Acres and Heirlooms: The Survival of Britain's Historic Estates

By Madeleine Beard

Book Overview

English country life in this century is tinged with the golden glow of memory. In a fascinating examination of the demise of the great landed estates and the way landowners adapted to their new circumstances Beard tells the true story.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415032644
• ISBN13: 9780415032643
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.5" x 8.7"

Customer Reviews

Winds of change . . .

Little more than a century ago, Britain ruling class -- which is to say its landowning class -- were united by common life experiences: Early life in the same public schools under the same headmasters, followed by three years at Oxford or Cambridge, then a stint as an army officer in the appropriate regiment, all of it leavened by foxhunting and cricket (or pig-sticking and polo if you were in India). They shared a particular way of speaking, a certain set of political and religious views, and an entitlement to wealth, for compared to aristocracies on the Continent, "the English landed elite owned a very large part of its nation's territory." Then, in April 1894, it all began to change, when the Liberal chancellor of the exchequer, Sir William Harcourt, introduced death duties -- the taxes levied on inherited estates. He was followed by another chancellor, David Lloyd George, whose impoverished childhood in rural Wales had led him to despise the landowning class. The rates were low and the level of exemption considerable, but some large landowners could see what was coming. Just before the Great War, the 9th duke of Bedford sold off most of his estates in East Anglia and Devonshire and invested the proceeds in stocks and bonds. But the necessity of a family divesting itself of land and stately homes was greatly enlarged by the high officer casualty rate between 1914 and 1918 -- one in five of the British and Irish peers who served were killed, a rate almost four times that of the rank-and-file. Even if the death duties could eventually be paid, the upkeep on large, antiquated country homes was enormous; more than seven hundred were pulled down by their owners in the 20th century. The author follows the progress of this divestment of the landed elite, including the effects of World War II, the inroads of the modern Labour Party, the coming of the National Trust in 1937, and the Disneyization of stately homes to make them pay for themselves in the tourist trade. More than two dozen black-and-white plates, all of them new to me, illustrate those changes very nicely.