Estates and Landownership

In 1873 the government carried out the only comprehensive survey of landownership Britain has ever had, partly to disprove a claim that the country was owned by a very small number of people. It proved the claim instead.

In the three counties that became Powys, a few dozen families held most of the ground, and the great majority of farmers were tenants with no security of tenure whatsoever.

How the estates were made

Three phases.

The dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s put enormous acreages of Cistercian sheepwalk on the market. Abbeycwmhir and Strata Marcella between them had held a substantial slice of upland mid Wales, and it went to laymen.

Then the Tudor and Stuart consolidation, in which Welsh gentry families who had learned to operate in English law and English court politics accumulated smaller holdings through marriage, mortgage and purchase.

Then enclosure. Parliamentary Acts between roughly 1790 and 1830 took the commons and upland grazings into private hands, and the beneficiaries were overwhelmingly those who already held land.

What a tenant's position was

Annual tenancy. No compensation for improvements. No security. In a county where the landlord was Anglican, English-speaking and Conservative and the tenant was nonconformist, Welsh-speaking and increasingly Liberal, that arrangement produced a grievance that ran through Welsh politics for fifty years.

Evictions after the 1859 and 1868 elections, when tenants voted against their landlords' wishes before the secret ballot existed, hardened it. The tithe, payable to a church most of the county did not attend, made it worse, and the tithe war of the late 1880s saw refusals and distraint sales across mid Wales.

The Royal Commission on Land in Wales reported in 1896 and documented all of it at length.

The sell-off

Then it ended, very quickly. Between roughly 1910 and 1925, and above all in 1918 to 1921, the great estates of Wales were broken up and sold, mostly to their sitting tenants.

The causes were death duties, wartime losses among heirs, high wartime farm prices that gave tenants the means to buy, and a general judgement among landowners that the political weather had changed permanently.

It is often described as the greatest change in Welsh landholding since the dissolution and that seems right. Powys went from a county of tenants to a county of owner-occupiers within about fifteen years, and the mortgages taken on in 1919 shaped farming here for two generations afterwards.

What survives

Powis Castle above Welshpool, the one great house in the county continuously occupied since the middle ages. The terraced gardens of the late seventeenth century are the best of their kind in Britain, and the Clive Collection arrived by marriage.

Gregynog near Tregynon, bought in 1920 by Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, granddaughters of the Llandinam industrialist David Davies. They founded the Gregynog Press, one of the finest private presses in Britain, and assembled the Impressionist collection now in the National Museum. The hall passed to the University of Wales in 1960.

Glansevern, Vaynor and a dozen others, mostly now in institutional, divided or private hands with their gardens the surviving element.

Reading an estate on the ground

Estate villages are legible from the buildings: matching cottages, a school, a reading room, an estate church, all in the same materials and often the same date.

Look for planted parkland with isolated mature oaks in pasture, which is what happens when a landowner enlarges a park by removing hedges but keeping the hedgerow trees. Look for lodges at gate entrances a long way from the house. Look for boundary markers with initials on them.

And in Radnorshire and Montgomeryshire, look at how straight the field walls are on the upland. Straight lines mean enclosure, and enclosure means a specific Act, a specific date and a specific set of beneficiaries, all of which are documented.