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Picturesque Landscaping and Estate Management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770–1829

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 January 2009

Stephen Daniels  and
Charles Watkins
Stephen Daniels
Affiliation:
Department of Geography, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK
Charles Watkins
Affiliation:
Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, UK.
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Extract

Georgian landscaping is conventionally studied as an example of high culture, in terms of the history of art, literature and aesthetics. We take a more down to earth view and look at landscaping as an example of estate management, in terms of such topics as farming, planting, leases and rents. We do not pretend that the study of estate management offers a sort of ground-truth for understanding landscaping. Terms like ‘rent’ and ‘estate’ are of course no more eternal, nor less ideological, than terms like ‘picturesque’ and ‘landscape’. We will not neglect high culture, indeed a central theme of the paper is how the aesthetics of painting helped frame estate management. Even a casual reading of the literature on ‘improvement’ in the eighteenth century reveals a complex overlapping of not just economic and aesthetic issues but moral and political ones too. And the point of this paper is to reinsert landscaping and estate management into this complex.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , October 1991 , pp. 141 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1991

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References

Notes

1 The general issue of this paper is also discussed in Daniels, Stephen and Seymour, Susanne ‘Landscape design and the idea of “improvement”’ in Dodgshon, R. and Butlin, R.A., A New Historical Geography of England and Wales, Second Edition (London, 1990)Google Scholar; Seymour, Susanne ‘Eighteenth-century parkland “improvement” on the Dukeries estates of north Nottinghamshire’ unpublished PhD thesis (University of Nottingham, 1989)Google Scholar; Daniels, Stephen with Seymour, Susanne and Watkins, Charles, ‘Landscaping and estate management in later Georgian England’, in Hunt, J.D. (ed.), Landscape and Garden (Washington D.C., in press)Google Scholar; and ‘Parkland design and management’, special issue of the East Midland Geographer, 12 (1–2) 1989.Google Scholar

2 Lambin, Denis A., ‘Foxley: The Price's estate in Herefordshire’, Journal of Garden History 7 (1987), 244–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar While there are important differences between Lambin and ourselves in interpreting Price and his estate, we wish to record our debt to both his article and his generous reading of an earlier draft of our article here.

3 Jones, E.L., ‘Agricultural conditions and changes in Herefordshire, 1660–1815; Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club 37(1962), 32–55Google Scholar; Marshall, William, The Rural Economy of Gloucestershire; including its Dairy: together with the Dairy Management of North Wiltshire and the Management of Orchards and Fruit Liquor in Herefordshire (London, 1789)Google Scholar; Thirsk, Joan (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales: Volume V, 1640–1750, I. Regional Farming Systems (1984).Google Scholar

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7 This list has an extraordinary story. It was discovered by Bryan Little on the flypage of a copy of James Gibbs’ Book of Architecture which he saw in an antiquarian book dealer's shop in London in the 1950s. He made a transcript of this list, but did not purchase the book, which cannot now be traced. Little made use of information from this list in a BBC Midland Home Service radio broadcast on 20th May 1956. The script of this broadcast was discovered by the authors in Hereford City Library. Bryan Little kindly provided a photocopy of his full transcript of the marginalia when we wrote to him in 1988. This is referred to in the text as the ‘Little transcript’.

8 A book of survey containing the Manors of Yazor, Mancellacy, Bishopstone … with the contents and yearly estimates of Uvedale Price Esq. of Foxley … in the year of our Lord 1770, Hereford County Record Office (HCRO) D 344. This is referred to in the text as the ‘1770 survey’.

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11 Kent, Nathaniel, Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property, (London, 1775)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horn, ‘Career of Nathaniel Kent’.Google Scholar

12 Little transcript.

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19 Ibid.

20 Ibid.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

24 Hereford County Record Office (HCRO) B 47/- H8; H13; H23.

25 HCRO B 47/- D220–22.

26 Kent, , 1774 survey.Google Scholar

27 Rackham, , Ancient Woodland, p. 201.Google Scholar

28 Hereford Journal, 18th 03 1795Google Scholar. David Whitehead kindly provided this information.

29 HCRO B 47/- D97.

30 Kent, , 1774 survey.Google Scholar

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33 Uvedale Price to Lord Aberdeen, 6 February 1818, British Museum Add. MSS.

34 Uvedale Price to Beaumont, 11 November 1812, Coleorton MSS, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

35 Uvedale Price to Beaumont, August 1803, Coleorton MSS.

36 HCRO B 47/- D303–07.

37 HCRO B 47/- H70–1 D97.

38 Uvedale Price to Beaumont, 14 August 1812, Coleorton MSS.

39 HCRO Knight papers T74 728.

40 HCRO Knight papers T74 728 5.

41 HCRO Knight papers T74 590.

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43 Duncumb, , General View.Google Scholar

44 Kent, , 1774 survey.Google Scholar

45 Kent, , 1774 survey.Google Scholar

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48 HCRO B 47/-1 D97, 1.7.1774.

