The plight of William Fletcher (1818–86)
The dwindling fortunes of a tenant farmer
The lives and fortunes of tenant farmer William Fletcher and shepherd Richard Widdows were closely entwined. Fletcher was Widdows’ employer for almost four decades: from 1841 to about 1880. Widdows was dependent on Fletcher for housing as well as employment. Throughout his working life Widdows lived with his family at Coombs Farm, the field homestead that was included in Fletcher’s lease.
The relationship between farmer and shepherd was more than transactional. They had a strong paternalistic connection. In his dotage during the early 1900s, the shepherd loyally referred to his late employer, more than two decades after his death. At a time in which, according to Reverend Henry Rendall, Great Rollright ‘had fallen a great deal into the hands of Dissenters’ (letter to Principal, Brasenose College, 3 May 1872), William Fletcher was identified as the only ‘Church Farmer’ in the congregation. Widdows also remained a devoted churchgoer, attending St Andrew’s, until the end of his life.
It seems more than a coincidence that Fletcher and Widdows both settled in Great Rollright in the same year – in 1841 – when Widdows immediately entered Fletcher’s employment. Fletcher moved directly to Rollright from his parents’ home, Blackdowns Farm at Ebrington in Gloucestershire. The farm is just to the west of Stretton-on-Fosse, where Widdows is recorded as a resident in 1835 when he married his first wife Eliza Penn. It seems most likely that Widdows, who was seven years Fletcher’s senior, was known to Fletcher before moving to Rollright. The shepherd could even have worked for Richard Fletcher, William’s father.
William Fletcher’s farming career straddles a significant period in agricultural and social history. As GE Mingay describes in Rural Life in Victorian England (1976):
‘In 1851 agriculture had employed more than a fifth of the occupied population and produced about the same proportion of the national income; fifty years later it employed less than a tenth of the labour force and its share of national income had fallen even more, to less than a fifteenth.’
The shift in the economic and social status of farming from being at the core of British life to one that was marginal manifested itself in a sharp decline, which bit hard in the final few years of the 1870s. Mingay describes the calamitous conditions that triggered the great depression in British agriculture (1873–1896), as a ‘combination of bad seasons, low prices, poor harvests and livestock losses’. Cheap grain imported from America and Russia, feeding the country’s burgeoning urban population, came at the price of farmers, whose vulnerability and ability to compete with low prices was compounded by adverse weather conditions. Many tenant farmers went bankrupt or gave up, landlords were forced to accept rent reductions and labourers, who could, migrated to the towns. Fletcher’s and Great Rollright’s fates followed this trajectory with Fletcher giving up his farm in 1880, in his early 60s, and the population of the village declining by 30% in the latter years of the century: from 459 in 1841 to 318 in 1901.
The bright years
When William Fletcher came to Great Rollright in 1841 as a 23-year-old, he must have been full of hope. Although his older brother was to inherit the family farm, his father Richard Fletcher, a prosperous Gloucestershire yeoman farmer, provided for his second son by taking out the lease for a farm at Rollright with Brasenose College. The lease included Manor Court Farm, the largest farmhouse in Rollight, and 300 acres. This was a sizeable amount of land. According to Mingay, the average farm in 1851 was 100–299 acres. On 18 March 1841, the college recorded the total annual value of the property in their valuation book as worth £452.18.9 (according to the Bank of England’s inflation calculator, it would be c £39,000 today) – suggesting a significant rent.
It is probable that Richard Fletcher continued to subsidise William for the first few years of his farming career. In 1843, Richard Fletcher made a lengthy will that included bequests for his wife and 11 children. This comprised a thousand-pound legacy to William. Shortly before his death in 1845, Richard retracted this legacy (along with that for another son, David) in a codicil, presumably because the two sons had already received significant financial support from their father.
When Fletcher was 23, in 1841, his first household in Great Rollright was modest. It was made up of Elizabeth Dee, a housekeeper of 45 (presumably a relation, as his mother’s maiden name was Dee), and two farm labourers Emma Puddock and John Dyer, both aged 15.
Within a decade, Fletcher had established himself. In 1851, he had nine labourers working for him on his farm. He was also sharing his farmhouse with his wife, Susannah, who he had married in 1842 in Blockley. Susannah (née Person) was a farmer’s daughter from Draycott, in the parish of Blockley, a few miles from Fletcher’s parents’ farm. Fletcher and Susannah had a two-year-old son, William, and they were supported by two live-in servants. Fletcher’s future seemed secure.
Dusk
In 1857, Susannah Fletcher died. Without any personal correspondence, we have no insight into the impact on Fletcher of losing his wife. All we know from the bare records is that he did not remarry.
By the 1861 census, Fletcher was a widower, living with a housekeeper in her mid 40s, a maid servant and a 72-year-old unmarried visitor, Elisabeth Orr, who is described as ‘an annuitant’ from Blackdowns. This suggests that she was an independently wealthy relation or family friend in receipt of an annuity. He had seven men and three boys in his employment.
Fletcher’s 13-year-old son William was not registered in the household. He was boarding a few miles away in Over Norton with clergyman Henry Hamilton, his wife Mary and three children. Assisted by two junior masters, Hamilton had nine pupils in his care, who travelled to this small educational establishment from as far away as Stafford, Suffolk and Devon.
William did not pursue an academic career, but followed his father into farming. After returning home to assist his father at Manor Court Farm he set up his own farm. By 1881, in his early 30s, he was married with two children, farming Nell Bridge Farm, a farm of 210 acres in East Adderbury, employing five men and one boy.
Closing in
From the mid 1860s onwards, there is a sense that Fletcher was struggling with the challenges of managing the farm. In 1865, he wrote to Brasenose College to complain about a fine levied on him. When in 1869, he renewed the lease of the farm the land was described as ‘very well cultivated and in good condition’. However, when a more detailed survey of the buildings on the property was carried out, on behalf of the college in 1872, it was apparent that although the main farmhouse was in good repair that the outbuildings were in need of substantial building work. In June 1875, an account of a fire at Coombs Farm appeared in the Oxfordshire Weekly News: the shepherd is reported returning to the field farmstead for his breakfast, after rising early at 5.30 am, to see stacks alight. Fortunately, the wind was blowing in the right direction and the fire was put out.
Finally in May 1880, Fletcher put the remaining 10-year-lease for the farm up to auction at the Crown and Cushion Hotel in Chipping Norton. By 1881, he had moved out of the farm and was living alone in Hook Norton. It was unusual for a single man of his status to have no domestic live-in help. It is indicative of severely straitened circumstances. As a tenant farmer with no home of his own, no income and only debts to show for a life in farming, he would have struggled to support himself. When he died aged 68, his ‘abode’ was listed as Adderbury, suggesting that he was living with his son William at the end of his life. He was returned to Great Rollright to be buried at St Andrew’s church by the Rector, Reverend Henry Rendall.
With thanks for Carol Dingle for providing me with a copy of the letter from the Reverend Henry Rendall.