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Trajectories of Aristocratic Wealth, 1858–2018: Evidence from Probate

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2022

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Abstract

In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.

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Original Manuscript
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 61 , Issue 3 , July 2022 , pp. 644 - 675
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Copyright © The Author(s), published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the North American Conference on British Studies

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Footnotes

They thank Craig Barker and Caitriona Beaumont for supporting this research, and Donna Loftus and Andrew Walker for constructive comments on an earlier version of this article presented at the 2019 Social History Association Conference. They are grateful to Sasha Fields and Gary Ellis for assistance in collecting data.

References

1 Popular culture is replete with portrayals of the aristocracy as wrapped in a sense of decay and experiencing imminent decline. Consider the 1991 television serialization of Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel Brideshead Revisited and the television series Downton Abbey (2010–2015) and subsequent film (2019). The BBC documentary The Last Dukes portrays dukes as a group under threat, whose way of life is fast disappearing: Michael Waldman, The Last Dukes, aired 26 October 2015, on BBC Two, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06mvy6r. A Google Trend search for the English aristocracy shows a drop in interest in this group since 2004. The Nouveaux Pauvres gives many examples of down-at-heel aristocrats. See below for references to historical works that treat the aristocracy as becoming bourgeois working professionals: Monson, Nicholas and Scott, Debra: The Nouveaux Pauvres: A Guide to Downward Mobility (London, 1984)Google Scholar. As F M. L. Thompson stated in his 1989 presidential address to the Royal Historical Society, the landed aristocracy “has performed an astonishing vanishing trick. This has been so effective that most people believe that the landed aristocracy has vanished from the public consciousness because it has been obliterated, apart from a few harmless survivors who act as caretakers for sundry parts of the national heritage.” Thompson, F. M. L., “English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property. Collapse and Survival,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, no. 40 (1990): 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 10.

2 Thompson, F. M. L., English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1963)Google Scholar; Rubinstein, W. D., Elites and the Wealthy in Modern Britain: Essays in Social and Economic History (London, 1987)Google Scholar; Bush, M. L., The English Aristocracy: A Comparative Synthesis (Manchester, 1984)Google Scholar; Beckett, J. V., The Aristocracy in England, 1660–1914 (Oxford 1986)Google Scholar; Mandler, Peter, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven, 1997)Google Scholar; Cannadine, David, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Wasson, Ellis, Born to Rule: British Political Elites (Stroud, 2000)Google Scholar; Wasson, Ellis, Aristocracy and the Modern World (London, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There have been some journalistic pieces such as Bryant's, Chris Entitled: A Critical History of the British Aristocracy (London, 2017)Google Scholar; Rubinstein expanded and reissued his Elites and the Wealthy in Modern Britain (Brighton, 2017), but the chapters on the aristocracy are from the 1980s.

4 For example, Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 92–94; Beckett, Aristocracy in England, 198; Bush, English Aristocracy, 62–69, 152–55; Thompson, English Landed Society, 308.

5 We view much of the loss of political influence as occurring through the growth of new political parties and restrictions on the power of the House of Lords. For examples, see Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 37–54, esp. 39; Beckett, Aristocracy in England, 13; Bush, English Aristocracy, 167–69.

6 Much of the writing on retrenchment, loss of confidence, fragmentation, and the reduction of influence is associated with the loss of land that farmers lived upon and others used, the decline in safe seats voted in by dependents, and so on. For example, see Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 98, 444; Beckett, Aristocracy in England, 474. On the rise of the landless aristocrat, see Bush, The English Aristocracy, 157.

7 On the intersection of the loss of political influence and the growth in hostile media and legislation, see, for example, Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 41, 61–62.

8 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 71–86; Thompson, English Landed Society, chap. 12.

9 See Thompson, English Landed Society, chaps. 11 and 12; see also Thompson, “English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property”; F. M. L. Thompson, “English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century,” in Anciennes et nouvelles aristocraties: De 1880 à nos jours, ed. Didier Lancien and Monique de Saint-Martin (Paris, 2007), 11–27, in which he emphasizes the persistence of the richer aristocracy through to the 1980s.

10 See Bush, English Aristocracy, 166, 158.

11 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 420.

12 Cannadine, 657.

13 Cannadine, 658.

14 Cannadine, 660.

15 Cannadine, Aspects of Aristocracy: Grandeur and Decline in Modern Britain (London, 1994), 54.

16 Beckett, Aristocracy in England, 294.

17 Beckett, 298, 301, 303.

18 Beckett, 475.

19 Beckett, 476.

20 Beckett, 477–78.

21 Thompson, English Landed Society, 309.

22 Thompson, 303.

23 Thompson, 330–32.

24 Thompson, 338.

25 Thompson, “English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property”; Thompson, “English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century.”

