Collections

drawing

1970-1979?

LMGLM:1997.153.220

Summary: drawing, coloured drawing on blank postcard showing allotment gardens in Avenue Road, Lymington, Lymington and Pennington, Hampshire, as they would have appeared in 1920Identification note: In 1801 Arthur Young, who was the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, and who was in favour of enclosures, admitted that ‘the fact is that by nineteen out...

Read More

Description

Summary: drawing, coloured drawing on blank postcard showing allotment gardens in Avenue Road, Lymington, Lymington and Pennington, Hampshire, as they would have appeared in 1920

Identification note: In 1801 Arthur Young, who was the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, and who was in favour of enclosures, admitted that ‘the fact is that by nineteen out of twenty enclosures the poor are injured’. The fear of social unrest led to a number of private initiatives to provide the landless labourer with the means to provide for himself. The earliest of these was the ‘cow and cott’ scheme, promoted from 1765 onwards, to make land available to rent. However, these individual initiatives were insufficient to guarantee any wholesale relief for the poor, or those who lost common rights. In 1806, an Enclosure Act stipulated that a portion of land should be set aside as allotments, the act relating to Great Somerford, in Wiltshire. In 1819, the Select Vestries Act gave discretionary empowerment to parish wardens to purchase or lease land parish land up to a total of 20 acres, for letting at reasonable rents, for the promotion of industry among the poor’. The landowning classes gradually accepted allotments, partly because they believed that they improved the morality of the labourers. They reasoned that a man with a crop of potatoes was less likely to spend his time in the alehouse, and thus more likely to turn up for work. However, allotment sizes were restricted, so that a man would not exhaust himself before arriving at his paid employment! The Barfields allotments in Lymington were on common land owned by the Burrard family, which had been used by the borough of Lymington for strip farming along with Highfield and Westfield.

Share this:

Follow us on social media or join our newsletter

Get in touch with St Barbe

  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.