Abstract

The estate system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by which the country was divided up among a relatively small number of landowners, has been of special interest to historical geographers. In spite of what Jones Hughes calls these 'elusive territorial entities'' there has traditionally been a fairly stereotyped view of the system in which most aspects of life and landscape were seen to be controlled by the dominant landowning class living in the Big House and owning extensive tracts of land. Latterly, historians and historical geographers have demonstrated by means of numerous case studies of management strategies on individual estates that the estate system was extremely complex in its operation, that its territorial and tenurial framework was extremely varied and that the agents of social and economic change were quite diffuse.'