The W G Hoskins Lecture 2013

‘The Patrician Landscape 1750-185o’ presented by Dr. Richard Gaunt.

The twenty-fourth Hoskins lecture

6 July 2013

The beautiful weather did not keep the crowds away and nearly 70 people attended the 24th annual Hoskins Day Lecture on 6 July which was given by Dr Richard Gaunt, a political historian from the University of Nottingham.

Dr Gaunt’s lecture was entitled ‘The Patrician Landscape 1750-1850’, as exemplified by the development of the area of Nottinghamshire known as ‘The Dukeries’. It was Horace Walpole who coined the phrase for the four great East Midlands ducal estates. The houses were the Duke of Kingston’s Thoresby House; Norfolk’s Worksop Manor; Portland’s Welbeck Abbey and Newcastle’s Clumber House. The estates were created by the purchase of former monastic lands and enclosing wastelands of Sherwood Forest disposed of by the Crown. They amounted to one half the area of Nottinghamshire and created almost contiguous ‘realms’ of the four dukes and other aristocrats.

Professor Gaunt surveyed the development of each of the ducal territories in turn, including developments at Rufford, (home to the Saviles, Earls of Scarbrough). After establishing the changes in landscape and the provision of a central residence for the family, he went on to detail the picturesque theories which motivated many of the owners. Pursuit of the picturesque reflected a desire to shape and have an impact upon the estate in a long- term way but also illustrated the dominant fashion for creating interesting, scenic landscapes, as opposed to continental-style formal gardens and long, uninterrupted vistas. None of this was achieved without cost – either financially (many of the owners had deep pockets and used the best advisers and practitioners of the day, including Humphrey Repton) or in terms of estate workers.

In the final part of the lecture, Dr Gaunt considered the tensions between ‘letting [people] in’ and ‘keeping them out’ of estates. On the one hand, individual owners worried about the potential for political and social revolution from their tenants (the 4th Duke of Newcastle was a notable example) but, on the other hand, were keen to bring tenants together in carefully choreographed displays of celebration at important moments in the life of the family. Elsewhere, owners such as the 4th Duke of Portland invested heavily in what has been described as the ‘first sewage farm’ in England, not only as a useful means of employment for workers hit hard by the agricultural down-turn, but in order to increase the yield on his Clipstone Park estate by means of better fertilisation.

Dr Gaunt’s lecture generated an interesting post-lecture discussion about the motivations and interests of aristocrats as estate owners during this period. In his conclusion he noted how some of the landscapes surveyed in his lecture now offer sites of recreation and tourism for a wide range of visitors; however, in many instances the houses have been swept away, leaving only the landscape behind. Thus, whilst visitors today enjoy a seemingly timeless landscape, as Dr Gaunt demonstrated, it has, in fact, been subjected to a significant degree of internal change and conflict over time.

Afterwards at Salisbury Road, there was the traditional tempting spread of comestibles for which many thanks to all the organisers. There was also the usual eccentric display of books and pamphlets, ranging from publications of CELH and David Starkey to such gems as several volumes on the history of Poole in Dorset and for 50p a wonderful booklet by a local history society Law and Disorder in Wrotham [Kent] over the Centuries, with chapters ranging from ‘Pre-Christian Justice’ to a 1947 ‘Murder on the A20’ solved by the real ‘Fabian of the Yard’.

From an original report by Richard Gaunt and Malcolm Muir