Managing for Posterity: The Norfolk gentry and their estates c.1450-1700

By Elizabeth Griffiths

Securing the long-term survival and status of the family has always been the principal concern of the English aristocracy and gentry. Central to that ambition has been the successful management of their landed estates, whilst failure in this regard could spell ruination for an entire family. In the sixteenth century, the task became more difficult as price inflation reduced the value of rents; improved management skills were called for. In Norfolk, estates began to change hands rapidly as the unaware or simply incompetent failed to grasp the issues, while the more astute and enterprising landowners capitalised on their neighbours' misfortunes.When Sir Hamon Le Strange inherited his family's ancient estate at Hunstanton in 1604 it was much depleted and heavily encumbered. The outlook was bleak: such circumstances often led to the disappearance of families as landowners. However, within a generation, he and his remarkable wife Alice had modernised the estate and secured the family's future. After 700 years, the Le Stranges still survive and prosper on their estate at Hunstanton, making them the longest surviving gentry family in Norfolk. The first part of this book presents new research into the secret of their rare success. A key aspect of their strategy was a belief in the power (and economic value) of knowledge: Hamon and Alice wanted to ensure that their improvements would endure for posterity. To this end, they curated their knowledge through meticulous record-keeping and carefully handed it down to their successors. This behaviour, instilled in the family, not only facilitated on-going reforms, but helped future generations overcome the inevitable reversals and challenges they also faced.The second part of the book collects together four related papers from Elizabeth Griffiths' research about the Le Stranges, Hobarts and Wyndhams, republished from the Agricultural History Review and edited from two Norfolk Record Society volumes. For anyone interested in early modern rural society and agriculture and the history of Norfolk gentry estates, this volume will be essential reading, offering as it does new perspectives on the history of estate management, notably the role of women, the relationship with local communities and sustainability in agriculture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Apr 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781912260546

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Le Strange family and their records

Securing the status and long-term survival of the family has always been the principal concern of the English aristocracy and gentry. Central to that ambition, at least until the late nineteenth century, was the successful management of their landed estates. Failure to perform this somewhat tedious task could spell ruination for the family. Unfortunately for them, the task became much more difficult from the late sixteenth century as price inflation reduced the value of their rents and placed new demands on their management skills. By the 1600s estates in Norfolk were changing hands rapidly as the unlucky or simply incompetent failed to grapple with the issues, while the astute and enterprising capitalised on their misfortunes. When Sir Hamon Le Strange inherited the family’s ancient estate at Hunstanton in 1604, after a long minority, the outlook was bleak; ‘he was left neyther household stuff nor stock and his Chief House halfe built and his farme houses in such decay, so he hath built most of them out of the ground’, as his wife Alice later recalled.¹ Typically, such estates were snapped up by the great lawyers, notably Sir Henry Hobart of Blickling, who amassed huge portfolios from the profits of high office and exploited their local connections.² However, Sir Hamon, a nephew of Sir Henry, resisted this fate and, with the help of his wife, restored the fortunes of the family through the careful and innovative management of their estates.³ How they achieved this outcome and secured the future of the Le Strange family, who still prosper at Hunstanton on their estates after 700 years, is the principal subject of this book.

So what was the secret of their success? A particular aspect of the strategy pursued by Sir Hamon and Alice was the way they tried, through their records, to ensure that their improvements endured and were sustained by their successors. Fathers often wrote books of general advice for their sons, but the Le Stranges’ approach was specifically directed to passing on management skills and a detailed knowledge of the estate.⁴ In effect, Hamon and Alice created a prototype knowledge economy which they successfully handed down to their children, grandchildren and most particularly to their great-grandson, Sir Nicholas Le Strange, who inherited the estate as a minor in 1669 and lived until 1724.⁵ This activity produced an estate archive of exceptional range and quality; the documents illustrate, quite clearly, through instructions to readers and cross-referencing back to earlier documents, how knowledge was created, managed and transferred from generation to generation, and how the family believed that this procedure was essential if the estate was to be preserved for posterity.⁶ Their understanding of the economic value of knowledge and the need to pass it on resonates strongly with modern management techniques, yet historians have largely ignored this aspect of estate management; this book is an attempt to correct the omission and cast light on the process of knowledge management in the early modern period.⁷

Figure 1.1 Engraving of the portrait of Sir Hamon Le Strange by John Hoskins, 1617. NRO KL/TC 13/1/18.

