ABSTRACT
Despite decades of research on the rural aristocracy, landed estates and the agricultural changes of the long eighteenth century, very little has been written about female landowners and the role they played in managing and improving their estates. Amy Erickson and others have recognized that despite coverture and primogeniture, early modern women actually controlled signicant amounts of property as widows and co-heiresses.1 Yet by focusing on countryhouse women’s roles in household management, garden design and charitable projects – all spaces in which women are traditionally seen to have been active – historians have tended to overlook female landowners’ involvement in estate
management and agricultural improvement, areas which have generally been thought of as distinctly ‘male’ spheres of activity.2
