A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes by Jessica Fellowes
Authors: Jessica Fellowes
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rented-out arable land would customarily be divided into fields of around a hundred acres each, with crop rotation the common method of growing: wheat or winter oats, followed by half clover for hay and half feed for sheep – rye, winter barley, swedes and kale; followed by turnips. ‘This rotation was as unalterable as the law of Medes and Persians,’ wrote A. G. Street in his moving memoir,
Farmer’s Glory,
about life on the farm at the start of the twentieth century. ‘Any slight variation was considered a sin … One didn’t farm for cash profits but did one’s duty by the land.’
As well as farmland, an estate would have woods and gardens for pleasure, whether for raising game for shoots or growing flowers for the dining table.
Pleasure gardens could be extraordinarily elaborate, making them a draw for any summer party, with rockeries, lakes, tennis courts and croquet lawns. While beautiful gardens were the pride of any estate, it was only the employed workers that actually held a trowel or planted a bulb. Gardening might be something we like to do today, but it was classed as servants’ work in 1924 (the fashion for getting one’s hands dirty did not begin until after about 1930), as one can read between the lines when Lord Merton replies to Lady Shackleton, after she asks him how his lovely garden is: ‘Still lovely. Largely because I have the same lovely gardener.’ The hierarchy of responsibility for the garden was so strict that many châtelaines feared being told off by their head gardeners – who were highly skilled workers – for so much as picking their own peaches off a tree. There’s a wonderful story from Loelia Ponsonby, of her orchid expert, when she was married to the Duke of Westminster: ‘[He] lived in hopes of producing a marvellous new cross that would be worth hundreds of pounds and we sympathised with him when he came and complained that his most precious bloom, a pure white virgin veiled in white cellophane to keep away pollen-carrying insects, had been picked by Lord Carnarvon and presented to a girlfriend.’ The descendant of that Lord Carnarvon, of course, owns Highclere Castle.
It’s not so hard to understand why, until the twentieth century, a man’s influence and power were not measured by his job, his wife, his friends, his money or even his title – although all of these things helped – but mainly by his land. The landowners were the country’s principal players for hundreds of years, the long period when a vast acreage indicated both riches and influence. To be ‘landed gentry’ indicated that you came from an old landowning family and could live off the money earned from your tenant farmers. This income could be considerable: at the end of the nineteenth century, the Duke of Buccleuch earned £217,000 a year from 460,000 acres. But even the smaller estates were nothing to sneeze at: the Duke of Marlborough got by on £37,000 a year from 24,000 acres. This at a time when the average working-class family income was less than a £100 a year.
MARY
‘I love the view from up here.’
BRANSON
‘If you know the view, all the better. Follow that hedge, to the left of it is Oakwood Farm, to the right is all farmed by us.
Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George, Prime Minister 1916–1922
But as the nineteenth century turned, so did the tide against the landowners. Land, having been considered the safest and most prestigious investment of all, turned out not to be so. There were agricultural depressions, the constant threat of cheaper imports and ever-increasing taxation. Still, up to a point, these things could be borne by the aristocracy.
In the years immediately after the war, there was a certain air of prosperity and many tenants bought the farm they had previously rented. This created a new breed of owner-occupiers, which shifted the landscape agriculturally, economically and politically, coming as they did at the same time as changes in the mechanisation of farming, a
Farmer’s Glory,
about life on the farm at the start of the twentieth century. ‘Any slight variation was considered a sin … One didn’t farm for cash profits but did one’s duty by the land.’
As well as farmland, an estate would have woods and gardens for pleasure, whether for raising game for shoots or growing flowers for the dining table.
Pleasure gardens could be extraordinarily elaborate, making them a draw for any summer party, with rockeries, lakes, tennis courts and croquet lawns. While beautiful gardens were the pride of any estate, it was only the employed workers that actually held a trowel or planted a bulb. Gardening might be something we like to do today, but it was classed as servants’ work in 1924 (the fashion for getting one’s hands dirty did not begin until after about 1930), as one can read between the lines when Lord Merton replies to Lady Shackleton, after she asks him how his lovely garden is: ‘Still lovely. Largely because I have the same lovely gardener.’ The hierarchy of responsibility for the garden was so strict that many châtelaines feared being told off by their head gardeners – who were highly skilled workers – for so much as picking their own peaches off a tree. There’s a wonderful story from Loelia Ponsonby, of her orchid expert, when she was married to the Duke of Westminster: ‘[He] lived in hopes of producing a marvellous new cross that would be worth hundreds of pounds and we sympathised with him when he came and complained that his most precious bloom, a pure white virgin veiled in white cellophane to keep away pollen-carrying insects, had been picked by Lord Carnarvon and presented to a girlfriend.’ The descendant of that Lord Carnarvon, of course, owns Highclere Castle.
It’s not so hard to understand why, until the twentieth century, a man’s influence and power were not measured by his job, his wife, his friends, his money or even his title – although all of these things helped – but mainly by his land. The landowners were the country’s principal players for hundreds of years, the long period when a vast acreage indicated both riches and influence. To be ‘landed gentry’ indicated that you came from an old landowning family and could live off the money earned from your tenant farmers. This income could be considerable: at the end of the nineteenth century, the Duke of Buccleuch earned £217,000 a year from 460,000 acres. But even the smaller estates were nothing to sneeze at: the Duke of Marlborough got by on £37,000 a year from 24,000 acres. This at a time when the average working-class family income was less than a £100 a year.
MARY
‘I love the view from up here.’
BRANSON
‘If you know the view, all the better. Follow that hedge, to the left of it is Oakwood Farm, to the right is all farmed by us.
Rt. Hon. David Lloyd George, Prime Minister 1916–1922
But as the nineteenth century turned, so did the tide against the landowners. Land, having been considered the safest and most prestigious investment of all, turned out not to be so. There were agricultural depressions, the constant threat of cheaper imports and ever-increasing taxation. Still, up to a point, these things could be borne by the aristocracy.
In the years immediately after the war, there was a certain air of prosperity and many tenants bought the farm they had previously rented. This created a new breed of owner-occupiers, which shifted the landscape agriculturally, economically and politically, coming as they did at the same time as changes in the mechanisation of farming, a
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