The World of the Small Farmer: Tenure, Profit and Politics in the Early Modern Somerset Levels

LANDSCAPES, 2017 VOL. 18, NO. 2, 200–203 BOOK REVIEWS The World of the Small Farmer: Tenure, Profit and Politics in the Early Modern Somerset Levels, by Patricia Croot, University of Hertfordshire Press (Studies in Regional and Local History 15), 2017, xiv + 226 pp., 16 figures (3 maps) and tables, £18.99 (Pbk), ISBN: 9781909291874 Taking the Brent Marsh of Somerset as her exemplar, Patricia Croot offers a wide-ranging study of rural economy and society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its principal focus is the area’s small farmers who she argues were eager to innovate, commercially-orien- tated and independent – as much in matters of politics and religion as in the management of their holdings. Altogether this is another welcome corrective to the old Marxist model which presented a peasantry oppressed and dispossessed by engrossing landlords. The Brent Marsh parishes, somewhat over 50,000 acres (20,500 ha) in the nineteenth century, lie between the Mendips, the Poldens, the Bristol Channel and, to the east, Glastonbury and Wells: roughly the western third of the Somerset Levels. The marshes (or moors as they are locally known), which are below sea level, remain subject to periodic flooding from the Bristol Channel and from the Axe and Brue rivers; reclamation and drainage dragged on well into the twentieth century. Historically, commentators were at best unenthusiastic: an early eighteenth- century vicar of East Brent (his opinion perhaps coloured by the fact that he had fallen out with his flock) reckoned ‘… winter is the only season...