26 Bush, English Aristocracy, 153.

27 It is certainly the case that some historians are explicit in their timings, at least in their broad statements and chapter headings. Thompson treats 1880–1914 as an “Indian summer” and 1914–1939 as a period of “eclipse.” Thompson, English Landed Society, chaps. 11 and 12, respectively. Bush, as we have seen, asserts the persistence of some families up to World War II and collapse thereafter. But both seem to suggest even further persistence as well as earlier collapses, blurring the timings that they assert in their overviews.

28 Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Cambridge, 2006); Aaron Reeves et al., “The Decline and Persistence of the Old Boy: Private Schools and Elite Recruitment, 1897 to 2016,” American Sociological Review 82, no. 6 (2017): 1139–66; Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA, 2014); Facundo Alvaredo, Anthony B. Atkinson, and Savlatore Morelli, “Top Wealth Shares in the UK over More Than a Century,” Journal of Public Economics, no. 162 (June 2018): 28–47.

29 The peerage has tended to be the evidentiary focus of existing scholarship on the aristocracy (see note 30, below). We avoid considering life peerages, since the object of interest here is the aristocracy as a transmitter of wealth and power across generations through the mechanism of primogeniture and inherited status.

30 These tend to be the great families, in part since they leave more data, letters, actions in the public realm, holdings, and interests. See, for example, the acknowledgments in Thompson, English Landed Society, viii. Historians do have data on less notable families, but these tend to be rare diaries, purely self-reporting accounts that together represent a tiny proportion of the group under study. So, one might argue that historians of the aristocracy have built their arguments on a rather limited convenience sample from a small subgroup of a small subgroup of the aristocracy—the upper peerage, with much of this material being from self-selected archives.

31 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century, 2–3.

32 Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern Britain, 11.

33 All of this expresses, of course, debates exercised in the philosophy of knowledge, from Karl Popper and before, but the reference to Piketty and Rubinstein is more apposite given their sensitivity to the charged character of writing on wealth and inequality, and hence the ease with which opinion can distort fact-finding and analysis.

34 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 25.

35 Cannadine, 125.

36 Cannadine, 136.

37 See, for example, Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 92–94. On falling rents against consistent costs, see Beckett, Aristocracy in England, 198, 203–4. On falling rents and increasing costs, see Bush, English Aristocracy, 62–63; and on falling rents caused by foreign farm products, see Bush, English Aristocracy, 152–55, and Thompson, who argues in English Landed Society, 308, that behind all other changes was the great agricultural depression of 1873–1896, as well as the importation of American wheat, foreign wool, and refrigerated perishable goods.

38 See, for example, Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 90–91; Bush, English Aristocracy, 158.

39 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 125, 98 (on retrenchment), 444 (on fragmentation).

40 Cannadine, 97; Beckett, Aristocracy in England, 477–78; Bush, English Aristocracy, 155–56; Thompson, English Landed Society, 328, 333.

41 Beckett points to an interwar recession in agriculture in Aristocracy in England, 477–78; Bush talks of the impact of postwar taxes in English Aristocracy, 153; Thompson talks of the passing of estates to distant cousins, as well as increased tax and stable rents, in English Landed Society, 328.

42 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 20, 147–48; Alvaredo, Atkinson, and Morelli, “Top Wealth Shares in the UK,” 6–7.

43 These records are held at Somerset House in London but have been entirely digitized to allow for remote access and searching by name and date of death. For records from 1996, more detailed searches are possible in terms of date of probate, and first names; these records are now publicly available on the government probate website, https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk/.

44 W. D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution (New Brunswick, 1981), Tom Nicholas, “Clogs to Clogs in Three Generations? Explaining Entrepreneurial Performance in Britain since 1850,” Journal of Economic History 59, no. 3 (1999): 688–713; Tom Nicholas, “Businessmen and Land Ownership in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review 52, no. 1 (1999): 27–44; Alastair Owens et al., “A Measure of Worth: Probate Valuations, Personal Wealth and Indebtedness in England, 1810–40,” Historical Research 79, no. 205 (2006): 383–403; Mark Rothery, “The Wealth of the English Landed Gentry, 1870–1935,” Agricultural History Review 55, no. 2 (2007): 251–68; David Green et al., “Lives in the Balance? Gender, Age and Assets in Late-Nineteenth-Century England and Wales,” Continuity and Change 24, no. 2 (2009): 307–35; Gregory Clark and Neil Cummins, “Intergenerational Wealth Mobility in England, 1858–2012: Surnames and Social Mobility,” Economic Journal 125, no. 582 (2014): 61–85; Erik Bengtsson et al., “Aristocratic Wealth and Inequality in a Changing Society: Sweden, 1750–1900,” Scandinavian Journal of History 44, no. 1 (2019): 27–52.

