Elections and the Yeoman: The Changing Identity of the English County Voter, 1700 to 1850

STEPHEN W. BASKERVILLE University o j Teerside

To discover the identity of an English county voter at any date before implementation of the 1832 Reform Act is no simple task. In the absence of any formal mechanism for electoral registration, the researcher has little choice but to try linking the exiguous information supplied in extant poll books to other sources of nominal data such as rentals, deeds, church records and taxation lists.’ Even if this is undertaken system- atically, he will have only a one in three (perhaps at best a one in two) chance of adding significantly to the skeletal facts supplied by each voter to the sheriffs clerk: viz. his name, the location of the freehold for which he is polling, the candidate@) whom he supports, and (in most cases from 171 1 onwards) his place of residence. Although it is technically possible that his franchise might consist of something other than an interest in land - a benefice in the established church, for instance; a mortgage or annuity - in the vast majority of cases it will be a freehold estate, of at least 40 shillings value after the deduction of all charges, that entitles him to a place in the electorate of his shire. Before 1832, then, the ‘typical’ voter in an English county was in short a ‘yeoman’.

O n the whole, historical psephologists have paid rather more attention to the voting behaviour of these freeholders than they have to their changing economic circum- stances, and have placed rather more emphasis on the political and crudely managerial determinants of the electorate’s size than on contemporaneous social and demographic factors. Yet the fact remains that the numbers and social status of English yeomen altered dramatically in the course of the eighteenth century, as their class was increas- ingly squeezed between the mounting costs of parliamentary enclosure on the one hand and the relentless drive towards larger farm sizes on the other. Indeed, it could be argued that the aristocracy and landed gentry did more to transform the nature of the county electorate as landowners than ever they did as political magnates.

The original idea for this paper, not to mention its title, came from reading Robert Allen’s provocative study, Enclosure and the Yeoman, in which he purports to chart the effective disappearance of copyholders and small freeholders from the south midland shires between the 1680s and the 1830s, and their replacement by a class of substantial tenant farmers paying rack-rents to the owners of great estates. By the twin criteria of effective landownership and family-labour use which Allen employs,

See, for example, Stephen W. Baskerville, Peter Adman and Katharine F. Beedham, ‘The Dynamics of Landlord Influence in English County Elections, 1701-1734: The Evidence fiom Cheshire’, Parliamentary History, XI1 (1993), 126-42.

Elections and the Yeoman 49

the open field system which operated in the midlands during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries ‘approximated a peasant system’. Mutatis mutandis, his definition may stand for other regions of the country as well. ‘Beneficial leases and copyhold,’ he writes, ‘created a regime of peasant proprietorship of long (but not unlimited) duration. Many farms and much land were operated mainly with family labour. There were certainly many small owner-occupied freehold farms as well. These farmers were the English yeomen.’2 Only once does he take direct notice of the yeoman as voter, and then only when recalling J. P. Cooper’s scepticism that the number of freeholders tallied by Gregory King in 1688 could have ‘included many copyholders since, if a lot were included, there would not have been enough genuine freeholders left over to make up the ele~torate’.~ Assuming that copyholders and other customary tenants did not generally vote in the eighteenth ~ e n t u r y , ~ the issue is none the less a real one, particularly if, as Allen alleges, the number of ‘genuine h-eeholders’ and beneficial leaseholders contracted sharply in the century after King made his calcula- tions. Was the county electorate also contracting in these years? And if it was not, why not?

The difficulty we encounter in answering this question stems primarily from the fact, already identified, that we have no direct means of measuring the size of the county electorate - by which is meant the total number of individuals who were qualijied to vote. We can, of course, count the number of freeholders actually coming to the polls, at least for those counties and contests that have left us poll books. But we must remember that this ‘voterate’ stands in an uncertain relationship to the larger body of which it is a sub-set, diminished variously by old age, poor health, long distance, bad weather, landlord intimidation and political indifference, to name but a sample of the factors that might lead to abstention.

