Since the 1950s, in a pack led by F. M. L. Thompson, the plentiful estate records of the British landed classes, mostly deposited in country record offices (often established for that purpose), have been assiduously mined by successive waves of historians. The peak of this industry probably came in the 1970s. John E. Davies’s account of the Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire estates of the Campbells of Cawdor closely follows Thompson’s model. Many of the features are familiar. Large estates were assembled in the eighteenth century by strategic marriages and purchases. A Palladian house was erected on one, and later a Tudor Baronial house on another. Conspicuous consumption of that kind – plus Grand Tours, art collecting, field sports, horse racing (and gambling) – placed mounting burdens on rentals. Some ground could be gained by patronising agricultural improvement, and the development of turnpikes, canals, ports and railways. More, if you were lucky, could be reaped from minerals – the Cawdors were lucky, exploiting first lead and then coal mines, and revenue from minerals had surpassed agricultural income by 1900. After that date, however, declining revenues from all sources precipitated a strategic retreat from Wales. Having been based there primarily since the mid-eighteenth century, the Cawdors returned to the remote Scottish Highland estates, which had supported the Thanes of Cawdor (remembered now mostly from an historically incorrect Macbeth) since the Middle Ages.
What makes the Cawdors’ Welsh estates deviate from Thompson’s template, and what gives added interest to their history, is their Welshness. Unlike many great estates in England, the Cawdors’ Welsh estates were not organised into large tenanted farms, a sizeable landless workforce, and a division of labour between landlord and tenant that optimised investment. Instead farms were small, and in the nineteenth century held as tenancies-at-will based on yearly agreements. Improvement possibilities were more limited. Tenants were vulnerable but in practice the Cawdors’ estates evicted rarely and on the death of a tenant the estate preferred to re-let to a family member. As Matthew Cragoe argued in his study of Carmarthenshire, this system was remarkably stable. The Cawdors were only ‘partial absentees’. They were (usually) Tory and (always) Anglican; their tenants were (increasingly) Liberal and nonconformist; and while they used pretty strong language in private to express their visceral horror of nonconformists, in public the Cawdors and their agents sought to appear frigidly correct. Like most great landlords in the nineteenth century the Cawdors spent increasing amounts of time in their London townhouses, invariably leased from the Grosvenor Estate, but they involved themselves continuously in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire politics and society, and probably took their local responsibilities as magistrates and philanthropists more seriously than most English landlords. Little is said, however, about their Scottish estates, where they were almost total absentees for most of the period of this book.
Davies’s chief analytical framework for understanding this system is ‘paternalism’, but rather than considering it closely as a system, as Cragoe did, he seems more interested in asking whether the Cawdors and their agents were ‘sincere’ or ‘cynical’, whether mistakes they made (for example, indulging in a wave of evictions after the 1868 General Election or failing to abate rents adequately in the agricultural depression) were ‘misjudgements’ or ‘malicious’. The Cawdors’ Welsh estates could probably yield more fruitful conclusions if considered as a system – what made it work, what made it malfunction – and in comparison with other estates where paternalism worked differently or less well. There remain many hoards of estate records as yet untouched, and it is good to have one more summed up and available for comparative analysis.