45 Barbara English, “Probate Valuations and the Death Duty Registers,” Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 57, no. 135 (1984): 80–91.

46 Mark Rothery, “The Wealth of the English Landed Gentry,” Agricultural History Review 55, no 2 (2007): 251–68.

47 We note that such an approach is likely to significantly underestimate the overall wealth of the ecosystem, as it were, in which the peers live. Settled wealth can generate personal income; it can also provide for members of the wider family generating a wealthy close network of individuals; and it can be used in many cases as an investment vehicle for growth. A large settled fortune can be a very effective bulwark against the vicissitudes of the world. Thus, by excluding this wealth, we strengthen any argument for decline and make more difficult any argument for persistence.

48 Martin Daunton, “‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’ and British Industry, 1820–1914,” Past and Present, no. 122 (1989): 119–158; English, “Probate Valuations and the Death Duty Registers”; David Nicholls, “Fractions of Capital: The Aristocracy, the City and Industry in the Development of Modern British Capitalism,” Social History 13, no. 1 (1988): 71–83; Green et al., “Lives in the Balance?”

49 Alistair Owens et al. defend the use of probate even in periods in which they report only gross wealth. They find that gross probates approached between 50 and 100 percent of the net value of an estate in two-thirds of average cases and in over four-fifths of wealthy cases. Alastair Owens et al., “A Measure of Worth: Probate Valuations, Personal Wealth and Indebtedness in England, 1810–40,” Historical Research 79, no. 205 (2006): 383–403.

50 Martin Daunton, Just Taxes: The Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1914–1979 (Cambridge, 2002), esp. 111 and 111n10.

51 Daunton, Just Taxes, 137–38, argues that the use of trusts really began to worry the Treasury in the 1910s and 1920s. Neil Cummins also argues that hidden wealth via trusts and other mechanisms becomes an issue from the 1920s and argues that it accounts for 20–32 percent of the decline in wealth among the richest Britons up to 1992. Neil Cummins, “Hidden Wealth,” CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP14020, 2021, 19,

52 Rubinstein does occasionally adjust for Retail Price Index inflation, for example, when comparing the probates of newly created peers, as in Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern Britain, 234–35, but this is rare in his work.

53 MeasuringWorth, “Five Ways to Compute the Relative Value of a UK Pound Amount, 1270 to Present,” 2022, https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/ukcompare/.

54 Additional comparative analyses of other specific rich or influential groups such as non-peerage politicians, businessmen, and the rich would allow for greater explanatory refinement and confidence—bring the broad brush into greater resolution, as it were. For example, it would allow for greater confidence in making claims over whether there is something particular to the peerage that effects their wealth. We make an initial effort in the following by comparing pre- and post-Edwardian titles.

55 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 26.

56 Further precision could be established here by separating the wealthy from the less-wealthy peers in order to reveal whether some rich peers were doing so well that their probates masked the collapsing probates of others. However, as shown below, where we separate titles by age (figure 5), this reveals different starting levels of wealth, and all titles increase in wealth during this period.

57 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 92–94; Beckett, Aristocracy in England, 477. See more sources above at notes 37 and 40.

58 Thompson, English Landed Society, chap. 11.

59 Bush, The English Aristocracy, 153.

60 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, chap. 14; Mandler, Fall and Rise of the Stately Home, chap. 9.

61 Logged because certain extreme outliers were having an extreme effect on the Ordinary Least Squares line fit to the data. We have created a graph using logged values, and it is largely the same as figure 1. Copies of the logged graph are available on request.

62 All of this shows how unlikely such a return to the past could be. It would entail the British peerage coming to own vast amounts of the assets that are central to wealth production in the twenty-first century: prime urban land, core minerals, central productivity-oriented communications infrastructure, innovative listed companies that are at the forefront of the speculative stock market. And remember, we are talking here of their personal wealth, not their settled, family-oriented wealth. No one is suggesting this. The puzzle for scholars of the aristocracy is rather that if they show equal or greater persistence as compared to the typical rich, should we see them as rational economic actors at an elite level, or are their traditional status features benefiting them in some antimodern economic manner, or is some combination of the two at work?

