Engaging account of the fortunes of a farming family during the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Proputty, proputty, proputty: Tennyson's "Northern Farmer, New Style"
could hear the word in the rhythm of his horse's hooves as he cantered
between his fields. The Dixon family built up their estate in
Holton-le-Moor, betweenMarket Rasen and Caistor, from a minor purchase
in 1741 to the point where they owned the whole parish, with a fine
house, a governess for their daughters, and a phaeton in which to ride
out. But despite these marks of status, they remained working farmers
well into the Victorian era. Even more remarkably, they created and
preserved a comprehensive archive, including farming accounts, diaries
and correspondence. Dr Richard Olney has known this archive for nearly
fifty years, first uncovering the documentary riches at Holton Hall
(where manuscripts from the loft had to be lowered in baskets to the
study below) and subsequently cataloguing the entire collection in the
LincolnshireArchives. In this book he creates a vivid portrait of the
building up of a farming estate over several generations, revealing the
introduction of agricultural improvements, the use of canals and, later,
railways to access wider markets, and the place of "the middling sort"
in nineteenth-century English rural society.
Richard Olney was an archivist at the Lincolnshire Archives Office from
1969 to 1975, and an Assistant Keeper with the Royal Commission on
Historical Manuscripts from 1976 to 2003. His publications include
Lincolnshire Politics 1832-1885 (Oxford 1973) and Rural Society and
County Government in Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire (History of
Lincolnshire Committee 1979).
