ARTHUR CHRISTOPHER BENSON.

From Macmillan's Magazine. THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE SMALLER GENTRY (1660-1800).

read, but for his pure and sober re- was a familiar figure in English counligious spirit, about which indeed much try life. Within a hundred years he might be said that would be foreign to was practically extinct, "a character the purpose of this essay. But it may now quite worn out and gone," says a be granted that he had a strong per- writer in 1792. To-day, with the modception of beauty, moral and physical, ern squire and his surroundings before in spite of a certain rigidity of tone; one's eyes, the broad estates swollen and that he had style, the gift of ex- with the wreckage of the agrarian pression, an artistic ideal, without revolution, the trim lawns and rebuilt which no purity of outlook, no exult-country-seats and town-houses, it is ant sense of beauty, can make a poet. difficult to recall even in outline the But even if his claim cannot be sus- figure of one of the smaller gentry of tained, even if his writings were not the seventeenth century. He stood poetry, we may be thankful that for apart from the yeoman in all the obstimore than half a century there have nate pride of the owner of a coat-ofbeen spirits so high, so refined, so arms, the representative of an honordevoted, as to have been misled by his able line, a member, albeit often a spiritual ardor, the lofty sublimity of threadbare member, of the governing his ideal, as to mistake his refined and class. In social standing, in habits, in enthusiastic utterance for the voice of ideas, there was no barrier between the genuine bard. him and his wealthier neighbors. He dined with them, rode to market with them, and cursed the Whigs with them on a footing of perfect equality. Poor as he might be, he was of gentle blood, and they could be no more. His house with its one keeping-room, and possibly a withdrawing-room for the womenfolk, its sleeping accommodation of the roughest, and the farm-midden hard "In dry summers the foundations upon the kitchen door, was certainly of the Manor-house can be clearly no better than, often by no means so traced upon the turf". "The estate good as a second-rate modern farmin 1795 passed with other neighboring house, and its comfort was infinitely properties into the hands of Alderman less. His furniture and belongings, Indigo, the celebrated East India mer- the settle-forms and stools of his parchant" "By a series of judicious lor, his chests and clothes-presses and purchases, his lordship has now be- his half-dozen chairs, the pewter flagcome the owner of almost the whole ons and dishes, and the row of old parish." And so on, chapter after books, were such as a decent estatechapter, runs the guide-book. In them- bailiff of our own day might legitiselves there is nothing very striking in mately aspire to own. He himself was such phrases. Yet we wonder how untravelled, ignorant, bigoted, coarse, many who read them realize that in with less knowledge of the world than these commonplaces lies the record of the drover to whom he sold his bulone of the most serious revolutions in locks, and no ideas of pleasure or English social history, of the silent recreation beyond a drinking-bout or a destruction and disappearance from coursing-match. Yet such as he was, English society of a whole class, a he filled an important place in rural class, moreover, which for at least two society. centuries had played no small part in the making of England.

"THE old Hall is now converted into a farmhouse"-"The Grange has now been unoccupied for many years

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At the close of the seventeenth century the "little squire" with his patrimony of two or three hundred a year

One does not, indeed, readily realize without figures the tremendous gaps which have been made in the ranks of the country gentry during the last two centuries by the disappearance of the

