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The English Landed Elite, 1540–1879: A Review

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Eileen Spring  and
David Spring
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Review Essays
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Albion , Volume 17 , Issue 2 , Summer 1985 , pp. 149 - 166
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Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1985

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References

1 Regretfully, we have found it necessary in most of this review to speak as if Lawrence Stone were the sole author of An Open Elite?. This is because the review is in a large part concerned with the corpus of Stone's work and with how this latest book adds to or alters his earlier ideas. We wish here to recognize the contribution of Jeanne Stone.

2 Stone, Lawrence, The Past and the Present (Boston, 1981), pp. 32–4.Google Scholar

3 Bottomore, T.B., Elites and Society (New York, 1964), p. 55.Google Scholar

4 Stone begins with only two counties. When Northumberland enters it adds only 9 houses and 9 families, thus making no considerable difference to these calculations.

5 Table 5.4 shows that office holders, lawyers, and businessmen who resold (or whose next heirs sold) numbered respectively 19, 20, and 68 in Hertfordshire. Table 6.2 gives the number of purchasers as 49, 42, and 132 respectively. Thus the proportions selling are 39%, 48%, 52%.

Stone's habit of making generalizations on the basis of one county needs notice. His three counties were chosen as together a sample of the nation.

6 Stone notes that inheritors and purchasers had the same chance of being heirless, which is true; but they had not the same chance of selling when heirless. Only 96 inheritors out of 1377 sold because of a lack of heirs, but 82 out 459 purchasers did so.

7 See table 8.6 (The last two lines of this table must logically be ignored, for they involve heavily, or completely, the post 1880 period, and even the present day.) The number for newcomers who lasted four generations or more is lower, but not greatly lower, than the record of the class as a whole (including newcomers), which is to be worked out (laboriously) from the preceding table—50% as against 55%.

8 Rubinstein, W.D., Men of Property (London, 1981)Google Scholar; and idem., “New Men of Wealth and the Purchase of Land in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present 92 (August, 1981).

9 Stone and Rubinstein also claim that the landed elite was “distancing” itself from the world of business, but neither makes a convincing case. The opposite is argued in Howe, Anthony, The Cotton Masters, 1830-60 (Oxford, 1984).Google Scholar

10 Rubinstein, , Men of Property, p. 217.Google Scholar

11 Thompson, F.M.L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963), pp. 22–3Google Scholar. It is interesting to note how Thompson's phrase “the isolation of a caste,” which he found inapplicable to the landed class, has ended in both Rubinstein and Stone being applied to it.

12 de Tocqueville, Alexis, The Old Regime and the Revolution (New York, 1856), p. 114.Google Scholar

13 Spring, Eileen, “The Family, Strict Settlement, and Historians,” Canadian Journal of History 18 (1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Law and the Theory of the Affective Family,” Albion 16 (1984).Google Scholar

14 The statement that “males had priority over females” (p. 75) is generally true of settlement practice. In common law, however, sons had priority over daughters, but daughters had priority over other males—a vital difference. It is not true that “nephews had priority over uncles,” for though “property never ascended,” this rule applied only at common law and to lineal ascent. At common law a parent could not inherit from a child; that is all that is involved.

15 The notion (p. 76) springs from a misunderstanding of the rule against perpetuities, which mentions the term to cover another form of settlement (one that is of no practical importance). Landowners would not even want such a term in their settlements, for it would make the process of settlement and resettlement unworkable. Only where a tenant in tail succeeded who was a minor did a regular strict settlement endure beyond the life of the last tenant for life, and that only until the minority ended. See Spring, Eileen, “The Settlement of Land in Nineteenth-Century England,” American Journal of Legal History, 8 (1964): 211, fn. 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Wrigley, E.A., “Fertility Strategy for Individual and the Group,” in Historical Studies in Changing Fertility, ed. Tilly, Charles (Princeton, 1978).Google Scholar

17 Wrigley shows that where population increases 1% per annum—an historically appropriate rate—then the number of men leaving a son rises to 68%, while the number leaving either no children or daughters only falls to 32%. If the fall is evenly divided between those with no children and those with daughters only (Wrigley does not say how it is to be divided) then 20% rather than 25% of fathers left daughters only, though 6% of daughters inherited.

18 Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost (London, 1983), p. 239.Google Scholar

19 Earlier Stone sometimes saw younger sons as losing by settlement. Now they are seen as coming “by the eighteenth century” to receive as much as daughters (p. 98). This is hard to square not only with the new view of settlement as primogenitive but also with Family, Sex, and Marriage, which tells of the advance to equality of women.

20 Brodrick, George, English Land and English Landlords (London, 1881), p. 341Google Scholar. For a discussion of portions see footnote 13 above.

21 There are differences among these words; but when the aristocratic family is said—all from the division of property made by the strict settlement—to have been imperfectly patrilineal, but strongly primogenitive, and yet weakly patriarchal, then the similarity of the words needs to be stressed. All that this plethora of words points to, as the words have been used, is that the aristocratic family was never thoroughly primogenitive; and the shifting from one word to another has only served to muddle discussion.

22 Malcomson, A.P.W., The Pursuit of the Heiress: Aristocratic Marriage in Ireland 1750-1820 (Ulster Historical Foundation, Antrim, 1982)Google Scholar. Malcomson directs his criticism at Sir John Habakkuk, and Stone's defense is literally of Habakkuk. Habakkuk's ideas, however, were vital to Stone's Crisis of Aristocracy.

23 Eileen Spring, “Law and the Theory of the Affective Family.”

24 The formula also tells that 60 out of 100 men had an eldest son. Since the formula applies to stable populations, the 60 eldest sons had 40 younger brothers. Thus 20 eldest daughters had 13 younger sisters.

25 A footnote of mine elsewhere misleads on this subject (“Law and the Theory of the Affective Family,” fn. 10). Heiresses were not “more or less constant by nature;” nor did Wrigley show that they were. He showed that they tended to be constant in pre-industrial societies. The point I was making is unaffected, however, which was that heiresses in aristocratic society are made by legal instruments more than by nature.

26 I have myself used a table by David Thomas, which similarly showed a decrease in marriages between eldest sons and heiresses, using it as one indicator of the decrease in the property of heiresses that the strict settlement effected. The tables cannot now be used in that way either.

27 Laslett, Peter has criticized Stone's demography severely. See The Guardian, 6 Sept. 1984.Google Scholar

28 Bonfield, Lloyd, Marriage Settlements (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 120, 122Google Scholar. For brief comments on Bonfield's ideas see my articles noted in footnote 13 above. For comment at length see my forthcoming “The Development of Primogeniture.”