Figure 1.2 Engraving of the portrait of Alice Le Strange by John Hoskins, 1617. NRO KL/TC 13/1/17.

A striking feature of the documents is Sir Hamon’s early awareness of what was required.⁸ Memoranda books dating from 1605 are full of information on the estate concerning the titles and rights to his property.⁹ In the same year he commissioned his first map and started on new accounts and field books.¹⁰ He also built up a library of agricultural texts and management manuals.¹¹ In his work Sir Hamon was guided by his guardians, Sir Henry Spelman, Sir Henry Hobart and his father-in-law, Richard Stubbe,¹² but his greatest asset by far was his wife, Alice, who soon showed her mettle, taking over the household accounts in 1610 from her husband and reviving the family tradition of weekly kitchen books in 1613.¹³ At the same time, she started receiving rents in place of her elderly father and, with his help, she bought sheep and kept tiny flocks for her five children.¹⁴ After he died in 1619 she managed her own estate at Sedgeford and reorganised the accounts and farming regimes. Gradually she extended her role, drawing up sheep accounts for the entire estate in 1625 and assuming responsibility for all the estate accounts in 1632; this included updating field books and rentals and keeping a record of the family finances. Alice’s documents are notable for their neatness and clarity; she clearly understood the need to educate her children in farming and estate management, as she had been, and to present the information in an accessible and easily transferable way for her successors.

The success of her strategy can be seen most vividly in the farming notebooks of her eldest son, Sir Nicholas. Soon after his marriage in 1631 he embarked on a new venture draining marshes at Hunstanton, Holme and, later, Heacham.¹⁵ In these notebooks, drawing on his father’s expertise in water management and building work, he provided a record of the drainage process, from the layout of drains to the cultivation of the marshes and the establishment of new farmsteads, with calculations of the costs and profits. Most significantly, he imitated the clear handwriting of his mother and designed these books as manuals for his successors. The final notebook includes a survey of what had been achieved, with fifty-five pages of notes and ‘miscellanie observations’ accompanied by instructions to the reader. In 1641, when the marshes at Heacham had become productive, the income from corn rose to £864 compared with £290 in 1621; this formed a substantial portion of estate revenues, which had increased from £1700 to £2650 per annum over the same twenty years.

Continuing success was not, however, a foregone conclusion. The Le Stranges suffered severely in the Civil War when their marshes, corn and sheep flocks were plundered by the parliamentary forces; it took them several years to restock, reinstate schemes and stabilise their finances.¹⁶ However, the point is that they did recover, unlike some other families crippled by similar losses, fines, sequestration and high taxation.¹⁷ The sheep accounts show Alice rebuilding the flocks from scratch, with relatives, friends and tenants placing sheep and paying her a small fee, which she recorded alongside tiny sums for the tithe wool and lambs; every penny counted.¹⁸ By 1650 receipts for corn, wool and sheep had almost recovered to pre-war levels, although debts remained a stubborn problem.¹⁹ The greatest threat to their lasting recovery was not so much the war as the deaths of Sir Hamon and Alice, and Sir Nicholas and his eldest son, Hamon, between 1654 and 1656. Sir Nicholas’s younger son, who inherited the estate in 1655, also died young in 1669, leaving a small child, Sir Nicholas, the fourth baronet, in the care of his aunt, Lady Astley.²⁰