A few examples, however, will lead us to conclude that, during the first half of the eighteenth century at any rate, the ‘voterate’ in most counties was increasing rather than decreasing in size. In Kent, for instance, some 5,000 freeholders went to the polls in 1679; but around 6,200 voted in 1715, more than 7,700 did so in 1734, and over 8,000 exercised their franchise in 1754. By 1796, the county’s voterate stood at 8,921 and still numbered 8,848 in 1802. In Huntingdonshire, one of Allen’s south midland counties, 929 men voted in 1673, at a time when it was reckoned there were only 1,100 freeholders in the county; 1,111 and 1,213 votes were given in 1730 and 1739 respectively; and a little over 1,500 men took part in both the 1741 and 1768 contests. In 1807, only 1,094 votes were cast and in 1818 some 1,300 - several hundred down

5

Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman (Oxford, 1992). p. 76. Ibid., p. 85, n. 10. For evidence to the contrary in Herefordshire (25 Nov. 1708), see C. I . , XVI, 14. Two years later

(5 Dec. 1710), in a petition citing similar offences in the same county, it was alleged that the sitting member, John Price, and his agents ‘by Bribery, and other illegal Practices, did procure and influence a great Number of Votes . . . several Hundred whereof were Copyholders, and Cottagers, not having 40 s. a year’. Ibid., XVI, 422.

Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman, p. 85: ‘The number of peasants fell in the seventeenth century as land was enclosed, but the rate of decline accelerated in the eighteenth century as peasants also disappeared &om the open fields. By the end of the eighteenth century only 10 per cent of England belonged to owner-occupying farmers [&om an estimated proportion of closer to two-thirds a century earlier], so the decline fiom 1688 was precipitous. The eighteenth century witnessed not only change, but revolutionary change.’

50 Stephen W. Baskerville

from the peaks of the mid-eighteenth century. Further north, in County Durham, while around 1,800 voted in elections held between 1679 and 1681 for each of the three Exclusion Parliaments, some 2,300 freeholders went to the polls in 1722, and a shade under 3,000 did so in 1761. By 1790, the tally stood at 3,407.6

For the county of Cheshire, rather more is known about the make-up of the electorate. Here, too, the number of voters coming to the poll increased markedly during Queen Anne’s reign. From just 3,448 in 1701, it grew by a staggering 34 per cent in a matter of months, reaching 4,623 in 1702, 5,917 in 1705 and 6,158 in 1710. Thereafter the numbers fluctuated somewhat, but the general election of 1722 saw 6,000 voters coming to poll, and that of 1734, the last to be contested before the Great Reform Act, witnessed 6,521 men exercising their right to the franchise.’ So perturbed was one local squire by this rapidly mounting tally of supposed freeholders, that following the 1705 election, when his party lost both seats, he personally scrutinized the sheriffs records for fraudulent votes. ‘I have been a constant Inspector of the Poll for this County for 30 years last past,’ he subsequently noted, ‘& in all those great contests hee that had 2000 votes canyed it for one. But whence soe many new votes have arisen in the commons, viz Bowden, Don[ha]m etc.’* The growth in these two townships was indeed spectacular. Having sent only seven voters to Chester in 1702, three years later Bowden was sending 24. Over the same short period, Dunham Massey’s share of the poll rose from just 21 to at least 63 freeholders, a threefold increase, and in 1722 sent no fewer than 83 of its inhabitants to the shire hall - one more, in fact, than can be seen voting there on the expanded county franchise in 1832!9 Cheshire was not, of course, a county characterized by open-field agriculture and copyhold tenure, but the widespread use of beneficial leases - in this instance of leases for lives - means that we have in some way to square such observed electoral behaviour with the central thrust of Allen’s tenurial arguments.