The Disappearance of the Smaller Gentry (1660-1800). 107 small squires. Speaking roughly (and gentle blood entered on the visitation all estimates upon the subject must of 1620, one hundred and thirteen are necessarily be rough, owing to absence extinct in the male line; a few are of precise statistics), two hundred years represented through a daughter's deago there were at least four times as scendants. One hundred and ninetymany gentry residing in the country as five families were entered in Ashmole's there are to-day. Allowing for the in- visitation of Berkshire in 1664; "but crease of population there ought to few survive," writes Mr. Cooper King, have been four times as many resident the latest historian of that county. Of gentry to-day as there were two hun- the list of knights, gentlemen, and dred years ago. Villages which now freeholders in the county of Chester have their one or two country-houses, drawn up in 1579, eight alone of the could then count their dozen or score eighty-one from East Cheshire are still of "bonnet lairds." The very monu- represented on their old estates. In ments of the village church, above all 1601, there were ninety gentlemen on its registers, are eloquent witnesses to the Commission of the Peace for Berkthe extent of the disaster, for a disaster shire; by 1824 eighty-seven out of the it assuredly is. "In the sixteenth ninety houses were extinct or had century," writes Mr. Baring Gould, in parted with their lands. Of fortyhis "Old Country Life," of the parish three estates in the valley of the Ribble of Ugborough in South Devon, "we in Lancashire and Yorkshire, six and find in them [the parish registers] the no more are still owned by the families names of the following families all of who held them under Elizabeth. Fifty gentle blood, occupying good houses: years ago, in his "Rural Rides," CobThe Spealts, the Prideaux, the Stures, bett noted the same phenomena in the Fowels, the Drakes, the Glass fam- southern England. On the road from ily, the Wolcombes, the Fountaynes, Warminster to Devizes within a hunthe Heles, the Crokers, the Percivals. dred years of the time he wrote there In the seventeenth century occur the were twenty-two mansion-houses of Edgcumbes, the Spoores, the Stures, sufficient note to be marked on the the Glass family again, the Hillerdens, county map; in 1826 there were only Crokers, Coolings, Heles, Collings, seven. Upon his map of thirty miles Kempthornes, the Fowells, Williams, of the valley of the Avon above SalisStrodes, Fords, Prideaux, Stures, Furlongs, Reynolds, Hurrells, Fownes, Copplestones, and Saverys. In the eighteenth century there are only the Saverys and Prideaux; by the middle of the nineteenth these are gone. The The evidence indeed is overwhelmgrand old mansion of the Fowells, that ing, not only as to the strange way in passed to the Savery family, is in which the number of the country genChancery, deserted save by a caretaker, try has crumbled and mouldered away, falling to ruins. What other mansions but that it was at the latter end of the there were in the place are now farm-seventeenth and during the eighteenth houses." At the present day indeed the vicar writes that there is not a single family of resident gentlefolk in the parish; and Ugborough is, in the opinion of Mr. Baring Gould, only an example, though perhaps a striking example, of a universal change.

The records of the herald's visitations, according to the same authority, tell the same tale. Of one hundred and twenty-four Devonshire families of

bury he marks the sites of fifty mansion-houses; forty-two of them were, when he wrote, mansion-houses no longer. A host of similar instances confront one in any county history.

centuries that the change took place. The causes are no doubt complex. In part they were economical. The Civil War was responsible for much. Apart from its direct losses, the "slighted" houses, the destroyed woods, the bare farms, hundreds of squires had to face the fact, when the shouting was over for the return of his most Sacred

1 Earwaker's East Cheshire. i. 17.

2 Clarke's Hundred of Wanting, p. 14.

troubled the poorer squires. They married traders' daughters; it was nothing strange for their younger sons to become clothiers or merchants. Many a one, even of those who had no need to turn trader, was like Squire Blundell of Crosby not above "going £40" with his sister and cousin "in an adventure to the Barbadoes." 8 And the profits were enormous. Squire Blundell in his adventure cleared a hundred per cent.; something better this than trying to find a purchaser for a granary of unsalable wheat.

Majesty, that their estates were sad- the prospect, almost the certainty, that dled with legacies of the struggle in his family acres or their proceeds the shape of debts, the payment of would yield him a far better return in which was hopeless, or which at best trade than he could ever expect from would cripple the family fortunes for a farming. To trade indeed the smaller generation. What with the free gifts gentry had nothing of the modern and loans to the king, and the exac-aversion. The courtly mind of Chamtions of the Parliament, many an berlayne was shocked to see "the sons honest gentleman, who had fought of baronets, knights, and gentlemen hard for the one and been correspond- sitting in shops and sometimes of pedingly fined by the other, found himself ling trades; " 2 no such scruples in the position of Colonel Kirkby of Kirkby Ireleth, who "so encumbered his estate that neither he nor his descendants ever succeeded in clearing it of debt; "1 or like Sir John Danvers of Danby found himself forced to sell his estate to his own tenants. And it must be remembered that with a landtax of four shillings in the pound on the gross value, and mortgage-interest at seven or eight per cent., he who went borrowing in Restoration days had a fair chance of fulfilling the old adage. Redress from the king was hopeless. The low prices of corn from 1666 to 1671 must have been the last straw to many an ancient house, already tottering on the verge of disaster. "They did talk much," noted Pepys on New Year's Day, 1667, "of the present cheapness of coru, even to a miracle; so as their farmers can pay no rent but do fling up their lands." Many estates went staggering on under the load of debt until the end of the century. The list of private acts for the sale of lands, one hundred and twenty-four in the thirty-one years of Charles the Second, two hundred and ten in the twelve years of William and Mary, two hundred and fifty-one in the short reign of Anne method by which in politics the weight is an instructive commentary. Well might Evelyn remark in 1795 that there were never so many private bills passed for the sale of estates, showing the wonderful prodigality and decay of families."