Not willing personally to undertake her duties, yet desirous that the infant ‘might be educated and his estate managed with the best care and advantage’, Bridget Astley assigned the guardianship to Sir Christopher Calthorpe and John Le Strange, ‘neere relatives and friends’ of the young boy.²¹ This was a wise move. In a letter to his aunt in 1682 Sir Nicholas acknowledged his debt, ‘having rec’d Sir C.C.’s accounts for the Guardianship [of my estate] wherein I find he managed all things to the best advantage & care’.²²

Over the next forty-two years, armed with this education and upbringing, Sir Nicholas engineered a further revival of the family fortunes. His strategy included searching the ‘Evidence House’, where he found Sir Hamon’s memoranda books, as he explained in a note:

This booke I found in ye old evidence house with a decayed and worm-eaten cover thrown by and neglected. But upon perusal meeting with severall things relating to building and every material and likely to be of use, I put an index or table to that part of the booke, and such other observations as might possibly prove of service and convenience to refer to upon occasion.²³

In his estate records he referred repeatedly to Alice’s field books and rentals and used them as models for his own updated versions. He also commissioned a series of new field maps with notes explaining how they should be preserved: ‘These books ought not to be lodg’d in the ye Evidence Room. For by reason of some fault in the past the moysture & damp of that room contracts so great a mould that it is apt to spott and deface ye draughts as may be discern’d in most of ye tables.’²⁴ In other words, Sir Nicholas rebuilt the knowledge bank created by Sir Hamon, Alice and his grandfather; with even greater awareness, he tried to ensure it was used and preserved for future generations.

I

The Le Strange profile of recovery and renewal in the seventeenth century was not unique. Other Norfolk families, notably the Hobarts of Blickling, the Windhams of Felbrigg and the Townshends of Raynham, radically improved their estates and their record-keeping in the early 1600s, with women often playing a prominent part.²⁵ However, the Le Stranges were different in the scale of their activity and the intensity of their approach; they also started from a lower base and suffered more acutely in the Civil War. What their documents show, unlike those of the other families, is a genuine grasp of modern management and what was required to be commercially successful in the long run. For example, Sir Hamon fully acknowledged his wife’s accountancy skills and they worked together in partnership quite openly.²⁶ This in itself was unusual. Women were no strangers to estate management, but typically they became involved as widows or in the absence of their husbands; they rarely worked alongside and certainly not as equals.²⁷ Likewise, Sir Hamon and Alice encouraged their eldest son, Sir Nicholas, to pursue his own ventures, offering him support and guidance. From 1632 the Le Stranges effectively operated as a family management team, indicating a further awareness of the principles of managing human capital. But, above all, they understood that creating knowledge and transferring it to succeeding generations was a key factor in securing the long-term survival of gentry families and their estates.

This emphasis on knowledge and managing for posterity offers new insights into gentry life and estate management in the early modern period. Estate studies have a distinguished pedigree in economic history dating back to the post-war period when landed families, or the National Trust acting on their behalf, deposited collections in county record offices.²⁸ The initial focus was on wealth creation, agricultural innovation, moving rents, tenures and leases, the benefits of enclosure and increased productivity, all played out against a background of rising and falling landed families.²⁹ Sidney Pollard, clearly impressed by all this activity, cited the eighteenth-century landed estate as the model for large-scale industrial enterprises.³⁰ As he explained, these estates differed from other enterprises involving masses of men, such as organising armies or building fortifications, in that by the eighteenth century they were managed to make a profit. The Le Stranges, as we have seen, were fully aware of the concept in the early seventeenth century, as Alice listed the profits of her dairy between 1617 and 1634,³¹ and her son Sir Nicholas compiled tables showing the cost and profit of his drainage schemes. These references are limited and Sir Nicholas’s tables were clearly experimental; nevertheless, they recognised the need for more informative accounts and ways of assessing the real value of their enterprises.

