The Nineteenth-Century Allotment: Half an Acre and a Row
A llotments have largely escaped the historian's archival spadework, A receiving only occasional and sporadic examination by, among others, Barnett whose work dates back to 1967 and, more recently, Moselle.' This reticence is surprising given that the interest and attention surrounding them was one of the dominant themes in the debates concerning the state of rural England between 1830 and the 1850s. They were examined by the authors of the new poor law and were subject to further investigation by a parliamentary select committee in 1843.2 Moreover, they were the almost sole concern of the Labourers' Friend Society which was largely responsible for the publication of many pamphlets on the subject.3 Moselle's work is the fullest and most systematic to date insofar as he has outlined the nature of their use, their profitability for labouring families, and the reasons why farmers were so antagonistic towards them. He posits an economic model which shows how the free market would never provide enough allotments because the farmers perceived them as damaging to their economic interests. This brief summary does not do full justice to his interesting article on what is a complex subject but it does serve to show its wide ranging nature. However, this kind of work requires further elaboration on a number of issues, including the interaction of social relations between the landowners, farmers, and labourers, the timing of the spread of allotments, the roles and purposes assigned to them, and the antagonisms they aroused. Furthermore, to those unfamiliar with the theme it is necessary to offer small correctives to this view, not least the misleading impression that is given of the farmers being the main lessors of allotments. In fairness to Moselle, he does identify two other sources of allotments, namely those provided by landowners and by the parish, but his emphasis is placed overwhelmingly on the farmers: 'subletting by farmers must have been the dominant source of allotments', and he stresses that the typical picture of an allotment holding was 'a commercial arrangement between farmer and labourer'.4 None of this is to deny that farmers did sublet or give land to their employees as two examples from the 1843 Report on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture make clear: 'Many farmers give their regular labourers a potato-ground rent-free', 'and where he (labourer)