By
Briony McDonagh (@BrionyMcDonagh)
Following
on from Michelle’s recent post on her fieldwork in Malta, several of us have
decided to blog about what we’re up to over the summer break from teaching,
specifically our summer research and/or fieldwork. As a historical geographer
and landscape historian, much of the fieldwork I’m engaged in is rather
different in nature to that undertaken by my physical geography colleagues. It doesn't involve flooded rivers or exploding volcanoes, dark caves or slippery climbs up glaciers. It doesn't require a great deal in the way of equipment and doesn't involve long and detailed risk assessments (for which I count myself
extremely lucky). Instead it all takes place in the UK, a good deal of it
within two or three hours’ drive of my office here at Hull. Much of what I do
relies on a combination of landscape history fieldwork, maps, aerial
photographs and documentary records. For me, fieldwork often consists of
carefully scrutinizing – and sometimes photographing, measuring, and generally
poking around – the landscape for traces of the past in the present. Hedges,
field patterns, green lanes, boundary stones, and old buildings can all tell us
a great deal about the way past landscapes were organised, resources utilized
and space experienced by those who lived and worked there (for more on this
kind of approach to the landscape, readers might like to check out WG Hoskins’
classic The Making of the English Landscape).
Hoskins' classic The Making of the English Landscape (paperback edition)
Yet this summer my ‘fieldwork’ hasn’t for the most
part taken place in the field at all. Along with some odds and ends of
fieldwork for other projects (for example, on the Diggers – on which more
another time), I’m spending the summer chasing up loose ends for the book I’m
writing on aristocratic and gentle women’s contribution to estate management
and improvement in the long eighteenth century. This project has involved some
work in the field proper – for example, visiting country houses owned by women,
tracking down their grave inscriptions and identifying building work designed
or paid for by them – but also a great deal of archival work. I’ve been to
county record offices and private collections all over the country looking for
evidence of women’s contribution to estate management and improvement, making
use of collections from places as far apart as Cornwall and County Durham. So, like my physical geography colleagues, I’ve certainly clocked up the miles on
this project if only within the UK. Moreover, we can think of archive work as a
kind of field experience (on which see Lorimer, 2010 and Keighren, 2013). For
historical geographers and others, local and national archival repositories
provide spaces for collecting data and testing theories, sites where outcomes
are often unknown and unpredictable, and where one may have to dig through
endless boxes or volumes before alighting on something fantastic or finding
just what you hoped might be there. And while they may be neither muddy nor
dangerous, public search rooms and archive back offices are frequently cold and
uncomfortable places and the documents surprisingly filthy.
My
latest foray has been to Surrey History Centre, a new-build (and warm) archival
repository on the outskirts of Woking. In my book I’m writing a bit about a
woman called Jane More Molyneux, who inherited the Loseley Park estate near Guildford
after the deaths of her brother and sister in 1776 and 1777, respectively. Like
many of the propertied women who feature in my book, Molyneux was a dedicated
estate manager and committed bookkeeper. I spent a day reading the volumes of
estate accounts and records kept by Molyneux as she tried to repay the debts
run up by her spendthrift brother and save the estate from financial ruin. The
house was in a terrible condition: the account books contained endless payments
for ‘pans to catch the drips’ and the steward was instructed to look over the
exterior of the house every day in order to check that there was no stonework
likely to fall and injure someone! In the winter, snow had to be shovelled out
of the attics so bad were the holes in the roof. Plus the whole place seems to
have been overrun with vermin.
Yet
Molyneux took on her task with great resolve, renting out the agricultural
estate in an attempt to raise cash to repair the house, selling off outlying
parts of the estate and economizing on her housekeeping costs wherever she
could. Ultimately her efforts paid off and by the early 1790s both the house
and the estate finances were in a much improved position. Molyneux then made
the somewhat unusual decision to lease out what was left of the land in hand
including the house and gardens and move to London. Though she spent the rest
of her life in the capital, Molyneux had already done much to secure the
financial well-being of future generations of her family. Amongst the numerous
volumes of accounts, notes and memoranda she handed on to her heir – the
illegitimate son of her profligate brother – was a book recording the repairs
she had undertaken on the house and estate in the 15 years she lived on the
estate. This she had inscribed as ‘for my own perusal and satisfaction’, a note
which reminds us of the personal sense of achievement and pride that women
might take in bookkeeping, and indeed in estate management more generally – a
theme which my book explores in greater detail.
One of Molyneux's account books (above) and detail from it (below).
Original at the Surrey History Centre. Photo B. McDonagh.
So all in, this was a good day’s work
in Woking. I wasn't plagued by any of the difficulties which sometimes beset
archive work – documents ‘not fit for production’, missing items or indecipherable
handwriting – and unlike many Georgian women, Jane More Molyneux left a
substantial collection of material which can be used to reconstruct the details
of her life and estate management. More than once I’ve spent fruitless days
struggling to find the materials needed to unlock the ‘hidden histories’ of particular
female landowners, but here at Surrey my ‘fieldwork’ was a success. I’m now
working on writing up Molyneux’s role in estate management for the book, and
thinking about how her experience relates to that of other propertied women in
Georgian England. But to find out the answer to that, you’ll need to keep an
eye out for later blog posts on the project here and elsewhere. Or perhaps even
buy the book!
Further reading:
W.
G. Hoskins (1955) The Making of the English Landscape (Hodder and
Stoughton).
Innes
M. Keighren (2013) Teaching historical geography in the field, Journal of
Geography in Higher Education 37.4, 567-77.
Hayden Lorimer (2010) Caught in the nick of time: archives and fieldwork,
in Dydia DeLyser,
Steve Herbert,
Stuart Aitken,
Mike Crang
and Linda
McDowell, The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography
(Sage), 248-73.
