19/08/2026
Today we are sharing something because it is almost precisely the opposite of relevant to our territory. Because our patch was so urbanised from so early a date, we do not have very many materials about any aspect of farming, but maybe the following will nevertheless be of interest to our audience here on Facebook.
One of us is spending a lot of time up in Staffordshire at the moment, dealing with family issues, and, of course, for light relief they popped into a local studies service there and stumbled across the book in our photograph today. Despite its parochial-seeming title, it has relevance at a national level for the history of agriculture in Britain.
As part of the general process in Britain in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, known as the British (or Second) Agricultural Revolution (the well-known enclosures and conflict over the Corn Laws were a part of this), a nationally administered system was set up to offer loans to landowners to improve farmland, especially by installing modern drainage systems and improving or extending farm buildings. A system was set up for inspection and assessment of viability of proposed improvement works in order for loans to be approved, whether the money came from the government or was raised privately. This work was done by people such as local land agents, estate managers, surveyors, etc. and reports made to the Inclosure Commissioners, who administered the whole scheme and approved loans.
Andrew Thompson was such a person, being agent to Ralph Sneyd's Staffordshire estate. The loan reports that he did for the Commissioners seem still to be the only large body of such reports to have surfaced anywhere and are in the Sneyd papers in the library of the University of Keele (S3182-6). They exist because Thompson made copies of what he sent to the Commissioners, not because there is any central repository of the reports that has been found. The book is a publication (along with accounts of wider context) of the reports that Thompson made on 26 estates in Staffordshire, though he wrote reports on 180 estates in all across England and Wales, which are listed in the book and happen to include weirdly one in a parish adjacent to this writer's mother's parish in NE Wales. Altogether they cover an area from the west coast of Wales to the east coast of England, and from County Durham in the north to Wiltshire in the south, though with an understandable concentration in the English Midlands. These records potentially provide a set of quite detailed snapshots of the state of agriculture at the time over quite a wide area, though it seems that no more of them have been published since this book.
[For bibliographic completeness: Phillips, A. D. M. ed., 'The Staffordshire Reports of Andrew Thompson to the Inclosure Commissioners, 1858 – 68: Landlord Investment in Staffordshire Agriculture in the Mid-Nineteenth Century', Collections for a History of Staffordshire, Fourth Series, Volume Seventeen, Staffordshire Record Society, Stafford, 1996.]
Image Description: Contemporary colour photograph. The hardback book lies on a pale wooden surface, front cover upwards, a coloured spine label visible along the left edge. Dark pink lettering gives much of the bibliographic information over a pale, greyish blue representation of a print, which shows a rural scene. In the foreground of the scene, two pairs of people observe what is going on in the field in front of them from behind fencing. In the middle distance, workers appear to be working in and/or digging parallel trenches in the field, which may be works to drain the field. In the distance, groups of people gather near horses, horse-drawn carts, and temporary tents, suggesting an agricultural event or fair. Mature trees frame the scene, and the landscape stretches into the background.
