ABSTRACT
This chapter explores women's role in the financial management of landed estates as well as other more 'hands on' aspects of estate management, including setting and collecting rents, negotiating with tenants about rent, tenancies and repairs, supervising home farms, managing timber resources and otherwise determining estate policy. It investigates the division of responsibility between landowning women and their estate staff – particularly their stewards and land agents – and between the women and the men in their lives, whether they were husbands, sons, nephews or more distant male relatives. The chapter focuses on elite women's contribution to running home farms and tenant farms, their negotiations with tenants about issues such as rent, tenancy agreements and repairs, and their management of timber resources. Using material drawn from across eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, the chapter charts single, widowed and married women's contribution to estate management. The relationship between landowners and their stewards was clearly central to estate management.
