This fine publication sheds much light upon Rutland's county town of Oakham and its management, properties and socioeconomic history. Oakham was the centre for surrounding agricultural areas, a significant market, and an important focus for landed elites, notably George Finch the 9th Earl of Winchilsea (1752–1826), the grandson of the 2nd Earl of Nottingham who built nearby Burley on the Hill in Rutland. His holdings and urban interests in 1787 are here documented in great detail: comprising a fine and very detailed map, field survey books, with much information about people, tenants and properties. The documents provide valuable insights into the layout of the town, its occupations, rates, and many further details of its activities before relatively late enclosure in the early nineteenth century. It has been finely edited here for the Rutland Local History and Record Society by Tim Clough, whose knowledge of the area must be unrivalled. The work is a model of scholarly editing and bears all the hallmarks of exhaustive research, really intensive local knowledge, understanding of the resources for the area's history before and after the period studied, and an eye for their wider significance in agricultural and market-town history.
The volume compares other maps of the town to considerable effect and it is most valuable as a study of the historical evolution of Oakham. There are detailed accounts of properties and their often agricultural uses, of the roads, tenants, services and trades, rates, watercourses, and also details of other owners’ properties. Much of this will be of great local interest but the work also stands as a wider example of how thoroughly such a landed magnate could dominate market towns of this kind in the eighteenth century, as lord of the manor and principal owner, with well over 1,000 acres in this survey. In addition, he owned many other manors and lands in other parishes, such as Burley, Greetham, Hambleton, Egleton and Leighfield in Rutland and Milton Keynes and Ravenstone in Buckinghamshire. The Oakham map and field books are of huge value in understanding the history of the town and are carefully dissected in this study. It includes a Baptist meeting house, a Quaker burial ground, the pre-1834 workhouse, field names and descriptions, property extents and values, properties ‘on the Waste’, many urban gardens, occupations, and related information from other sources further documenting the people featured in the survey. For example, there is an extract from the 1791 Universal British Directory on Oakham, listing its principal inhabitants and associated information. Among the striking features is the occupational trade and service range of Oakham, with references to man-midwifery, surgeons, an organ-builder, a French and English boarding school for Young Ladies, a honey merchant, large numbers of apprenticed trades, and the woollen-cloth industry: with tammy-weavers, woolstaplers, drapers and the like. Indeed, it is revealing to see here the documentation of spinning, knitting and weaving in Rutland at the time, and the close association of these trades and services with agriculture. The editor comments on ‘how wide a range of trades and services were available’ (p. 41), many of them identifiable in the Survey.
Some of this material was found many years ago ‘crumpled into a cupboard at Burley on the Hill’. From thence it was transferred to the expert restorers of the Record Office for Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland, and subsequently into this fine volume of wide significance. It is interesting to ponder the passage by which valuable historical primary sources find their way into the public and scholarly domain.
