Chapter 2 - Funding the Aristocratic Lifestyle: Demesne Farming and the Price Revolution

Summary

As Stone argues, the rise in the price of goods produced on estates in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries should have encouraged enterprising landowners to resume direct farming. Many did, but not to the same extent as their continental counterparts. One of the select band of the ‘most enterprising and active’ landowners, whom Stone judged did farm their demesnes on a ‘moderate but substantial scale’, was William Cavendish. How did they respond to the challenge? Naturally, like their tenants, they had to pay attention to local climatic, geographical and geological conditions, considerations that influenced the growing trend towards regional specialisation. Nonetheless, because of their status, the size of their households and the composition of the demesnes, as well as the geographical extent of their estates, their perspective was different. Firstly, land on the demesne was more likely to be enclosed, even in areas of open field farming, and this widened the options available to the owner. Secondly, the requirements of the household might induce landowners to pursue a policy of mixed farming on the demesne in order to provide bread-corn and meat. Conversely, a number of individual case studies suggest that large-scale demesne farmers tended to focus on livestock husbandry. In relation to the nature of demesne farming, these elite ‘ranchers’ had to feed exceptionally large households, in which meat consumption loomed large. According to Stone, they required at least 50 beeves and 400–500 muttons a year. Moreover, as they received a good deal of grain in the form of tithes and corn rents, they could reduce the acreage of corn they grew for home consumption, whether as bread-corn or as malted barley. In 1607 Gilbert Talbot, 7th Earl of Shrewsbury, received 168 sheep, 386 couples of rabbits and 123 qr of wheat and malt. An added attraction of livestock husbandry in comparison to arable production was the ease with which animals could be transported long distances when bought or sold, or moved around the estate.

Livestock Husbandry

England's traditional export, undyed cloth, made sheep-farming a profitable venture in the sixteenth century, even surviving a crisis in 1551 when debasement of the coinage led to a severe contraction in the overseas market and caused wool prices to tumble.