These profit-making activities Pollard described as entrepreneurial management, as opposed to internal management, which involved the creation of management structures, the use of professionals and the organisation and incentivisation of labour. Research in this area has been notoriously deficient, with Hainsworth’s work on estate stewards often cited as a notable exception.³² The explanation for this neglect, according to Pollard, was that the British took such skills for granted and that such matters were not worthy of analysis. However, as industrialisation spread across the world, attention turned to these issues and the social and environmental context in which they existed. Reflecting these concerns, historians have worked on landowners’ relationships with their communities; their impact on rural economies and the English landscape; the existence of a moral capitalism; and the role of women in estate management.³³ Estate studies continue to be built around these themes and issues.

In the 1990s interest turned to the issue of sustainability and its application to historical situations. This has proved treacherous territory. Turner, Beckett and Afton made a promising start in their research project on ‘Sustainability in English Agriculture, c.1550–2000’, correcting a widely held assumption that sustainability was simply a problem of our times.³⁴ They drew attention to earlier crises, notably of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the open-field system designed for subsistence could no longer meet the demands for food from a rapidly rising population. Against a background of dearth, with escalating prices threatening social stability, landowners and farmers were forced to develop more market-orientated systems able to feed and ‘sustain’ growing and more diverse communities. In this context, responsibility for sustainable systems shifted from the community to individual landowners; this posed serious risks to the harmonious working of rural society. Turner, Beckett and Afton explained that, for harmony to be maintained, three core elements were required: ecology, economy and equity. These concepts, which encapsulated an enduring respect for good husbandry, an understanding of the needs of the market and access to the land and its outcome, had to be in balance for a genuinely sustainable system. This provides a model that can be applied to empirical situations, such as that of the Le Stranges at Hunstanton.

More recently, Paul Warde traced the ‘invention of sustainability’ through discourses on agricultural and forestry practices, while Ayesha Mukherjee, in her work on Hugh Platt, made a connection between dearth, knowledge making and resource management at the end of the sixteenth century.³⁵ These arguments include the idea that handing down knowledge generated sustainable solutions in rural communities.³⁶ The Le Stranges make a crucial contribution to this debate, providing an example and illustrating the activities of practitioners on the ground; but what, if anything, did sustainability mean to them?³⁷

The link between knowledge, learning and sustainability is not a new idea. Jules Pretty, in his work on sustainability in modern agriculture, has explained how knowledge underpins sustainability by providing people with the skills and understanding to live and work in sustainable ways.³⁸ Others have emphasised that sustainability is not a simple package but a process of learning, with the use of knowledge as the main mechanism for survival in periods of rapid change.³⁹ What is becoming increasingly evident is that these concepts were familiar to landowners and farmers in the seventeenth century. ‘Sustain’ was a word they used and understood. In the 1600s Sir Henry Hobart, on his newly acquired estate in Norfolk, required tenants to ‘decentlie cherish, maintain, keep and sufficiently sustain’ hedges, gates and buildings; and also to spread muck on arable ‘to the bettering, susteyning and improveing of the same’.⁴⁰ Sir Henry, a leading land reformer and commissioner for the crown lands, clearly appreciated the need to promote and protect improvements; he may well have advised his nephew, Sir Hamon Le Strange, to that effect. But ‘sustain’ meant more than that. The OED lists twelve different meanings dating back to medieval times with fourteen pages of references; the definition ‘to keep in being, to cause to continue in a certain state, to keep or maintain at a proper level, and to preserve the status of’ is most relevant to an estate study. Landowners were driven by the overwhelming desire to preserve their status and sustain their families for the future: in other words, they managed for posterity. The modern criteria for ‘sustainability’, that development should meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, does not remotely do justice to what drove these landed families. Managing for posterity is a more pertinent title for what motivated them and shaped their policies.