49 HCRO B 47/-1 D97, 2.2.1781.

50 Hereford Journal, 11th 12 1783Google Scholar. David Whitehead kindly provided this information.

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52 Price, Uvedale, Essay on the Picturesque, as compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and on the Use of studying Pictures for the Purpose of improving real Landscape (London, 1794)Google Scholar; 1810 edition, I, 26–7.

53 Price, , Essay on the Picturesque p. 196.Google Scholar

54 Price, , ‘Bad Effects of Stripping’, p. 241.Google Scholar

55 HCRO B 47/- H70–1 D97 31.7.1799.

56 Kent, , Hints, pp. 235, 239, 278.Google Scholar

57 Kent, Nathaniel, General View of the Agriculture of the County of Norfolk (London, 1794), p. 46.Google Scholar

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59 Price, Uvedale, Thoughts on the defence of property (Hereford, 1797), pp. 11, 28, 20, 19.Google Scholar

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61 Price, to Abercorn, Lord, 3 08 1798, B.M. Add. MSS.Google Scholar

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65 Marshall, William, A Review of the Landscape: Also of an Essay on the Picturesque (London, 1795), pp. 185 ff.Google Scholar

66 Lambin, , Foxley, p. 262.Google Scholar

67 Lambin, , Foxley, p. 259Google Scholar; Kent, , Hints pp. 35–6Google Scholar; letters, Price to Beaumont, , 24 04 1805, 17 August 1805, Coleorton MSS.Google Scholar

68 Price, to Abercorn, Lord, 21 12 1800, B.M. Add. MSS.Google Scholar

69 Gilpin, William, Observations on the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmorland Vol II (London, 1786), p. 43.Google Scholar

70 Barrell, John, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge, 1972) pp. 79–81.Google Scholar

71 Price, , Essay on the Picturesque, Vol I, p. 351.Google Scholar Gilpin had pronounced the Upper Wye from Hereford to Ross ‘tame’. Price's strictures on Gilpin were taken up by Fosbrooke, T.D. in his Wye Tour, or Gilpin on the Wye with Picturesque additions from Wheatley, Price & c (Ross, 1826).Google Scholar

72 Price, , Essay on the Picturesque, Vol I, pp. 193–4.Google Scholar

73 Price, to Beaumont, , 29 04 1803Google Scholar, Coleorton MSS; Price, to Abercorn, Lord, 31 05 1796Google Scholar, B.M. Add. MSS. Abercorn read the proofs of Price's Essay on the Picturesque and was intent to erase provincial language, for example ‘tump’ for which he substituted ‘mound’ even though Price considered it to be incorrect. Price, to Abercorn, , 2 02 1797Google Scholar; 11 March 1797.

74 Price, , Essay on the Picturesque, II, 342, 367–8, 340.Google Scholar

75 Ibid., II, 301–46.

76 Ibid., II, 116–28.

77 Price, to Beaumont, , 2 02 1798, Coleorton MSS.Google Scholar

78 Price, , Essay on the Picturesque, I, 240.Google Scholar

79 Ibid., III, 120.

80 Price, to Beaumont, , 23 04 1803, Coleorton MSS.Google Scholar

81 Price, to Aberdeen, Lord, 22 11 1821, B.M. Add. MSS.Google Scholar

82 Price, to Abercorn, Lord, 12 06 1796, B.M. Add. MSS.Google Scholar

83 Price, to Abercorn, Lord, 12 06 1796, B.M. Add. MSS.Google Scholar

84 Price, , Essay on the Picturesque, III, 130.Google Scholar

85 On the importance of foregrounds to Price see Daniels, Stephen, ‘The political iconography of woodland in later Georgian England’ in Cosgrove, Denis and Daniels, Stephen, The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 59–60.Google Scholar

86 Wordsworth, William to SirBeaumont, George, 28 08 1811Google Scholar in de Selincourt, Ernest (ed.), The Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth: The Middle Years (Oxford, 1937), p. 467.Google Scholar

87 Price, , Essay on the Picturesque, I, 24 ff.Google Scholar

88 Ibid., I, 32–5.

89 Price, to Beaumont, , 24 07 1812, Coleorton MSS.Google Scholar

90 Carter, George, Goode, Patrick and Laurie, Kedrun, Humphry Repton Landscape Gardener 1752–1818 (Norwich, 1982), p. 153.Google Scholar

91 On this see Daniels, Stephen, ‘The political landscape’ in Carter, et al. , Humphry Repton, pp. 112–18.Google Scholar

92 Allentuck, , ‘Uvedale Price’, p. 73Google Scholar; Carter, et al. , Humphry Repton, p. 154.Google Scholar

93 Jones, E.L., ‘Industrial capital and landed investment’, in Jones, E.L., Agriculture and the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1974), pp. 160–83.Google Scholar

94 Repton, Humphry, Fragments on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening (London, 1816), pp. 192–3.Google Scholar

95 Daniels, , ‘Political iconography of woodland’, pp. 70–2.Google Scholar

96 Loudon, J.C., A Treatise on Farming, Improving and Managing Country Residences, (London, 1806), III, 355.Google Scholar