One of the most important collections in the Norfolk Record Office is the huge archive of estate and household accounts left by Alice, wife of Sir Hamon Le Strange, which are exceptional, both in scale and quantity.
Alice and Sir Hamon married in 1602 when both were still in their teens. Sir Hamon was descended from an ancient Norfolk family which had lived at Hunstanton since the twelfth century. However, the Le Strange fortunes were in decline in the late 16th century when steeply rising prices had made it essential for landowners to update their management structures and put their estates on a sound commercial footing. Sir Hamon was only eight when his father died in 1592. His trustees, Sir John Peyton, Sir Henry Hobart and Sir Henry Spelman, aided by the lawyer Richard Stubbe were honest and careful, but not innovative. By the time Sir Hamon inherited the estate in 1604, the rental and his income was a fraction of that enjoyed by his great-great-grandfather. He embarked on the task of reviving their fortunes aided by Alice, who was Stubbe’s younger daughter; initially she was fully occupied by her increasing family, but in 1610 Sir Hamon handed over to her responsibility for household expenditure.
Most daughters of the gentry were taught arithmetic and simple accounting to prepare them for the management of large households as the wives of landowners. Alice soon discovered that she had a talent for account-keeping and tackled her task with real enthusiasm. The general disbursements immediately become more organised and rigorous. Whereas Hamon had had to rely on the honesty of servants and tradesmen, paying their bills as submitted, Alice had time to itemize every payment, and uncovered a certain amount of petty fraud. She soon started categorizing entries in the accounts: wages to servants, expenditure on the children, repairs to buildings, and food for the household. In time, food and buildings were siphoned off into separate accounts giving her greater control over detail and providing a framework for expansion into new enterprises. The building accounts stemmed from Sir Hamon’s undertaking to rebuild the hall and the buildings on the estate. Alice’s work gathered momentum in 1620 when she inherited her father’s estate at Sedgeford.
From then on, Alice paid the bills and itemized expenditure, while Sir Hamon concentrated on managing the building process. His growing confidence in her meant that he could reliably predict his income stream and plan ahead with a degree of certainty. He knew at a glance his day-to-day expenses, his income, and the spare cash he could allocate to various projects; this later enabled him and his eldest son Nicholas to carry out a rolling programme of building and repairs. Alice modernized their estate accounting; she vastly improved the layout and legibility of the field books and drew together the rentals, firmals and bailiffs’ accounts into a single volume, and later created a fully integrated system, linking estate and household accounts. Alice was not unique in keeping estate accounts: other Norfolk gentlewomen such as Lady Frances Hobart of Blickling and Katherine Windham of Felbrigg also ran the family estates, but only as widows. Alice and Sir Hamon were a team and by their joint efforts, they rebuilt their estate ‘out of the ground’, as Alice noted in her summary of the family finances.
The Le Stranges’ income had been derived primarily from sheep farming, but Alice’s accounts show the working of an infield and outfield system for arable land, devised to farm and utilize the sandy soils and heathland of west Norfolk, where the existence of river valleys provided a core of fertile land. This fertile land – the infields – were the main area for growing corn. The outfields, the sandy brecks, were gradually improved by an eight-year rotation system consisting of summerley (where land was uncropped but not necessarily unploughed) for breaking up the land in the first year; then three years with grain crops – rye, barley, barley and oats – followed by four years of grass, grazed and manured in rotation by the sheep. In 1631 Alice had a survey of the Sedgefield estate made consisting of three interlocking maps, helping her to organise the rotations, the tenancies, and the brecks allotted to the foldcourses of sheep. Methods which proved successful at Sedgeford were later extended to the whole estate. The quality of the brecks improved and yields increased. The process of improving the brecks and bringing them into regular cultivation, the cornerstone of the agricultural revolution, was underway on this estate from the early seventeenth century. The income from both sheep and corn rose steadily until the 1640s and debts were paid off.
The situation changed with the outbreak of the civil war. Norfolk largly supported the parliamentarians but Sir Hamon and his sons were ardent royalists. When King’s Lynn declared for the king in August 1643, Sir Hamon was named governor, but the town was soon forced to surrender. Consequently, what Alice referred to as ‘the plunder’ took place: the parliamentary forces seized corn and the greater part of their flocks, the Le Stranges were fined, and their lands temporarily sequestrated. Left with less than one hundred sheep, Alice determinedly started again with friends and relatives helping to re-stock the foldcourses. Recovery was slow and before she died in 1654, she wrote, for her sons, a detailed summary of the family’s financial position from 1645 to 1654, which shows her complete grasp of all aspects of their situation.
Set out clearly and precisely, Alice’s records were to serve as a reference work for succeeding generations. The estate was commended by Arthur Young in 1770, in his Farmer’s Tour through England, as a model of improvement, and this owed much to Alice. It would be no exaggeration to claim that her meticulous record-keeping secured the survival of the estate in the early- seventeenth century and laid the foundation for its success in the eighteenth century and beyond.
She and Sir Hamon were happily married for over fifty years. He was a member of parliament, who built up a fine library and had a keen interest in hawking and music. He played the viol, but was clearly no virtuoso as Alice insisted that he build a garden house to practice in. He died two years before her, and in his will he praised her ‘incessant industry in straynes of knowledge above her sex to the just, faithfull and laudable advantage and advancement of my estate’. Most endearingly, he wrote her a message in one of her household books, concealed under a flap which quotes from the Book of Proverbs: ‘who shall finde a virtuous woman for her price is above pearls, the very heart of her husband trusteth in her … she overseeth the ways of her household and eateth not the brede of idleness’.
The introduction to this volume contains an overview of farming methods and estate management in Norfolk in the seventeenth century, complete with a fascinating glossary of sheep-farming terms. The transcriptions from her account books are chosen to illustrate the range of Alice’s involvement in farming and estate management and to show the methods and development of her record keeping. Also included are her financial summary mentioned above, and transcripts both of her will and that of Sir Hamon.
Her Price is Above Pearls: Family and Farming Records of Alice Le Strange, 1617-1656, edited by Elizabeth Griffiths was published by the society in 2015.
This blog was written by Dr Jean Agnew, BA, PhD