The clear implication of our informant’s last sentence is that the earl of Warrington, the only substantial landowner in each township, had been busily creating ‘faggot’ votes for the Whig interest there, either by the splitting of existing freeholds or else by the proliferation of new ones, carved out of the parish common. Indeed, we do know that while there was little parliamentary enclosure in Cheshire, there was a considerable amount of piecemeal encroachment onto the commons and wastes in the county throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - most of it for

The voting figures and estimates in this paragraph are taken from the Kent, Huntingdonshire and Durham entries in Basil Duke Henning, The House of Commons, 1660-1690 (3 vols., 1983); Romney Sedgwick, The House of Commons, 171 5-1 754 (2 vols., 1970); Sir Lewis Namier and John Brooke, T h e House of Commons, 1754-1790 (3 vols., 1964); and R. G. Thorne, The House of Commons, 1790-1820 (5 vols., 1986).

Voting figures for election contests are drawn from records stored in the Cheshire Elections Database at Hull University, compilation of which was made possible by hnding from the Economic and Social Research Council between 1990 and 1992 under award number ROO0 23 1988.

Cheshire R. O., Shackerley MSS: note by Peter Shackerley on a booth-by-booth analysis of the 1705 poll book, n.d.

These figures are taken from the Cheshire Elections Database. The element of uncertainty arises because of another township called Dunham on the Hill. When read in conjunction with the Wamngton rentals (see below, note lo), the 1705 poll book clearly identifies 64 voters as coming from Dunham Massey, but also records another as having his freehold merely in ‘Dunham’ for whom there is no rental entry.

’

Elections and the Yeoman 51

10 perfectly good agricultural purposes. Yet despite our tory squire’s suspicions, such was not the cause of the burgeoning voterates of Bowden and Dunham Massey. In the latter township, 53 of those who went to the polls in 1705 can be identified unequivocally in the earl’s rental for 1704; two more inherited land from a relative during the intervening year; one took up a lease recently surrendered; and three men appear as free tenants of the barony of Dunham Massey, two of whom may also have been the effective occupiers of property shown in the rental as being held by widowed female relatives. All of these except the last three seem to have held their small parcels of land by means of leases for lives - as already noted, the commonest form of agricultural tenure in Cheshire before the Napoleonic Wars - and to have done so, moreover, for several years prior to 1702. That leaves just five voters unaccounted for who presumably held their farms in fee simple or by lease from other small proprietors who did so; but since none of them had voted four years previously, there remains the slight possibility that here at last are our fraudulent common dwellers!”

While the Warrington rentals and suit rolls for the barony of Dunham Massey give no positive indication of freehold splitting, nor of cottages being thrown up on the commons to provide their occupants with a vote, they do provide evidence of two rather mfferent phenomena: viz. the politicization of a previously indifferent section of the electorate and the polling of men with only marginal qualifications to vote. Party agents regularly used land-tax assessments as surrogate electoral registers, but had the tories of Bucklow Hundred been able to check the names of Dunham’s voters in 1705 against the earl’s rentals as well, they would have discovered not only a number of substantial yeomen, several of whom had remained aloof from politics during previous contests, but also 17 men with lands valued at less than 40 shillings per annum, none of whom had voted in 1701. Now it is certainly true that some of these apparently ‘poor’ voters may also have possessed estates in fee simple, or else have held leases for more substantial properties in neighbouring townships; but it is hard to escape the impression that the rising tide of partisanship after 1700 was encouraging electoral agents to press the indigent as well as the reluctant!

Although the number of freehold properties (and hence of potential voters) in most Cheshire townships remained fairly constant throughout the eighteenth century, the rapid growth in voter participation seen here on the Warrington estates was repeated in scores of others where politically active landlords were able to mobilize their so-called ‘freehold tenants’ behind a party cause. The matching of poll books with rentals and suit rolls reveals both the persistence of a substantial yeoman element in

Michael Turner, English Parliamentary Enclosure (Folkestone, 1980), pp. 38, 54, 178; C. Stella Davies, 7 k e Agricultural H i m r y o j Cheshire, 2 750- 2850 (Chetham Society, 3rd ser., X, Manchester, 1960), pp. 18-19, 28 and ch. 3, passim.

