Women's landownership in England in the nineteenth century

This chapter analyses land ownership by women during the nineteenth century using information on 23,966 plots of land. Four regions of England were selected for study, encompassing urban and rural areas involved in agriculture, industry and commerce. Studies of land ownership on this scale have never been attempted before because there was no registration of land in nineteenth-century England, and therefore no official source of information on the subject. This study exploits a new source of information on land ownership, namely the books of reference produced by railway and canal promoters, together with their accompanying maps. This wide-ranging source has never before been used systematically for historical research into land ownership.