ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the contributions of these women and others like them to a bundle of related practices – including parliamentary enclosure and agricultural improvement, but also non-agricultural sources of estate income. Like male and institutional landowners, the female owners of landed estates across the English Midlands and beyond stood to gain significantly from the enclosure and improvement of unenclosed common fields, pastures, meadows and wastes. The chapter discusses the contribution made by a number of elite women to managing non-agricultural interests, drawing particular attention to the role played by women like Elizabeth Montagu, Judith Baker, Anne Lister and Anna Maria Agar in capitalising on the mineral wealth of their estates, sometimes – as in Agar's case – in combination with the development of new transport networks and the laying out of new settlements. The replanning of the villages at Escrick and Aynho is indicative of the changes to the landscape which might follow parliamentary enclosure.
