thomas a Becket’s 12thc murder.

Sir William Poulett (Paulet) (d 10.3.1572), Comptroller at the Court, created 1st Marquis of Winchester was granted the Cistercian Netley Abbey (conferred by Henry III on 7th March 1251), which was converted to a mansion, falling into disuse in the early 18thc.

The Earls of Bedford estates surrounded sites of dissolved abbeys: Woburn (which became his main home), Tavistock (the title of his eldest son) and Thorney (Cambridgeshire).

From the Dissolution of Burton Abbey lands the Port Family gained Ilam in the Peak District. The estate had originally been given in 1004 by Wulfric Spot to the Abbey who had rebuilt and enlarged the small Saxon church.

In 1809 the Ports sold the estate to Jesse Russell and his wife Mary the daughter and heiress of David Pike Watts who rebuilt the village in the present alpine style.

Staffordshire in the 19th century saw 36 families held 43% of the useable land, and when Lord Derby’s National Land Survey in 1870 revealed that a few hundred held 25% of the land, there was greater agitation for reform of the land-owning control over the legislature.

Owning land also meant reaping the natural resources to be found. The Willoughby’s and Middleton’s wealth came from wool, ironworks, woad growing, glassworks and coal-mining with in pits at Cossall, Wollaton and Stapleford Colliery Companies.

Many reaped rewards from iron, quarrying and agriculture and coal from the 16thc as forest timber became scarcer. Measham in Leicestershire was dismissed by a William Wyrley in 1596 as, ‘a village belonging to Lord Shefield in which are many coal mines’, but family influence  continued until well into the 20thc.

The North Country had the Lambtons, Montagues, Lowthers (who developed Whitehaven Port), Lonsdales, the Durham Russells of Brancepeth Castle and the 5th Duke of Portland who owned eleven mines around Welbeck Abbey in the Nottinghamshire ‘Dukeries’ where he had three miles of tunnels so he could move unseen, along with estates in London.

The Devonshires owned the large copper mine at Ecton, Derbyshire and Lord Bute and Lord Londonderry (northern coal owners) (Churchill’s cousin), whilst The Curwen Family were later to develop Workington and the Lonsdale Dock in 1865.

One family is remembered in ‘Little Jack Horner’: traditional Nursery Rhyme said to be associated with the Horners of Mells, Somerset. They aquired land from Commissioners of Henry VIII in 1543. ‘ Jack pulls out the plum (the estate) for being a faithful retainer; ‘What a good boy am I’.

(1) One effect of the great reform Act was that it made MPs more accountable for on 6th February in 1837 the Sherborne Mercury recorded a public meeting which had been held at the Guildhall of Lyme Regis on Thursday, 26th January.

The purpose of the meeting was to enable their representative, William Pinney Esq ‘to state his opinions upon the leading political questions of the day and to take the sense of his constituents on his parliamentary conduct’.

References/Pics.

wikipedia.org.

tate.org.net.

Somerset History Environment Record. S.C.C.