II

The focus of this book is on the seventeenth century, when the Le Stranges effected and sustained, through much adversity, an astonishing turnaround in their fortunes. This period is extremely significant, but it represents only a slice of a much larger archive, dating from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, which also includes records of the highest quality; in fact, historians have paid far more attention to the medieval and sixteenth-century documents than those of Sir Hamon and Alice.⁴¹ Before the project on Alice’s household accounts, Sir Hamon was known principally for his exploits in the Civil War, while Alice merited only a few passing references. Their immediate successors, including their great-grandson, Sir Nicholas, have been largely ignored. For the later centuries, despite the existence of an extensive archive and a general awareness of its potential, little has been written about the family and the estate.⁴²

As the oldest surviving gentry family in Norfolk, the Le Stranges are probably the best equipped to explain how to successfully manage for posterity. They have been associated with Hunstanton since the early twelfth century and have lived there as resident landowners since 1310, albeit with a gap of seventy years in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Le Strange archive, covering seven centuries, raises the question of whether some landed families consciously fostered a culture of record-keeping that promoted their long-term survival. Why did the Le Strange family keep such meticulous records in the first place? What role did these records play in their management for posterity? How did their approach compare with the strategies of their relatives and friends in Norfolk?

The experience of the Le Strange family also reflects the more general concerns of landed families. The quality of the documents for all the estates under discussion shows a marked improvement in the 1600s as the inflationary crises deepened and landowners needed to pay greater attention to estate business; this was followed by a noticeable simplification of the documents in the early eighteenth century as stability returned, allowing estate business to be delegated to professionals. The effect was to create a distinctive period when a handful of Norfolk gentry families were fully engaged with the modernisation of their estates. The chapters which follow, led by the experience of the Le Strange family, illustrate how the process evolved, and how they tried to secure their estates for posterity.

1 NRO, LEST/P10. See chapters 3 and 7 for further discussion of Alice’s summary of their financial affairs. From this note onwards, the prefix NRO (Norfolk Record Office) to documents in the Le Strange Collection (LEST) has been dropped.

2 See chapter 4.

3 See esp. chapter 6.

4 Sir Edward Coke drew up a list of ‘Precepts for the use of my children and their Posteritye’; for a selection of his wise advice, which had minimal impact on his sons, see C.W. James, Chief Justice Coke, His Family and Descendants at Holkham (London, 1929), pp. 78–81, Appendix VI. More generally, Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (London, 1994) cite many examples of this aspect of gentry culture, notably that of Sir John Oglander of Nunwell: pp. 20–3.

5 See chapter 5.

6 P. Warde, The Invention of Sustainability: Nature and Destiny: c.1500–1870 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 90–101, includes a section on posterity in the context of woodland management with particular reference to the popularising of the concept by John Evelyn in his widely read book Sylva, or a discourse of forest trees (1664).

7 An exception is Ursula Schlude’s work on the Electress Anna of Saxony and her creation of practical knowledge on the electoral estates in the sixteenth century, ‘Diversity of media – diversity of gender and social strata. Agrarian knowledge and the written word at a sixteenth century princely court’, paper for Rural History 2013, Bern. For a later period European historians, led by Paul Brassley, Yves Segers and Leen Van Molle, are working on ‘Knowledge networks in rural Europe since 1700’; see also Eric H. Ash, Power, Knowledge and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, MD, 2004); Peter M. Jones, Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology and Nature, 1750–1840 (Oxford, 2016).

8 Elizabeth Griffiths, ‘A Country Life’.

9 Four memoranda books survive: LEST/Q34, Q36, Q37 and Q38.

10 Between 1605 and 1633 Sir Hamon commissioned maps for every part of his estate. The earliest for Holme in 1605 is missing, but they survive for Hunstanton, 1615, LEST/AO1; Ringstead, c.1625, LEST/OD; Ringstead Brecks, LEST/OB5, OB6; Heacham (in two parts) c.1623, LEST/OC2, OB2; Sedgeford (in three parts) c.1631, LEST/OC1; Gressenhall, c.1624 NRO Hayes & Storr, 72, MR 235, 242 x 1, and Brisley, 1622, repaired by Sir Nicholas (4th Bt) in 1706, NRO MR RO402/7. Sir Nicholas also made a list of ‘Surveys and Plotts … and time when taken’ in one of Sir Hamon’s memoranda books, LEST/Q37, which is how we know about the map for Holme. Subsequently, these maps formed the basis of his books of field maps undertaken in the 1680s and 1690s.