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There was always, too, before the eyes of the needy squire, who was naturally reluctant to part with his battered house and starved patrimony,

1 Annals of Cartmel, p. 77.

If the squire did desire to sell, there were a host of purchasers ready to hand. The same influences which induce men now to invest in broad acres the fortunes made in the city or at the bar were at work, but with tenfold force. The political value of land was far higher than it is to-day. To purchase land was not only to obtain a safe investment in days when trustees' stocks, government securities, and railway debentures were still in the far future, nor only, thanks to Orlando Bridgman, the surest method of securing the stability of a family against the caprices of fortune or the wastefulness of one's descendants; it was the sole

of one's money could be felt. And as
the eighteenth century wore on and
the profits to be derived from the new
agriculture became apparent, the habit
of buying up the smaller estates
became a settled policy. Wealthier
squires who had saved money, noble
houses that had repaired their fortunes
by a "marriage into the city," East
India nabobs, soldiers, chancellors,

: Present State of England, 1695, p. 261.
3 A Cavalier's Notebook, p. 248.

The Disappearance of the Smaller Gentry 1660-1800). 109 merchants, bankers, sinecurists, all further and further out of touch; the were jostling each other in their pressure to sell must have proved anxiety to help the little squire out of stronger and stronger. Once the ranks his difficulties by taking over his acres. were broken the process of destruction The Scotts, the Addingtons, the went on with increased and increasing Finches, the Duncombes, the Clives, speed, for the survivors found themthe Somers, the Pratts, the Yorkes, selves more and more isolated.1 Some the Churchills, are a few and only a of them, we know, by judicious marfew of the great fortunes which during riages, or by thrift and consequent purthe seventeenth and eighteenth cen- chasing out their neighbors, rose into turies were turned into land. the higher ranks of the squirearchy. Many without doubt simply dropped back into the yeomanry, and shared in the yeomanry's destruction. The great bulk were bought out; and upon the ruins of their order grew up the modern squire, with ten times their acreage and twenty times their rental.

Social causes hastened the downfall. A drinking-bout was looked upon as the fitting close to a day's pleasure, and drunkenness as the most venal of peccadilloes. One of Mr. Spectator's correspondents in his four hundred and seventy-fourth number found himself compelled to protest against the forced. It may be doubted whether any of tippling at these gatherings. Nor was the great agrarian changes of the eighdrinking the only form of extrav-teenth century was a more serious disagance. Sir Jeffrey Notch, the gentle- aster to rural society. No doubt the man of an ancient family "that came "bonnet laird " in his habits and ideas to a great estate some years before he resembled, as Macaulay puts it, the had discretion, and run it out in village miller or ale-house keeper of our hounds, horses, and cockfighting," was own day. Probably, as Cobbett says, not without his imitators among the he was a bigoted Tory, an obstinate smaller squires. There had come over opponent of all improvement, and a country life a new scale and a new ex- hard master. But his function in rural travagance, which was viewed with society was not a trivial one. He was undisguised dislike by such old-fash- a link, and a link the need of which we ioned Cavaliers as Squire Blundell. are sorely feeling to-day, between the The habits of visits to London or a great proprietor and his tenants, atwatering-place grew rapidly in the clos- tached to the one by the ties of traing years of the seventeenth century. dition and status, to the other by By 1710 the London season and the community of interest. Uncourtly, town-house were an accomplished fact, rough, almost brutal as he was, his inand Hanover and Grosvenor Squares, fluence was a factor to be considered, New Bond Street, the upper part of and must have made the rule of one Piccadilly, and a host of adjoining man impossible in rural society. He streets, had sprung into being within made for rural independence, even if seventy years of the death of Charles the Second for the housing of the gentry during the season.

