A great deal has been written about the experiences of the British landed classes during the First World War. It has been well documented that they gave disproportionately more lives than any other class and that they contributed generously of their time, energy, and money to the war effort through their activities on the home front. To Edward Bujak's credit, he has managed to find an original and illuminating dimension to the history of the aristocracy and the war: the impact on estate life as revealed through the pages of Country Life. Bujak shows that over the course of the war, the aristocracy entailed away control of their fields and parkland to the Ministry of the Air, the War Office, and, especially, the Food Production Department. Designed parklands made way for aerodromes or the plough. Aristocrats put up with the curtailment of shooting and hunting by the Food Controller and War Office. They also kept their rents low to benefit the agricultural sector. By the end of the war, the estate system had been utterly and rather brutally transformed.

This book is concerned with England and to a lesser extent Wales. The opening chapter reveals some of the pressures faced by the English landed class before the war, as the Liberal Party, and especially David Lloyd George, targeted the land monopoly of the “idle” aristocracy by proposing a series of new taxes based on land valuation. For a time, it seemed that the war might offer a respite, that the landed classes would be rewarded for their patriotic valor. However, from the summer of 1914, the new Territorial Army began to drill in demesnes, and summer camps were established for territorial battalions and yeomanry regiments in such magnificent surroundings as Lord Lansdowne's Bowood. As the war progressed, the militarization of the countryside through legislation such as the Defence of the Realm Act further affected estate life as various government departments dictated how landowners should manage their farms, set out what agricultural policies they had to follow, and even dictated how they should play.

In chapter 2, “Mobilizing the Estate Worker,” Bujak raises the rather contentious question about the extent to which landlords coerced and cajoled their employees to join the colors. Some of the great magnates, such as the dukes of Rutland and Derby, recruited their men by emphasizing a sense of place and locality—Derby recruited whole battalions of “Pals” in Manchester and Liverpool—rather than by traditional paternalism alone. Thus, Country Life contended that recruitment was most pronounced where there was a “natural and hereditary head” (48). But recruitment came with a price to agriculture and estate life. As early as July 1914, up to 150,000 men had been taken out of the agricultural economy, and that number would double before the end of the war. These were mainly young, unskilled farm laborers—scarce enough before the war—leaving only young boys, old men, and women to take their place. In 1917, the new Ministry of Food Control was established, with responsibility for increasing the production of wheat, oats, and potatoes and encouraging landlords to plough up pasture and grassland. Under the so-called plough up campaign of 1917 and 1918, the area of tillage in England and Wales was increased from 10.3 million acres in 1913 to 12.4 million in 1918. However, more could probably have been achieved had not the crisis of labor meant that at the precise time the government demanded more tillage, skilled ploughmen were in the army.

All of this state interference in the management of estates was anathema to landlords. They were further animated by the fear that Lloyd George would nationalize land and reduce landlords to mere rentiers, denying them any influence in national agricultural development. Moreover, their leisure pursuits were compromised by both government legislation and public opinion. In prewar Edwardian England, weekend shooting parties had reached a crescendo; in 1910, the aristocracy leased shooting rights worth £1.3 million. Landlords argued that shooting leases were a viable alternative to diminishing rents, especially as there was an expanding tenantry of the nouveaux riches to take advantage, but Lloyd George would not be convinced that this use of land was for the greater good of society. Again, the war intervened: gamekeepers went to the Front with consequences for game preservation and conservation. Shooting almost disappeared; had it done so completely, Bujak contends, it “would have been a betrayal of the young aristocratic officers whose self-identity was shaped by the fields, hedgerows, and coverts where they had taken aim at their pheasants and their partridges” (80).

To a lesser extent, foxhunting was also transformed. It had traditionally been regarded as a sport that made for good cavalrymen; but the Great War had little use for such fighters. To hunt became inappropriate at a time when so many young men were dying. Thus, the Duke of Rutland contemplated putting down his Belvoir pack. On the one hand, the Board of Agriculture foresaw difficulties for the poultry industry if no one was culling foxes; on the other, keeping valuable horses at home and expending massive sums on their upkeep and feeding was as great an issue.

This is a most engaging book. Written in a lively but always erudite style, it provides an original dimension to the impact of the Great War on the English landed classes and opens up avenues for future exploration, especially in relation to comparative studies. There are some minor quibbles: the book, short as it is, could have been more stringently edited to avoid unnecessary repetition: arguments, for example, about the political attacks on land monopoly, are labored. Occasionally Bujak's own opinions are lost in a series of lengthy quotations from others. However, these criticisms should not detract from the fact that this book makes an excellent contribution to the historiography of the English landed classes and war, and it deserves to be read by academics and a much wider audience.