Land and Gender

Delving into a historical field or period outside of your specialist area of study can, it is always said, only make one a better historian.

Working with the tenancy records of the Rochester Bridge Trust since September 2010 for the ‘City and Region’ project at University of Kent has therefore been an enlightening experience. Indeed new experiences have been plenty in my interactions with the project at large (getting a grounding in economic history; working with, and digitising, historic maps; planning the delivery of a bespoke website to carry our dataset), but the records themselves have thrown up some truly surprising moments.

Today, whilst massaging the RBT dataset, I discorvered how economic approaches can be used to tell us something about gender in British history (and not merely, as is often the case, with respect to patterns of consumption).

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The small town of High Halstow near Rochester in Kent is not somewhere with which I have an acquaintance. However property records for the land there owned by the Rochester Bridge Trust between 1581 and 1914 reveal a remarkable fact: for 117 of the 333 years the main tenant of High Halstow was female.

Katerine Kelsham held the rural estate for 29 years from 1581 after the death of her husband Edward. Between 1643 and 1644 one Marye White paid £2 2s. rent per year on the property. She was awarded the property by the Bridge Wardens for, quote: "the great expense charges and troble the said Marye and her lately deceased sonne Alexander Witherley were enforced vnto in the defence of the right of the said Bridge vnto the said marsh land against the suite brought by one Sir George Theobald in his Majesties Court of Exchequer whoe thereby vaynly hoped to possess himselfe of the same". In 1659 the lease was taken by Margaret Lake who in 1674 passed it to her son, Hugh Lake. Similarly Ann Sanders (reverting back to her maiden name from Lake) took ownership in 1688 from Hugh (her late husband), and passed it to their son Nicholas in 1703. And finally one Laetitia Akers held the lease for a remarkable 41 years from 1775, during which time she saw her annual rent increase from £8 to £33 in 1795.

Hereafter the lease is held solely by men, all of which allows us to make some provisional conclusions.

These records tell us that the role of women was crucial in the early modern period to the way property was managed, inherited, maintained, and protected, only to decline (or mutate) sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century. One might speculate then that the idea of property (as land) was being renegotiated and gendered male in mid-nineteenth century Kent. This data may only provide a snapshot, but as something I’ve run across a few times since starting work on the dataset, it has forced me to ponder how even disciplines as traditionally separate as economic and gender history can, in fact, be fruitfully intertwined.