ABSTRACT
Writing in 1761, William Beckford considered the 'middling people of England' to consist of 'the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman'. The last named would not have considered themselves correctly Rlaced, for the real middle class of the countryside were the farmers. 1
Beckford's 'yeomen' were increasingly tenants rather than owneroccupiers. Around three-quarters of England's farmland was rented by 1800. The tendency, too, was towards larger units. The decline of the smallholder was neither as dramatic nor as complete as used to be assumed, but in most of the major agrarian counties they were declining. A village parson complained of the landlord's steward in 1809: 'He will at this rate soon depopulate the parish for he turns out all the smaller tenants and the houses are going to decay and we shall soon have nothing but labourers and beggars in the
there were around 180,000 freeholders worth between £50 and £84 a year and so better off as a group than the 150,000 tenant farmers on an average income of £44. Joseph Massie writing in 1759 thought the number of freeholders had increased by then to 210,000, but the group was now worse off than the 190,000 tenant farmers. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Patrick Colquhoun considered that 160,000 tenant farmers on an average
£120 were significantly better off than all but 40,000 of an equal number of freeholders. Freeholders in general were less able to raise funds for investment in larger farms, and the smallholders who made up the vast majority were increasingly considered a group who toiled hard for small reward. 3 At the same time the tenant farmers prospered, some of the larger ones greatly so. It was they for the most part who made 'Farmer' as much a title as an occupational description. In the diary of a Somerset parson from 1799 to 1815, fifteen named individuals appear as 'Farmer'. They covered a wide range. There were the 'Farmers Rich', two bachelor brothers who lived up to their name in all save generosity, and 'Farmer Lindsey', a hard-bargain driver secretly called Jew Lindsey' by the parson. He left 240 gold guineas as well as bills and securities worth £1,800. 'Farmer Dibble' rented a good farm for more than twenty years and saved enough to 'retire to a little estate of his own'. 'Farmer Stone' brought up fourteen children on a small farm and managed it 'with great credit and decency,.4 Once a year, when his tithes were due, the parson entertained them.
