As explained in the Puzzles section, we used the 1842 tithe map and its key to reconstruct the land ownership pattern at that date. This showed that the vast majority of Hempstead was owned by two men – John Drummond and Robert Fane – each of whom, on further investigation, turned out to have married daughters of Admiral Sir Eliab Harvey.
A very similar exercise can be carried out, using the ‘occupier’ rather than the ‘owner’ information from the key, to reconstruct the pattern of farms which existed in the parish in 1842.
This shows a pattern that is still broadly familiar, with the parish divided into a dozen or so farms, the largest of which were Church Farm, Hill Farm, Boarded Barn (aka Wincelow Hall) Farm, Great Dawkins Farm, Bulls Bridge Farm and Hempstead Hall Farm.
Going back in time from 1842, we have the survey of the Harvey lands that was undertaken in 1770 and, while the names of the farmers changed over a 70 year period, the names and locations of the individual farms did not. Further back still, there is little data to show who was actually farming the land although we do know that it was owned by the Harvey family from 1647, prior to which it had been held by one or other of the lords of the manors of Hempstead Hall and Crouchmans. There is no reason to think that, give or take a few sales, the individual farm boundaries changed that much going right back to the Conquest.
Moving forwards from 1842, we have much more plentiful data in the form of Census returns and trade directories such as Kelly’s. This shows continuing stability, both in the names of the farms and in their presumed boundaries, right up until the time of the First World War, when the order that had lasted for almost a millennium was radically changed. In 1921, the Estates Gazette reported one London agency alone as having sold 1.8 million acres across the UK since the end of the War in 1918. It suggested that, if this were representative of the whole, “one quarter of England must have changed hands in four years.”
The War – and the toll which it took on the agricultural workforce – was clearly the major factor in this large scale sell-off of the English countryside. But it was part of a perfect storm of other factors – a long term depression in farming profits over several decades, the introduction of death duties in 1894, and proposals by the then Chancellor, David Lloyd George, to tax unearned increases in land value. The Times expressed the situation in May 1920 like this:
The sons perhaps are lying in far-away graves; the daughters, secretly mourning some one dearer than a brother, have taken up some definite work away from home, seeking thus to still their aching hearts, and the old people, knowing there is no son or near relative left to keep up the old traditions, or so crippled by necessary taxation, that they know ‘the boy’ will never be able to carry on when they are gone, take the irrevocable step; the obliging agent appears, deferential, sympathetic, yet businesslike.
By 1905, the Hempstead Hall Estate, with 740 acres of farmland, had been gifted to the Church Army in what was likely to be a death duty avoidance scheme. And then in 1918, most of the rest of the village, including virtually all its historic farmhouses, was put up for sale by auction. The sale particulars are available in the Archive section of this site. A good deal of the land in Hempstead was acquired by Sidney J Haylock, although his acquisitions were made piecemeal over a period of some twenty years. Subsequently, a degree of consolidation took place so that farms that had been run independently for centuries now came under the same management. This process has continued to the present day, when most of the land in Hempstead is once again owned by two families, just as it was after 1066.
