Women and estate management in the early eighteenth century: Barbara Savile at Rufford Abbey, Nottinghamshire (1700–34)

sIntroductionsThere is a growing volume of valuable research on women’s relationships with property in Britain in the early modern period.s1sAmy Erickson established that women owned much more property in early modern Britain than historical accounts and the law might suggest.s2sKey papers have emphasised the role of women as moneylenders and as keen participants in the developing financial markets of the early eighteenth century.s3sChristine Wiskin has stressed that ‘women were in business in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ and had ‘genuine engagement with their economic world’.s4sA recent critical review shows how women ‘overcame the barriers of gender, social status and circumstances of birth by exploiting the power of property’.s5sThe considerable contribution that women made to the management of landed estates in the medieval and early modern period through to the Restoration period has been highlighted by scholars such as Amanda Capern and Briony McDonagh.s6sThere is also a number of individual case studies of elite women, which further establishes female involvement in eighteenth-century estate management.s7sMcDonagh’s recent book, Elite Women and the Agricultural Landscape, 1700–1830, makes a crucial intervention to understandings of the relationship between women and landownership, in general, and the roles of elite women in estate management, in particular. She identifies female land ownership through examination of parliamentary enclosure claims in the later eighteenth century. There were more women landowners – 10 per cent on average across her sample – than the gendered property laws might suggest and considerable evidence that women used the law to protect their property from male relatives. McDonagh highlights how the small yet significant number of elite female landowners managed their own property, many actively, some as married women. She also draws attention to the...