John Rylands University Library of Manchester, Dunham Massey MSS: transcripts of the 1701 and 1704 rentals (originals held at Dunham Massey); ibid., D M 21/3, suit rolls for 1701, 1702 and 1705.

For those incautious enough to use such a marginal property qualification to vote against their landlord’s wishes, the process of electoral enfianchisement might have a sting in the tail, as John Low, the parish clerk of Bowdon, dmovered to his cost after the 1705 contest. Although his tenement was valued in the 1704 rental at A;1 10s Od and paid an ‘Old Rent’ ofjust 10s a year, it was subsequently endorsed in the earl’s own hand: ‘He polled for this, we recon it at 40s clear.’ Alongside this in a column headed ‘To Renew’ has been added the legend: ‘Never to have another lease because of his ill carriage to my family.’ Dunham Massey MSS: transcript of the 1704 rental, p. 9: Bowdon, entry no. 13.

12

“)

l1

l 2

52 Stephen W. Baskewille

the electorate, and its widespread deference, at least among those holding land under beneficial leases, to the political wishes of the great landowners. What cannot be so easily determined for Cheshire is the proportion of the electorate holding land in fee simple; only those freeholders identifiable as the ‘free tenants’ of manorial lords can be known for certain, albeit that some contemporary lists of ‘charterers’ are available for the northern parishes in the late seventeenth century.13 Moreover, it needs to be admitted that, if only by virtue of its tenurial arrangements, Cheshire can hardly be regarded as a ‘typical’ county before 1832.

Let us therefore consider another northern shire in which both the economic and electoral fortunes of the yeoman may be equally open to scrutiny. Cumberland went to the polls infrequently in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but at least the contests took place at more or less regular intervals throughout the period covered by this paper. Freeholders voted for members to serve the undivided county in 1702, 1722, 1768, 1774, and 1831, after which the Reform Act split the county into Eastern and Western Divisions. In the east contests occurred in 1837, 1841 and 1852; in the west they did so in 1832, 1833, 1835 and 1857. Complete or partial poll books are known to survive for all of these elections, save those of 1702 and 1852.14

In 1702 there are only thought to have been about 2,000 voters in the county, but by 1722 this had risen to 2,627, and during the bitterly fought contest of 1768 some 4,412 men offered their votes, of which at least 352 were rejected by the sheriff.” At the begmning of the eighteenth century, most of the land in Cumberland was held by customary tenure, or ‘tenant right’, which to all intents and purposes amounted to a copyhold of inheritance. Customary tenants, therefore, were certainly yeomen by Robert Allen’s definition, but did not vote. Apart from a few leaseholders for lives occupying church lands, the bulk of the county’s electorate at the opening of the eighteenth century was made up of peasant proprietors holding parcels of ancient h-eehold in fee simple.I6

l 3 See G. Ormerod, History ofthe County Palatine and Ci ty of Chester (2nd edn., revised by T. Helsby, 3 vols., 1882), I, passim. A ‘charterer’ was one who held a title deed (or ‘charter’) that might testify to his keeholder status.

W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: T h e Stmale in the Constituencies, 1701-1725 (1970). p. 127; Poll Books. c . 16962872: A Directory to Holdings in Great Britain, ed. Jeremy Gibson and Colin Rogers (2nd edn., Federation of Family History Societies, Birmingham, 1990), p. 19. McCalmont’s Parliamentary Poll Book: Brit& Election Results, 2832-1918, ed. J. Vincent and M. Stenton (8th edn., Brighton, 1971). pt.

