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THE LINCOLNSHIRE WOLDS IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY - Charles Rawding

Review by Dr Richard Olney, London
in Lincolnshire History and Archaeology, Volume 36 (2001)

What a splendid subject for a book! Even today the Lincolnshire Wolds present a distinctive and striking landscape, very different from the lowland areas surrounding them. A somewhat long and narrow region of chalk upland, it is characterised by large, isolated farms, small settlements and wide horizons. Moreover, despite the concomitants of twentieth-century agri-business, the Wold landscape is still recognisably a nineteenth-century one. Its farmsteads and cottages, coverts and plantations, churches and monuments, remind us at almost every turn of its early mid-Victorian heyday.

Charles Rawding, in this substantial study, describes many aspects of the Wolds during this period. He has a strong feeling for the landscape, and shows how it was influenced by social and economic factors. He looks at agriculture and industry (what very little industry there was), transport and communications, patterns of land ownership, settlement and population structure. He looks at rural society, class by class, showing how landowners, farmers and farm workers interacted with each other. The Wolds supported a relatively simple hierarchy and one that, as he shows, was not without its tensions, particularly between farmers and their employees. He then brings together some of these strands in a chapter entitled ‘Society on the Lincolnshire Wolds’, which discusses differences within the region such as that between open and close parishes, and concludes with a chapter on ‘Culture and changes in the villages’.

Dr Rawding also shows how the region changed during the century. In 1800 rough pasture and rabbit warrens were still features of the landscape. By 1850 the Wolds had acquired a maturity and prosperity that owed much to high farming and conspicuous landlord investment. By 1900 the distinctive character of the area in social and economic terms had been weakened by agricultural depression, and its comparative isolation had been lessened by improved communication and by the impact of external change.

In compiling this thorough account Dr Rawding has been able to draw on a corpus of already published work. The chapter on working-class culture, for instance, owes much to the work of Rex Russell. But he has also exploited primary sources, such as the tithe files in the Public Record Office, to good effect. He has been given access to three manuscript collections kept locally in private hands, and his personal knowledge of the area shows, for instance, in his comments on Wold churches and their monuments. The volume is attractively produced and includes photographs taken by the author.

How far does the book advance our understanding of the local and regional history of Lincolnshire? At the outset Dr Rawding describes the Wolds as a distinctive pays, a physical region distinguished clearly from the marshes to the east and the sandy moors to the west. This follows the work of Professor Alan Everitt, who in the 1970s used the word pays to denote a type of countryside based on geological formations and displaying distinctive landscape features. The Wolds were certainly a pays in this rather limited sense, although within the district there were and are differences between the southern Wolds on the one hand and the central and northern Wolds on the other. It is the latter which present the country’s most typical features – the big estates, large farms and long vistas. The southern Wolds around Somersby look, feel and indeed are some way from the northern Wolds around Brocklesby. They even had their own hunt.

In the final chapter, however, Dr Rawding claims that ‘the concentration of different groups of people in different villages or on the farms, the varied interest [sic] and activities of social groups, and the complex set of interactions between these groups define [my italics] the pays which was the Lincolnshire Wolds in the nineteenth century’. In other words, the Wolds were a social and cultural as well as a physical entity. Having begun by defining them in physical terms he ends by defining them in terms of local society or community. The rest of the book does not prepare us for this statement. Nor does Dr Rawding elaborate upon it for it is, in fact, his concluding statement.

Of course, the English local historian cannot adhere too rigidly to definitions: the subject is too rich and complex for that. Everitt himself warned us that local boundaries were rarely coterminous. A farming region and a social neighbourhood might not correspond, or might correspond at one period and not at another. The content of a region will vary with the historian’s approach – whether he is looking at it from an economic or a social point of view. And no region had hard and fast boundaries, like the walls of a medieval city. In the case of the Lincolnshire Wolds, however, it is worth reflecting on the factors that made it more or less of a social, economic and cultural entity during the nineteenth century.

Agriculturally, for instance, the rise of high farming made it less necessary for wold farmers to hold marsh or fen land for summer pasture. By 1850 the wold economy had become in a sense more self-sufficient. Paradoxically, however, this made it less distinctive when compared with other regions of large farms within the county. Economically, it could be argued, that the period 1750-1850, rather than 1800-1900, was the defining period for the Wolds, not least in terms of the impact of the enclosure movement. Socially one could begin with the obvious point that the Wolds had no central concentration of population. Its inhabitants looked outwards – to the market towns on its periphery. These towns were social centres but they also linked the Wolds to adjacent regions. Louth, for instance, served the marsh as well as the central Wolds, Horncastle the Fens as well as the southern Wolds. Looking at eastern Lindsey more generally, it is possible to discern two economic and social regions that actually cut the Wolds in half, so to speak. The northern and central parts belonged to a north-east Lindsey region served by Grimsby, Barton, Brigg, Caistor, Market Rasen and Louth, whilst the south fell into a region around Horncastle, Alford, Spilsby and Boston. The farmers of the Wolds, even those that Lord Yarborough claimed to have bred himself, came from a stock that was common to a wider area of north Lincolnshire. So did the labourers, a rural class whose culture was increasingly affected by urban influences during the nineteenth century. This makes Dr Rawding’s chapter on village culture particularly problematic if one is looking for a distinctive local character. It may be significant that quite a few of his examples are taken from outside the Wolds themselves.

Another approach would be to compare the Lincolnshire Wolds with those of Yorkshire. As Dr Rawding points out they are similar but also different. But an extended comparison would, of course, be beyond this study. Rather than complain about what it lacks, we should welcome it as a stimulus to further research. This is the first volume in a new series of Studies in the History of Lincolnshire. We look forward to many more.