R. A. Houston's monograph on peasant petitions forms part of an ambitious publishing project to look at the relationship between power structures and community. This book is based on an analysis of tenant petitions to great landowners in the highland regions of the British Isles, comparing practice and context in the Scottish Highlands, Ulster, and the fringes of the English Lake District. It is therefore a refreshing antidote to all those studies of rural society in the English lowlands that have absorbed so much of the time and energy of economic, social, cultural, and demographic historians of the British countryside. The view from the north is essentially different, but it also poses problems of transnational history that Houston distinguishes well. He nicely articulates not only the different legal situation in Scotland but also the cultural and social differences in rural society and local power structures throughout the areas he studied.
The people he focuses on are the “peasant” landholders of those parts of the three kingdoms where the dominance of the small family farm had a continuity and resonance that had drained away in south. Houston uses the opening section of the book to look at these concepts and the different social and cultural patterns of landholding in northern England, the north of Ireland and Scotland, and to describe the methodology involved in using peasant petitions. He follows this with a section in which the structures of an estate-ruled world and the personnel who mediated landlord-tenant relations are set out together with the context of estate petitioning, and then with a slightly offset chapter on why there appear to be no surviving petitions in upland Wales. In the third section Houston deals with the petitions as artifact, discussing authorship and authenticity, physical form, styles of address and ending, and delivery mechanisms. In the fourth section, taking up the middle third of the book, he analyzes the content of the petitions by region, first Ulster, then the north of England, and finally the Scottish highlands. The rest of the book is composed of two sections, the first relating estates, petitions, and the contrasting poor law regimes in the three kingdoms to their relative convergence just before the end date of the study, 1850, and the second addressing the psychology of attachment to the land and questions of paternalism and deference.
Inevitably, Houston's research concentrates on estates where there are large numbers of peasant petitions. His sample encompasses the huge Breadalbane estates in the southern highlands of Scotland, stretching from Perthshire and Loch Tay across into Argyll; the Anglesey and Draper's Company estates in the north of Ireland; and the Egremont estates on the northern fringes of the English Lake District. The petitions are analyzed by subject and over time, which brings out both continuities, shifts over time, and time-specific features. Not surprisingly, most of the petitions either request land or plead for assistance in poverty. In general men petitioned for land, women for relief, and groups petitioned for community assets such as schools, roads, or dykes. In some cases the landlord's (or agent's) response is recorded as well. Quantitative data is given for the Draper's Company estates in Ireland and for Breadalbane (the latter for late-eighteenth- and mid-nineteenth-century petitions, where there are large numbers). It is possible to compare Breadalbane in the two periods, but the classifications for the north of Ireland are different and direct comparisons are difficult. The two clusters of Scottish petitions in the 1790s are specifically around land reorganization and army recruitment, which significantly skews any quantitative analysis, and the numbers of petitions so analyzed are roughly 1250. Those about military service nicely encapsulate the lordship-tenant service bond, with families petitioning to keep their sons at home to ensure viable supply of farm labor while acknowledging the laird's expectations that they would provide his military quota.
Houston makes interesting generalizations about the way in which the dynamics of landed society differed in the three kingdoms. England's landlord-tenant relations were set within a strong social respect for the rule of law, while in Scotland the traditional landlord-tenant reciprocity remained powerful and the laird was effectively the final authority in estate matters. The north of Ireland is portrayed as a society in which the prevalence of absentee landowners and importance of middlemen—both agents and large-scale tenants who basically sublet rather than farm for themselves (sometimes combining both functions)—generated a culture of farmer-landlord conflict in which tenant combinations were highly effective and often disruptive. These national characteristics need to be investigated further; indeed, the importance of Houston's work lies in the ideas to be further tested in each of the regions.
The book is nicely produced, but a map of the location of the estates would have been helpful. Its breadth of approach is ambitious and to be applauded both for comparing surprisingly different rural societies and for blending different historical approaches. Some criticisms can be leveled: the long period between 1600 and 1850 is often treated as an unchanging whole, when in reality the view projected belongs mainly to the period 1750 to 1850; the very short chapters makes the structure seem rather disjointed at times and not altogether satisfactory. This reviewer was left with the impression that perhaps a project that started with high expectations of its source did not produce results that were as interesting as the author had hoped. Certainly the examples given in the texts make them very similar in style and content to those found in southern England scattered among estate correspondence. Nevertheless this is a well-researched and well-written volume that may not say the last word on its subject but has successfully navigated many of the knotty problems of transnational history.
