Researchers in English local history tend to divide between those who engage with the history of a place because they were born there or live there, or have some other personal connection, and those who are footloose and are drawn to a place by the quality of its documentation. Patricia Croot's selection of the Brent Marsh in the Somerset Levels as the subject of her study arises out of family connection and long familiarity. She offers a study that is scholarly and rewarding but cannot quite escape the problem that there is no especially rich documentation for her to draw on and this offers special challenges. It is a reflection of the character of the area that this is emphatically not a study of estates. Croot's concern is with the independent small farmer, whether a copyholder for lives or a leaseholder, much less often a smallholder. The sources relating to farmers are always scanty, and as one might expect, the book lacks big, detailed accounts of individuals: instead it is based on the careful accumulation of hard-won detail. Perhaps because of Croot's reliance on court rolls and wills, it is also much fuller than are other recent studies on questions of tenure, the descent of land, and the provision that testators made for their widows and children. This forms a useful contribution to a debate that has largely stalled in recent years.
Croot addresses many areas of concern to historians without any prior interest in Somerset. There is useful information here on sub-tenancy and the market in leases; on the increase in the numbers of gentry; and in the discussion of farming, including an account of a rarely considered crop, teasel. Although one would not guess it from the contents page, there is a detailed consideration of the role of women in farming and society.
Croot's main concern is to show the commercial orientation of the small farmer; she focuses the account to explain why we should not see them as merely subsistence producers. To a degree this is an argument that no longer needs to be made. It perhaps reflects how far we have come in accepting that farmers were capitalist entrepreneurs that some of Croot's conclusion takes the form of a critique of the middle-period work of W. G. Hoskins. As this was a district with a heavy commitment to cattle rearing, dairying, and cheese and butter production, it is inevitable that the farmers there would be commercial operators. Croot shows that there were opportunities to accumulate money to invest in leases and pass over to the next generation. The lack of inventories means that there is less information about the standard of living as seen through possessions and furnishings than one might expect. Croot offers no comments on housing, not even a discussion of any vernacular housing still standing. Nor does she offer any comment on schools or the education of young men at Oxford and Cambridge, even though education should be seen every bit as much as a form of consumption and investment in the next generation as would be buying a lease or an apprenticeship for sons or daughters.
Croot does offer a telling account of popular politics. The Brent marsh might seem a remote area, but it did not lack either a political life or a religious one, and its inhabitants had a good knowledge of and reacted to events elsewhere. Men from the district joined Monmouth's rebellion (and suffered after its failure): we have an account of disturbances in 1687 that shows that divisions in local society remained raw.
There are a couple of points where I ought to express reservations. There is much less in this book about the marshes (moors) themselves than one might expect, or about their management. This was a wet landscape, at least in part. Sedgemoor was drained, albeit probably not terribly efficiently, in the 1630s, and at some periods the prospect of drainage and enclosure of the moors must have hung over the heads of the farmers of the Brent marsh. While the marsh was extensive (Croot says 10,000–13,000 acres), a map of its extent, even at the time of its enclosure and drainage, would have been useful. I also thought that Croot tended to homogenize experience over the long period she considers. The Civil War is discussed, but it forms less of a turning point than it does in other studies, and the agrarian depression of the later seventeenth century is made into less, rather than more, of a distinctive period.
Overall this is a good book to have. It will not have been an easy book to research or write and Dr. Croot is to be congratulated in bringing it to a conclusion. It fully describes a species of rural economy that has attracted little attention since the pioneering work of Joan Thirsk on Lincolnshire nearly seventy years ago. I hope it brings the present-day inhabitants of Somerset as much pleasure as it will bring Dr. Croot's professional peers.