A copy of the 1722 poll book is preserved among the Egemont MSS at Cockermouth Castle (D/Lec, Box 110: Cockermouth election papers), and can be examined a t the Cumbria R. 0. (Carlisle). A machine-readable version is available at the University of Teesside. For the voting figures in 1768, see W. W. Bean, The Parliamentary Representation ofthe Six Northern Counties of England (Hull, 1890). p. 4. The number of votes said to have been ‘offered 81 rejected’ does not tally with the final retum.

l 6 For a range ofperspectives on the changing state of land tenure in Cumbria during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most of which share and/or expand upon Allen’s view of yeoman decline, see, for example, G. P. Jones, ‘The Decline ofthe Yeomanry in the Lake Counties’, Transactions ofthe Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new ser., LXII (1962), 198-223; J. V. Beckett, ‘The Decline of the Small Landowner in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century England: Some Regional Consid- erations’, Agricultural History Review, XXX (1982), 97-1 11; C. E. Searle, ‘ “The Odd Corner ofEngland”: An Analysis of a Rural Social Formation in Transition, Cumbria 1700-1914’, University of Essex Ph.D., 1983; N. Gregson, ‘Tawney Revisited CustomandtheEmergenceofCapitalistClassRelationsinNorth-West Curnbria’, Economic History Rwiew, 2nd ser., XLII (1989), 18-41; C. E. Searle, ‘Cumbria’s Parliamentary Enclosure Movement: A Comparative Case Study in Rural Quiescence,’ Transartions ofthe Cumberland and Westmorland Antiquarian and Archaeological Society, new ser., XCV (1995), 247-69.

l 4

I, pp. 72-4.

Elections and the Yeoman 53

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed a steady consolidation of landholding in the county, particularly on the coastal plain, where the Lowthers, Cunvens, Wyndhams and other early mining entrepreneurs of lesser status were keen to acquire mineral rights to the extensive coal and iron ore deposits of the regon. But this tendency to engross the land in great estates was partially o&et by another, which saw a number of the county’s landed magnates selling the freehold of several dozen manors to their customary tenants in a practice known locally, and with unconscious irony, as ‘enfranchisement’. For the purposes of illustration, I shall again focus on a single representative territory within which to explore the effect of these conflicting forces on the yeoman farmers of the shire.

The neighbouring parishes of Lamplugh and Arlecdon lie a few miles east of Workington on the inland margins of the west Cumberland coalfield. Ignoring here the iron-mining township of Frizington to the south, the area forms a low-lying agricultural basin hemmed in between the Lakeland massif to the east and the windswept hills of Whillimoor rising up to the south and west. In 1700, the area was held as two substantial manors, each of which included property in both parishes: Kelton and Arlecdon belonging to the Patricksons of Stockhow Hall and Lamplugh owned by an ancient armorial family of the same name. Most of the local inhabitants worked family farms of between 20 and 60 acres in size (plus rights to pasture sheep and cattle on the commons) and held their lands by tenant right.

Between 1717 and 1731, however, Thomas Lamplugh sold off the greater part of his manorial estate, retaining only the lands farmed in demesne and part of two other farmsteads. In view of the fact that the largest single act of enfranchisement in 1717 created some 51 freehold properties, it is perhaps surprising that five years later only nine ofthe new owners definitely bothered to travel the short distance to Cockermouth to cast their votes.’* Yet while apathy seems the most likely explanation for this dismal showing, the name of one Livewell Green of Whitehaven may suggest another; for there is no record of either Green or his family farming in Lamplugh in the early eighteenth century. It is surely conceivable that many, perhaps a majority, of the freeholds purchased in 1717 were still encumbered by mortgages, which would have meant both the legal title and the electoral franchise passing to the mortgagee. Was Livewell Green, then, a mortgage-holding merchant who chose to vote in right of his new security?

By 1722, also as the result of a mortgage, Kelton and Arlecdon was in the effective possession of Sir James Lowther of Whitehaven, himself a candidate in the election; but with only half a dozen free tenants owing suit of court, the manor could produce only one additional voter who was not also enfranchised a t Lamplugh. Lowther lost

17

19

For a discussion of the motives that lay behind enfranchisement, see Searle, ’Cumbria’s Parliamentary Enclosure Movement,’ esp. pp. 248-50.

Cumbria R. 0. (Carlisle), Lamplugh MSS, D/Lam/3/2: deed of enfranchisement, 1 Oct. 1717. Two more of those voting in 1722 may have been heirs to property enfranchised in 1717. For the smaller 1731 enfranchisement, see Cumbria R. 0. (Carlisle), Dickinson MSS, D/Di/4/31: deed ofenfranchisement, 11 Mar. 1731.

