Home wasn't built in a day. ~
Jane Sherwood Ace
Ah, the English countryside, I guess there's
nothing really like it. Many Americans have gotten to know this form of
greenery because of Downton Abbey, the successful BBC TV show that will
commence its 4th season in the US 3 weeks from today.
I've been fascinated with the show not only
because of the story and personalities, but because of the times in which it
takes place – before and after the First World War. For the "great English
country houses" the late 19th and early 20th century was a period of significant
economic change and challenge.
Here's my 2-act tour of the life and times of
English country houses (aka, estates), and the people who lived in them, like Downton Abbey, from an economic
vantage point.
Act I starts with the house itself. Its name,
Downton Abbey, implies that at one time in the distant past it was an abbey – a
religious monastery, convent or priory. Henry VIII's Dissolution of the
Monasteries in the early 16th century disbanded such Catholic land-holdings and
appropriated their income and assets. As you may remember from a long-ago
history class, he did this after Parliament made him the Supreme Head of the
Church of England in 1534, thus separating the English church from the Catholic
church and Papal authority. Many of these ecclesiastical properties were provided
to friends of the King and converted into private homes. Downton Abbey may have
been one of these places.
In real life, TV's Downton Abbey is actually
Highclere Castle which is part of a 1,000 acre estate in the north-central part
of Hampshire, in southern England. According to Lady Carnarvon, the mistress of
the home, Highclere Castle has probably 200 or 300 rooms, 50 to 80 bedrooms and
costs $1.5 million a year to maintain. She's also mentioned that if you know
exactly how many rooms are in your home, you probably don't have a large house.
Love the British, don't you?
The underlying economics of Downton Abbey (DA)
is historically founded on feudalism first begun in ancient times (probably by
the 9th Century). This system continued for centuries in Europe and what is now
the UK. Like other landed gentry, DA's Lord Grantham owned all the estate's
land, including its villages and towns; a relatively small portion was his
demesne. By the turn of the 11th century, an agricultural estate – which
referred to virtually all estates in England since about 90% of the population
lived and worked on the land at the time (the same percentage that lived on the
land in the 18th and early 19th centuries) – depended on slave labor (aka, indentured
servants and farmers).
In a very real sense, the landed gentry
depended on slavery - for centuries. Estates were built around the authority of
the lord of the manor/estate.[1] The
Old English word "Weallas", or Welshman, was one of the English words
for slave. The indentured farmers provided a portion of their produce as
payment in kind and/or of their time to the lord. In return for these payments,
the indentured, common folk received room and board from the lord. These
indentured people included: the cottager,
someone who farmed at least 5 acres of the lord's land, and paid for this by
working for his lord every Monday in the year, as well as for 3 days a week in
August, as the harvest approached; the shepherd,
who could use 12 nights' dung (the invaluable natural fertilizer) at Christmas
and also could keep the milk of his flock for the first 7 days after the
equinox; and the ox-herd (the man who
operated the ox that powered the plow – probably the most important person
working the land), if he had his own cow he could pasture it with his lord's
oxen and cows.
In more recent times such people have been
called "tenant farmers." In 19th century England 90% of
the land was tenanted; by the mid-20th century 60% remained tenanted.[2]
This formidable agriculturally-based economic
system began to splinter in the late 18th and 19th centuries, when the
Industrial Revolution was structurally altering England and subsequently the
world. This revolution changed English (and most other western nations')
agriculture, not just industry. My blog, The Agricultural Revolution,
discuses how this revolution actually facilitated the Industrial Revolution.
The movement of agricultural workers (aka, peasants) off the farms into the
cities - and new factories - wasn't necessarily a disaster for agricultural
estates or their owners because of increased farm productivity. Productivity
gains were realized through mechanization. These benefits more than made up for
the reduction in the mostly low-skilled agricultural work force.
By the early 20th century - when we are
viewing DA - the technical scale of agricultural production had significantly
grown. Smaller farms, presumably like those at DA, were increasingly
inefficient, mainly due to their size and inability or unwillingness to utilize
modern methods. In my mind, this is the principal source of tension between
Lord Grantham and Matthew (RIP). Matthew knew that farms based on centuries-old
tenancies and techniques that had existed at DA seemingly forever were no
longer going to work because the farms were not large enough to support WWI-era
agricultural methods and technology, like the then-new internal combustion
engine tractor and its yield-improving accouterments.
Revenue that Lord Grantham received from the
townspeople – probably a portion of each merchant's sales – was not likely to
be sufficient to make up for the fiscal challenges he faced from his farms.
Retail sales in England, including DA, were indirectly and adversely affected
by the Bank Panic of 1907. This panic was principally a US
calamity, due in no small part to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. But the
Bank of England had to raise its interest rates, partly in response to English
insurance companies paying out so much to US policyholders, which landed
financial blows to the British economy. Lastly, the British government began to
change its fiscal policies to focus on generating more tax revenues from the
considerable wealth accumulated in estates like DA. Taxes steadily increased
during the 20th century and included land, income and probate taxes as well as
death duties. Given his situation, it is likely that Lord Grantham would feel
in complete accord with George Harrison's final lyric in Taxman, "And
you're working for no one but me."
Coming soon, Act II will delve into events
during the 19th and 20th centuries that further undermined the foundations of
the tried-and-true British upper class, including Lord Grantham and Downton Abbey.
No wonder he has such an enduring dour expression.
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