11 Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange (Oxford, 2012), pp. 26–48 for a discussion on the use of these manuals, which included C. Estienne, Maison Rustique, or the Countrey Farme, translated by R. Surfleete in 1616.

12 Sir Henry Spelman of Congham, 1563–1641, antiquarian and jurist, ; Sir Henry Hobart (c.1560–1625), see Griffiths, ‘Management’ and ‘Sir Henry Hobart: a new hero of Norfolk agriculture?’, Agricultural History Review, 46 (1998), pp. 15–34; for Richard Stubbe see chapter 7.

13 Whittle and Griffiths, Consumption and Gender, esp. chapter 4.

14 See chapter 7.

15 See chapter 8. Four farming notebooks survive: LEST/KA6, KA9, KA10 and KA24.

16 The Le Stranges, father and three sons, were actively engaged in the civil war, playing a leading role in the defence of King’s Lynn against the parliamentary forces in 1643. R.W. Ketton-Cremer, ‘Sir Hamon L’Estrange and his sons’, Norfolk Gallery (1958), pp. 56–94.

17 R.W. Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War: A Portrait of a Society in Conflict, 2nd edn (Norwich, 1985), pp. 292–304; Heal and Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, pp. 214–26.

18 Chapter 7.

19 Griffiths, ‘A Country Life’, pp. 230–55. Receipt books have not survived for the period 1641–50, so it is difficult to assess the precise impact of the war.

20 See Figure 5.1. Lady Astley was Bridget Coke, d. of John Coke of Holkham, widow of Sir Isaac Astley of Melton Constable.

21 LEST/AA18.

22 LEST/KA11, Sir Christopher Calthorpe, son of Sir James Calthorpe of East Barsham and Catherine Lewkenor, the sister of Anne who married Sir Nicholas Le Strange in 1631. The letter to Lady Astley, LEST/P20.

23 LEST/Q38.

24 LEST/EH8 field maps of Ringstead, c.1690s.

25 See chapters 9 and 10, and also Griffiths, ‘Management’; with Overton, Farming to Halves, for a case study on the Raynham, Hunstanton, Blickling and Felbrigg estates.

26 Alice’s role in the management of Sir Hamon’s affairs was publicly acknowledged in the interrogations for the Chancery case between Robert Cremer and Sir Hamon Le Strange, 1647.

27 In their widowhoods, Eleanor Townshend at Raynham, 1493–9, Lady Frances Hobart at Blickling, 1647–65 and Katherine Windham at Felbrigg, 1689–1720 did sterling work, while Anne (nee Vaux) kept exemplary estate accounts for her husband Sir Thomas Le Strange during his absence at court in the service of Henry VIII. See B.J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (Oxford, 2002) for Eleanor Townshend and Anne Le Strange and C. Moreton, The Townshends and their World: Gentry, Law and Land in Norfolk, c.1450–1551 (Oxford, 1992).

28 P. Roebuck, Yorkshire Baronets 1640–1760: Families, Estates and Fortunes (Oxford, 1980), pp. 1–16 for a historiographical background on estate studies dating back to the seventeenth century and an extensive bibliography. The Townshend papers are still at Raynham; those for the Hobarts and the Windhams, after negotiations with the donor families, were deposited at the Norfolk Record Office by The National Trust from 1940 and 1968 respectively. The Le Strange archive arrived at the NRO after a huge fire at Hunstanton in 1951 and the family continue to make additional deposits.