‘9 See Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman, pp. 102-4, for a brief discussion of developments in mortgage law during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For a fuller consideration of the legal technicalities, see W. S. Holdsworth, A n Historical Introduction to the Land Law (Oxford, 1927), pp. 25644; A. W. B. Simpson, A n Introduction to the History ofthe Land Law (Oxford, 1961). pp. 132-4, 225-9.

54 Stephen W. Baskewille

his election by 50 votes. Seeking to carry both county seats for his interest in 1768, Sir James Lowther of Lowther’s campaign was much better organized than his distant cousin’s had been 46 years earlier, with copies of the land tax cross-referenced to freeholder lists, estate valuations and canvass returns all available to his agents. Instead of the five voters which it had sent to Cockermouth in 1722, Lamplugh parish now sent 42; Arlecdon township, meanwhile, could only improve the ten freeholders it had previously furnished by one. In fact, though, as Lowther’s fastidious records show, only four additional votes were there to be gained. O f these, one was at sea when the poll was taken; another declined to take the freehold oath, even though he possessed property valued at A30 a year; and a third had his vote rejected because he was thought insane. Only one Arlecdon voter, therefore, wilfully abstained. Clearly, in Lamplugh and Arlecdon, as at Dunham Massey, the massively increased voterate owed less to the polling of dubious freeholds (which were in any case closely scrutinized at this election) than it did to a Herculean effort to get the vote out.20

It remains to ask what changes the Great Reform Act made to the composition of the county electorate; and here, of course, our task is made immeasurably easier by the development of proper electoral registration. Even so, one must bear in mind that not all those qualified to register necessarily availed themselves of the right. This once said, however, it becomes much easier after 1832 to identify abstainers as well as to analyse the different categories of those now entitled to vote. In terms of political calculation, it was undoubtedly the Chandos clause, which extended the franchise to tenants-at-will paying at least A50 per annum, that has most exercised historians; but a number of other important amendments were also enacted. The right of life-leaseholders to vote was in future to be limited to those who actually occupied their property, unless it was worth more than A10 after the payment of all charges; towns like Chester that were considered counties of themselves could henceforth send freeholders to poll in the shires of which they were part; and most important of all perhaps, at least for the midland counties, copyholders with estates worth A10 a year or more were granted the vote.22 Whatever they may have achieved for the electoral influence of great landowners, these changes not only restored the franchise to large numbers of farmers who had slumped to the status of tenants-at-will during the late eighteenth century, but also undoubtedly added a good many yeomen to the electorate who had not previously been able to vote at all.

In Cumberland, as late as 1851, freeholders in fee simple remained the largest single category of registered voters in many townships. In the 23 subdivisions that made up

Cumbria R. 0. (Carlisle), Lonsdale MSS, D/Lons/L. As well as the items indicated in the text, the large collection of materials pertaining to the 1768 election also includes ‘Office’ and ‘Court’ books summarizing the personal information collected, and an alphabetical ‘Record of Poll’ book for each ward. For a discussion of the wider issues raised by and management of this contest, see R. B. Levis, ‘Sir James Lowther and the Political Tactics of the Cumberland Election of 1768’, Northern History, XIX (1983),

See, for example, T. J. Nossiter, ‘Aspects of Electoral Behaviour in English Constituencies, 1832- 1868’. in Mass Politic Studies in Political Sociology, ed. Erik AUardt and Stein Rokkan (New York, 1970). pp. 16689; Michael Brock, The Great Reform Act (1973), passim; David Cresap Moore, T h e Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Ninefeenth Century English Political System (Hassocks., 1976), pp. 150-8,

21

2o

108-27. 21

162-8, 179, 234-6, 347-8, 385. ‘* 2 WiU. IV, c. 45, sections XVII-XX.

