Preliminary Programme

The diary of John Carrington from 1798 shows the activities of a successful Hertfordshire farmer who in his 70s was speculating in land and housing, yet is to be found taking practical action to undermine the market in grain during the crisis years 1799-1801 for the benefit of the poor. A John Bull character with a wide variety of county and London connection, yet firmly rooted in his parish community, Carrington combined a sharp eye for the market with a genuine concern for his poorer neighbours, providing an example of a type often seen as loosing sympathy with the rising population of underemployed farm labourers at this time. (Show less)

In 1654, in the preamble to his will, Sir Hamon Le Strange of Hunstanton thanked his wife for the ‘just, faithfull and laudable advancement of my estate’. Clearly, he thought their efforts to improve their estate and expand production in a period of dearth conformed to the highest moral principles. Those still sympathetic to the idea of a rapacious gentry might scoff at such self serving sentiments, but the less ideological increasingly appreciate the intractable problems facing a society unable to feed a growing population. This paper will show that in the need to develop resources and create sustainable communities landowners of the early seventeenth century often played a significant role in building up capital assets, providing leadership and commercializing agriculture. It will be argued that Sir Hamon was articulating a new moral economy based on practical realities and the material needs of society. (Show less)

The important part played by country-house women in the moral economy of the English landed estate has long been recognised. In their role as ‘Lady Bountiful’, the wives and daughters of landowners visited the sick, distributed alms and medicine, and contributed time and money to local schools and churches. In doing so, they arguably did much to help landlord-tenant relations and thereby contribute to the smooth running of the English landed estate. Yet as Amy Erickson and others have recently demonstrated, elite women were also landowners in their own right, controlling significant amounts of property as widows and co-heiresses.

This paper explores female landowners’ attitudes towards farming, improvement and the local community with reference to research undertaken as part of the Leverhulme-sponsored Elite Women & the Agricultural Landscape project (www.nottingham.ac.uk/~lgzwww/womenandenclosure/). It examines the interactions – and potential tensions – between elite women’s traditional role as Lady Bountiful and more market-orientated concerns to profit from enclosure, agricultural modernisation and improved rents, as well as asking whether elite women’s widespread involvement in charitable projects equated to a specifically feminine spirit of improvement distinct from other styles of estate management. (Show less)

Our goal on this work is not a structural analysis of the situation of the lessees in Brazil, we intend to obtain clues of the operation of the local power network and consolidation of a set of traditional rights of the use of the land. In the course of our research it was detected that the access to the lands and other available resources inside the same property were gratuitous for some people, which we call “sitiantes” (dwellers of little farms), however non-gratuitous for other people, the lessees. Moreover, it does not appear to be a coincidence the fact that we have not found A SINGLE lessee who related to the seigniorial families by blood, matrimonial or ritual; none case of whom could have paid leasing inside the farm of his circle of kinsfolk. Therefore, we defend that lease of lands in Rio de Janeiro in the 19th century was not determined by prerogative of the private property and did not also represent straining of resources from the poorer to the richer. Our hypothesis is that lease can be understood according to a non-economic or moral traditional vision, which ranked the rights of use taking into account whether the individual belonged to local kinsfolk or not. We are before different social relationship between seigniors and those who were not owners. There was a hierarchy by family relationship, which reflected in levels of access to the lands.

Keywords: lease, moral economy, conflict of land, Brazil, properties rights. (Show less)