The earthen pot comes off worst in the race down stream. In the struggle for survival it was naturally the smaller squires who went to the wall. Their position tended to grow more and more untenable. With the greater gentry who could afford a town-house, who were versed in the affairs of the day, wore the latest fashion in perruques, and could quote the new plays, the smaller squires must have fallen

that independence were only of a stolid and limited character. With all his faults and shortcomings, his destruction blotted an important feature out of country life. And occurring, as it did, as part and parcel, with the destruction of the yeoman and the peasant-farmer, of the agrarian revolution of the eighteenth century, it was the leading incident in a process which drained the rural districts of the very elements of rural life.

See on the whole subject Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England.

now at work are engaged in teaching. "A kind of university settlement The number of students in residence from Victoria College instructs and at Lady Margaret's Hall averages trains for domestic service destitute thirty-eight. Holloway College has girls at at Victoria Homes, Belfast. only been at work for seven years, and These are detached homes, in which there has not been time for much de- there is now room and appliances for velopment in the after-careers of stu- training eighty-eight girls in every kind dents, but of the one hundred and of household work." ninety-seven who have left seven are Alexandra College, Dublin, is a large married, about sixty-nine are teaching day-school where girls come up to study or preparing to teach, two are nurses, painting, music, and various other subtwo are studying at the School of Med-jects that are not taught at Newnham ; icine for Women, and about forty-seven but of the sixty-one ex-students of the are residing at home. college who have taken the University From Victoria College, Belfast, Mrs. of Ireland B.A. degree from the colByers sends the following particulars : lege, and who would, therefore, be of "In addition to over fifteen hundred the same standing as those who have students of Victoria College certificated left Newnham and Girton, forty-one by the Queen's University, Ireland; are engaged in teaching, six have marTrinity College, Dublin; Cambridge, ried, one is a medical doctor, one is Edinburgh, and London Universities; assistant to Sir C. Cameron, city anathe College of Preceptors, London, and lyst, and the remaining eleven are apthe Intermediate Education Board, Ire-parently living at home. land, there are fifty-one graduates of The total number of ex-students from the Royal University, Ireland. These Girton, Newnham, Somerville Hall, include graduates in arts and medicine. Halloway College, and Alexandra Eight former Victorians are at present medical undergraduates, with a view to becoming medical missionaries.

College, whose after-careers we have mentioned above amounts to fourteen hundred and eighty-six; of these six "Many have become wives of mis- hundred and eighty are engaged in sionaries, and sixteen unmarried ladies, teaching, two hundred and eight have former Victorians, are at present en- married, eleven are doctors or prepargaged in zenana medical and educa- ing to be doctors and medical missiontional work among the women of Syria, aries, two are nurses, eight or nine are India, and China. Twenty-one former in government employment, one is a students are now principals of flourish-bookbinder, one is a market-gardener, ing middle-class girls' schools in Ire- and one is a lawyer. Besides these land, in most cases of schools founded regular employments, which are enuby themselves, while a large number who were engaged as private or other teachers have since married.

"Twelve are at present head mistresses or assistant mistresses in high schools and other middle-class schools in England and the colonies.

"Many of our students have successfully taken up sick-nursing as a vocation. Some of these hold important posts as the heads of hospitals and other similar institutions at home and in the colonies.

"The entire certificated staff of ladies at Victoria College, with the exception of four, has been educated at Victoria College.

merated and duly scheduled in these reports, there must be, without doubt, a great deal of unpaid work done by those ex-students who live at home which it is difficult, indeed impossible, to put into any list. For instance, some university-educated women are engaged in literary work, while others employ themselves with various useful works connected with philanthropic and charitable undertakings around their homes, and are doubtless doing their business all the better and more practically for their university training; but these diverse occupations are hardly of a kind to be called a definite

career.