63 Vicky Shaw, “Nearly 770,000 UK Homes Are Million-Pound Properties,” Independent, 9 February 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/uk-million-pound-properties-homes-777000-zooplahousing-market-study-a8202056.html.

64 All this also casts doubt on the idea of the “working peer.” They may have worked, but on this reckoning, on receipt of probate, the average peer has never had to work.

65 The second-youngest peerage, that of the Duke of Westminster, was created in 1874 although the family had a marquessate from 1831, an earldom from 1784, a barony from 1761, and a baronetage from 1622.

66 We are particularly interested in identifying differences (or not), in the decline of these bourgeois versus landed peers (as discussed below). However, one might also explore the links between wealth and status by considering the effects of cultural history and memory on power and influence. This work has begun in some ways among French and other European scholars influenced by Pierre Bourdieu. See, for example, the contributions in Yme Kuiper, Nikolaj Bijleveld, and Jaap Dronker, eds., Nobilities in Europe in the Twentieth Century: Reconversion Strategies, Memory Culture and Elite Formation (Leuven, 2015), especially those of Monique de Saint Martin and the editors.

67 See notes 15 and 16, above.

68 It should be noted that Baron Winterstoke ended up the owner of a large estate. Writing of the Wills family, Thompson notes, “The Wills family in particular produced millionaires like rabbits, three just before 1914 and four more in the interwar years (and a further couple in the 1940s): the tobacco money was poured into Bristol University, but it was also employed in sprinkling Somerset and Gloucestershire with their country houses and estates.” F. M. L. Thompson Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain, 1780–1980 (Oxford, 2001), 63. Thompson reminds us that gentrification continued after 1885 and that millionaires continued to be attracted to land. The point is that, after 1885, land was not the basis of ennoblement, nor was ownership of an estate a de facto requirement of being a peer.

69 There is an interesting opportunity here to contribute to debates around the open character of the elite initiated by Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite: England, 1540–1880 (Oxford, 1986). In particular, it might be possible to define the amount of wealth required to get a new title.

70 We might note that this disaggregation of titles into the richer post-1884 cohort, which loses more wealth than the less-rich older titles, begins to unpick the confusion and imprecision around the notion of the super-rich detailed previously. We can see somewhat more clearly who the super-rich peers are as a group. The fact that this wealthy group collapses more precipitously than do the less wealthy groups also gives a good first indication that, contra all the views discussed on the super-rich peerage, sheer possession of a greater fortune does not in itself seem to be the basis for economic resilience and persistence for future generations. Greater clarity would come were we to divide the entire peerage by deciles of wealth from their first available record and track these divisions intergenerationally by family.

71 Martin J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981).

72 It is worth noting that Cannadine takes a highly uncharitable view of the British aristocracy. For example, among the many case studies he mentions, Bertrand, third Earl Russell, the intellectual titan, Nobel laureate, and peace campaigner, is only briefly mentioned, and simply as “one of the cleverest men of his generation.” Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 539.

73 Bush, English Aristocracy, 4–5.

74 Beckett, Aristocracy in England. (The noted themes run throughout the entire book.)

75 Thompson, “English Landed Society in the Twentieth Century: I, Property,” 11–12. Curiously, Thompson theorizes little as to the characteristics of the failure.

76 Ellis Wasson, Aristocracy in the Modern World, 117.

77 See the line for Britain in Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 425, figure 11.12.

78 Mandler, Stately Homes, chap. 9.

79 Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, 424.

80 Barrington Moore Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Middlesex, 1966), 39. For additional discussion of these differences between the approaches of the Junkers and the British aristocracy, see Alexander Gerschenkron, Bread and Democracy in Germany (Ithaca, 1943); Sybille H. Lehmann, “The German Elections in the 1870s: Why Germany Turned from Liberalism to Protectionism,” Journal of Economic History 70, no. 1 (2010): 146–78; Hanna Schissler, “The Junkers: Notes on the Social and Historical Significance of the Agrarian Elite in Prussia,” in Peasants and Lords in Modern Germany: Recent Studies in Agricultural History, ed. Robert Moeller (Winchester, 1986), 24–51.

81 Cannadine, Decline and Fall, 95.

82 We also note that the possession of great wealth and historical social status would likely maintain influence even as direct control slipped away.