29 Notable examples include M.E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640, Northamptonshire Record Society 19 (Oxford, 1954–5); A. Simpson, The Wealth of the Gentry, 1540–1640 (Cambridge, 1961); R.A.C. Parker, Coke of Norfolk: A Financial and Agricultural Study, 1707–1842 (Oxford, 1975) and more generally the work of J.H. Habakkuk, G.E. Mingay, F.M.L. Thompson, J.V. Beckett and C.G.A. Clay on landownership, the gentry and estate management.

30 S. Pollard, The Genesis of Modern Management (Cambridge, MA, 1965), pp. 25–60.

31 LEST/P8.

32 D.R. Hainsworth, Stewards, Lords and People: The Estate Steward in his World in Later Stuart England (Cambridge, 1990); Francis Guybon, the long-serving steward of Lord Fitzwilliam at Milton, was related to Francis Guybon, the principal tenant at Sedgeford and first cousin of Alice Le Strange, p. 25. For an earlier period, Rowena Archer commented on the importance of administrative history and its unpopularity amongst historians: R.L. Archer, ‘How ladies … who live on their manors ought to manage their households and estates. Women as landholders and administrators in the later Middle Ages’, in P.J.P. Goldberg (ed.), Women is a Worthy Wight: Women in English Society, c.1200–1500 (Stroud, 1992), pp. 149–81.

33 C. Oestmann, Lordship and Community: The Lestrange Family and the Village of Hunstanton in the First Half of the Sixteenth Century (Woodbridge, 1994); J. Broad, Transforming Rural Society: The Verneys and the Claydons, 1660–1820 (Cambridge, 2004); M. Cragoe, An Anglican Aristocracy: The Moral Economy of the Landed Estate in Carmathenshire, 1832–1895 (Oxford, 1996). B. McDonagh, ‘All towards improvements of the estate: Mrs Elizabeth Prowse at Wicken Northants, 1764–1810’, in R.W. Hoyle (ed.), Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain (2011); Griffiths, ‘Improving landlords or villains of the piece?’; B. McDonagh, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830 (London, 2017).

34 M. Turner, J. Beckett and B. Afton, ‘Agricultural sustainability and open-field farming in England, c.1650–1830’, International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability, 1 (2003), pp. 124–40, reprinted in J.N. Pretty (ed.), Sustainable Agriculture and Food 1: History of Agriculture and Food (London, 2008).

35 P. Warde, ‘The invention of sustainability? The issue of durability in early modern agronomy and forestry’, paper for the Land, Landscape and Environment conference, Reading (2008). A. Mukherjee, Penury into Plenty: Dearth and the Making of Knowledge in Early Modern England (London, 2014).

36 Sustainable Households and Communities: Early Modern Discourses of Environmental Change and Sustainability: workshop, Exeter, 2011, organised by A. Mukherjee and N. Whyte.

37 E.M. Griffiths, ‘Handing down knowledge and securing the future: the Le Stranges of Hunstanton, 1604–1724’, paper for Sustainable Households and Communities; ‘Managing water and water based resources: the Le Stranges of Hunstanton, Norfolk 1604–54’, for Early Modern Water Symposium, Nottingham, 2011; ‘Mapping and measuring: the key to modern management on a Norfolk estate, 1605–55’, for Early Modern Conference, Reading, 2011.