Elections and the Yeoman 55

the Aspatria polling district, freeholders constituted 56 per cent of the electoral roll; in Egremont polling district, of which Arlecdon and Lamplugh were a small part, they made up 72 per cent of the total. This figure is skewed, however, by the inclusion of 310 Whitehaven voters, 302 of whom were freeholders; with these omitted, the proportion drops to nearer 63 per cent. Nevertheless, across the county as a whole, the registered electorate in 1832 numbered 8,783, almost a 100 per cent increase on the numbers who polled in 1768.24 The proportional success of the yeomen freeholders is partly explained by a continuing trend towards enfranchisement; but to some extent it must also reflect the little noticed fact that a single property, if renting for more than A50 pounds a year, could now enfranchise two voters. If Cumberland f m s had all been owned by landed magnates, this would hardly have had a significant effect; but many of the new rentiers were themselves men of yeoman stock, even if they now increasingly appear in our records as doctors, lawyers, land agents and mining engineers.

In Arlecdon, 37 of the parish’s 44 regstered electors voted in 1832; 15 of these were A50 occupiers, mostly of farmsteads until recently part of the Lowther estate. Eight electors appear on the regster as the owners and occupiers respectively of four properties. Holdings in the manor of Kelton and Arlecdon had been enfranchised by the earl of Lonsdale in 1810 and the common had been enclosed by act of parliament between 1819 and 1823. Together with the collapse of agricultural prices at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the cost of these measures was too great for many of the new owners, and those who had not yet sold out to larger landowners were often heavily mortgaged.25 In Lamplugh, both the number of electors and the ratio of freeholders to occupiers were almost identical, but with this important difference, that much of the land there was still owned by the heirs and assigns of the yeoman families that had purchased their freeholds in 1717 and 1731.

Space does not permit us here to consider Cheshire’s post-1832 electorate in any depth, but a few simple points can be made. Firstly, here as in other shires, the number of those entitled to vote grew markedly. Divided into Northern and Southern Divisions by the Reform Act, the county had a total of 10,233 registered electors in 1832.26 Secondly, although freeholders in fee simple were a good deal more numerous than they had been in 1734 - especially on former crown lands like Delamere Forest and in areas where the Liverpool and Manchester middle classes were beginning to set themselves up as a new ‘villa gentry’ - nevertheless, life-leaseholds remained

23 Cumbria R. 0. (Carlisle), QRP/2/2/15: Cumberland. Wesfern Division Register o f Voters. 1851-2

24 McCalmont’s Parliamentary Poll Book, ed. Vincent and Stenton, pt. I, pp. 72-4. 25 Cumbna R. 0. (Carlisle), QRP/2/2/2: The Register of the Electors to Vote in the Choice 4

Members o f Parliament, for the Western Division 4 the County o f Cumberland (Carlisle, n.d.); Ibid., QRP/3/25-33: poll book for the Western Division of Cumberland, 1832. For documents relating to the enfranchisement and enclosure of Kelron and Arlecdon, see especially ibid., D/Lons/W, ‘Ex Box 7’/Bundle 2: enfranchisement counterparts, Manor of Kelton and Arlecdon, 8 May 1810; An Actfor Enclosing the Manor 4 Kelton and Arlecdon (1819); ibid, QRE/1/126: Kelton and Arlecdon Enclosure Award, 12 July 1823. I am currently working on a book-length study of land-holding patterns and capital formation in this part of Cumberland, where farm mortgages were common from the 1790s onwards. At least after 1832 mortgagors were not disenfranchised unless they ceased to occupy the property: see 2 Will. IV, c. 45, section XXIII .

23

(Carlisle 1851).

