Devon Farming in the 19th century Paul Brassley, University of Exeter Sources In contrast to some other counties – Lincolnshire and the East Anglian counties in particular – agricultural historians have given little attention to Devon, especially in the nineteenth century. W.G.Hoskins, in his history of the county, devoted less than three pages to 19th-century agriculture, half of which discussed the condition of agricultural labourers (Hoskins, 1972: 98-101). Over many years Robin Stanes, who as a young man spent several years farming in the South Hams, taught and wrote about Devon’s agricultural history, and his book The Old Farm (subsequently republished in an extensively illustrated edition) contains much on the nineteenth century agriculture, but it does not set out to explore the reasons for change over the century, or to distinguish between nineteenth-century and earlier or later methods. Neither is it referenced (Stanes, 1990: Stanes, 2005). Helen Harris, who also had an agricultural background, has a chapter on ‘Agriculture and Kindred Pursuits’ in her book on Dartmoor’s industrial archaeology, but her purpose is to explain the origins of what can be seen on the moor rather than to write its history, and obviously Elisabeth Stanbrook’s excellent account of the development of the farms in the middle of the moor, much of it concerned with the nineteenth century, does not extend to the county as a whole (Harris, 1972; Stanbrook, 1994). Neither does Orwin and Sellick’s classic work on the reclamation of Exmoor (Orwin and Sellick, 1970). Fortunately, however, Sarah Wilmot built on her PhD thesis to produce further investigations of south-west farming in the nineteenth century, and it is upon her work that the following paper is largely based (Wilmot, 1988; Wilmot, 1999; Wilmot, 2000).