38 Pretty, Sustainable Agriculture and Food 1.

39 N.G. Röling and M.A.E. Wagemakers, Facilitating Sustainable Agriculture (Cambridge, 1998).

40 Griffiths, ‘Sir Henry Hobart’, pp. 15–34.

41 D. Gurney (ed.), ‘Household and privy purse accounts of the Le Stranges of Hunstanton from AD 1519 to AD 1578’, Archaeologia, 15 (1834), pp. 411–569; H.L. Styleman, ‘L’Estrange papers from the Hunstanton Muniment Room’, Norfolk Archaeology, 5 (1859), pp. 122–45; Hamon Le Strange, Le Strange Records: A Chronicle of the Early Le Stranges of Norfolk and the March of Wales AD 1110–1310 with the Lines of Knockin and Blackmere continued to their Extinction (London, 1916); H. Le Strange, ‘Roll of household accounts of Sir Hamon Le Strange of Hunstanton, 1347–1348’, Archaeologia, 69 (1917/18), pp. 111–20; C. Hussey, ‘Hunstanton Hall I – Norfolk’, Country Life (10 April 1926). B.J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550 (Oxford, 2002), pp. 63–76. For the first full-length modern account see Oestmann, Lordship and Community. Besides her work on Alice Le Strange, Jane Whittle has written a paper, ‘Estate management and agricultural labour, 1328–1630: the case of Hunstanton, Norfolk’, given at a meeting entitled ‘Town, country and consumers – a bouquet for Margaret Yates’, University of Reading (2014), and an article, ‘The food economy of lords, tenants and workers in a medieval village: Hunstanton, Norfolk, 1328–48’, in M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon and P. Schofield (eds), Peasants and Lords in the Medieval Economy: Essays in Honour of Bruce M.S. Campbell (Turnhout, 2015), pp. 27–57.

42 S. Wade Martins and T. Williamson, Roots of Change: Farming and the Landscape in East Anglia, c.1700–1870 (Exeter, 1999); see also K. Fryer, A Fine Strong Boy: The Life and Times of Henry L’Estrange Styleman Le Strange (Hunstanton, 2000).

Chapter 2

The medieval inheritance of the Le Strange estates

By the time Sir Hamon inherited his estate in 1604 the Le Stranges had been in possession of their lands at Hunstanton for over 450 years and resident for almost 300 (see Figure 2.1). The precise origins of the Le Stranges’ association with Hunstanton are largely a matter of conjecture. The traditional view, based on Sir William Dugdale’s account and repeated by Francis Blomefield in his History of Norfolk, was that the family was descended from Guy L’Estrange, a younger son of the duke of Brittany, who had been granted lands in Shropshire and Norfolk at the time of the Conquest.¹ This illustrious notion was firmly discounted by the antiquarian Hamon Le Strange in his book on the early Le Stranges, published in 1916.² Influenced by the Rev. Eyton’s work on Shropshire, he identified Rhiwillan Extraneous, sometimes called Roland Le Strange, as the first recorded link with Hunstanton, citing two Norfolk deeds from the reign of Henry I in 1112 and 1122.³ Roland married Matilda Le Brun, daughter and eventual heiress of Ralph Fitz Herluin, alias Ralph de Hunstanton, mesne lord at Hunstanton at the time of the Domesday Survey. After the death of Ralph, the manor came into the hands of the Le Stranges.⁴

The early Le Stranges spent little time at Hunstanton, especially after they established their principal residence at Knockin, Shropshire, in 1189, where they prospered greatly in the service of the king. In 1310, soon after the death of Sir John Le Strange, first Baron Strange of Knockin, his eldest son John, the second baron, enfeoffed his younger brother Hamon with the manor at Hunstanton. As the first Sir Hamon Le Strange, he was the founder of the junior branch of the family. He built the original house round a courtyard on a moated site, thereby signalling his intention to make Hunstanton his primary residence. However, he did not live long enough to enjoy it. He died young in 1316 leaving an infant son, another Hamon, who survived until 1362.⁵ He was responsible for the first series of household and manorial accounts.

Figure 2.1 Family Tree: Le Strange of Hunstanton, 1310–1600.

Note: Lords of Hunstanton in bold type.

Sources: Blomefield, Norfolk,, vol. 10, p. 314; Walter Rye, Norfolk Families (1912) pp. 477–82; Burke’s Landed Gentry, vol. 3 (18th edition, 1972); see also, J. H. Mayer, Extraneus, A Social and Literary Chronicle of the Families, Strange, Le Strange and L’Estrange, 1082 to 1986 (1986).

These fourteenth-century documents have long been of interest to medieval historians and