26 McCalmont’s Parliamentary Poll Book, ed. Vincent and Stenton, pt. I , pp. 55-6.

56 Stephen W. Baskerville

common in rural townships such as Alpraham, where 25 of the 34 inhabitants polling in 1837 still held their properties by means of such beneficial leases. Increasingly, however, as the nineteenth century wore on, it was the A50 tenants-at-will who was becoming the ‘typical’ Cheshire

In conclusion, then, it is important to consider the small-print of Allen’s argument with reference to elections. For the yeoman was not everywhere in decline:* and even where his share of total landholding had been drastically reduced since the end of the seventeenth century, in terms of absolute numbers he and his kind remained a highly visible feature of the local political community. At root, the problem is one of definitions: Allen’s yeomen were members of a composite class, held together by their common relationship to the customary economy even as they were divided by internal divisions of wealth and tenurial status. Some prospered; others were ruined. But whereas the socio-economic differences could often be minimal as between copyholders and other customary tenants on the one hand and small freeholders and life-leaseholders on the other, in terms of access to the franchise the gulf between these two groups, at any rate before the passage of the Great Reform Act, remained vast. Well-to-do copyholders, though they were certainly yeomen in Allen’s termi- nology, were quite simply excluded from the electoral equation in all but the most exceptional circumstances. Thus in areas such as the midlands where copyhold tenures had once predominated, their decimation during the course of the eighteenth century had little or no impact on the size and vitality ofthe county electorate. For psephological purposes at least, the yeomanry here must be disaggregated, and the fortunes of freeholding owner-occupiers studied in rather more detail, if the paradox of declining numbers of yeomen set alongside rising (or at least static) numbers of voters is to be resolved.

Thus to answer directly the question with which we started, any decline in the total numbers of fieeholders and beneficial leaseholders between c.1700 and 1832 appears to have been more than offset by a significant and sustained increase in their rate of electoral participation in those shires that continued going to the poll. In Cheshire, a plausible explanation for the rising numbers of voters in the early decades of the eighteenth century, followed by the preservation of a scarcely diminished (if unpolled) electorate thereafter, must be sought partly in the growing efficiency of electoral management in the county, and partly in the retention of beneficial leases as a primary form ofland-tenure there well into the nineteenth century. In Cumberland, during the same period, the wholesale enfi-anchisement of customary holdings was

*’ For an informed discussion of the fundamental shifts in the patterns of land tenure and farm tenancy that occurred in Cheshire in the century after 1750, see Davies, Agricultural History of Cheshire, ch. 2, passim. *” In his otherwise excellent book Enclosure and the Yeoman, Allen is much given to sweeping generalizations about the total destruction of the English peasantry: vide his claim that ‘The acquisition of peasant propeny by large landowners commenced after the Restoration and was complete before Waterloo’ @. 78); or his assertion that ‘Whether peasants are defined as owner-occupiers or as famly farmers, there can be no question that the class had essentially disappeared from English agriculture by the late eighteenth century’ (p. 79). Nevertheless, his own sample data show that as late as 1790, 7,623 out of 10,800 farms and cottages in the south midlands (or 70.6 per cent) were in held in parcels ofbetween nought and 60 acres. As he himself adrmts: ‘Even though most of England’s farm land was in large farms, most farms were small’ (p. 93). True enough, a small-holding of less than five acres might not constitute much of a farm; but even in 1701, as the Dunham Massey rentals show, it could still endow its ‘peasant’ owner with a vote.

Elections and the Yeoman 57

evidently creating small freehold estates at a quicker rate than enclosure and other market pressures were moving to consolidate and extinguish them. Moreover, when yeoman families did leave the land and/or their social class in either of these counties, it was not always via the ‘down escalator’ into the disenfranchised proletariat, but sometimes by the ‘up-escalator’ into the professions or skilled trades where their electoral involvement could be maintained or even enhanced. A more detailed analysis of those who continued to cast votes in the midland counties is urgently needed before we can usefully speculate as to whether these or other factors were at work in such areas to forestall the collapse of the rural electorate.

Self-evidently, though, the yeoman voter continued to survive for at least a generation beyond the franchise reforms of the 1830s. Just how independently he exercised his political judgments is, of course, another matter - one with which this paper has not really concerned itself; but if widespread owner-occupation had never been a guarantee of electoral liberty, neither, it seems, was the rise of the large farm and ubiquity of the tenant-at-will quite the one-sided political victory for the great landed magnates that many contemporaries, and not a few historians, have imagined it to be.