Thread by @crappyliving, For today’s homeschool we sat in the car park at Waitrose and [...]

For today’s homeschool we sat in the car park at Waitrose and learned about the Enclosure Acts, the English aristocracy and the transatlantic slave trade, and a dispute between the 7th Duke of Beaufort and a woman called Betty Davis in the Forest of Dean

As I now know thanks to my extensive history reading*, the English landscape - with property rights to large areas of farm and moor land owned by a relatively small number of people - has not always looked this way
*Google

Before the 1600’s, and right up until the early 20th century, there were many more acres of common land, which were open to everyone to use for small scale farming and grazing, and where legal property rights for individuals did not exist. 7 million more acres, in fact.

This was the amount of land that was ‘enclosed’ by over 5000 separate acts of Parliament, each one passing that property to an individual family, mostly the local aristocracy. Luckily hardly any of them still own it today, so no harm no foul I guess

Turns out this wasn’t a great scene for the people who needed that common land, but the gist is they couldn’t do much about it and had to carry on as tenant farmers or nob off to the factories where luckily nobody needed to spend 200 years establishing basic employment rights

Or at least, we get told a lot they couldn’t do much about it. But today I learned a bit about how these kind of moves went down in Gloucestershire, or more specifically in the Forest of fucking Dean.

In 1819, an enclosure act was passed for common land around the village of Woolastone, between the ancient Forest of Dean and the River Severn, where 160 people lived. Their homes, which they had rather thought belonged to them,
were now the property of the 7th Duke of Beaufort

Like all Dukes in early 19C England, he was a reserved yet passionate person who respected women and he looked like this

I’m joking of course - he was an absolute dick and he looked like this

Facts about the Dukes of Beaufort: the first Duke married the daughter of the director of the East India Company. The second Duke was a Lord Proprietor of the Bahamas. The county of Beaufort, in the former slave colony of South Carolina, is named after him.

The Dukes of Beaufort redesigned a big house in Gloucestershire called Badminton House with that money that had no associations with slavery, where they invented badminton and did fox hunting and have horse trials every year. Here’s the 7th Duke on a horse

Extra fact: the 7th Duke married the Duke of Wellington’s niece (Duke fest here) and when she died he waited *literally 25 minutes* and then married her younger half sister. Here he is with the facial hair he grew for elopement purposes

Anyway, over in the village of Wollaston, nobody gave a shit about the Duke of Beaufort’s Casanova status, because they were now being charged rent to live in the houses they just had nicked off them. Sucks to be them.

100 people agreed to give rent money to the Duke’s agent, who they called Zouch Turton, because that was literally his name.

But 60 Woolastone residents said - no.
60 is a big proportion of 160. Does it count as a *rebellion*, when 60 people claim these places as ‘their absolute property’?
The Duke thought so, so he and good old Zouch kicked them out.

Two of those people were especially vocal about the unfairness of this: William and Betty Davis, two members of the Davis family who were specifically evicted bc ‘their cottages and gardens were rather better than the others’.

This is the kind of thing you would definitely write to your MP about - although it turns out the MP for Monmouth was inexplicably also the Duke of Beaufort, so that made it awkward

So they were brought to court. Not a regular local court for a land dispute, but the big crime Gloucester Assizes (where in that same year a Woolastone man was found guilty of a *wild* murder but that’s another story, there was a lot going on in the Forest is all I’m saying)

Now, I’m not saying the judge was pally with the local landowner/MP/also a landowner himself, but I am saying things did not go well for Betty Davis. The judge found against her, and she was ordered to pay costs, and rent.

There aren’t so many pics of Betty knocking about, so I’m assuming she looked like this

The Duke owned a lot of land with a lot of other ‘tenants’, so I’d say he was keen to make an example of the Davis family in the county court, in case these kind of ideas spread.

But here’s the thing - noone knows how the family, who Zouch referred to as ‘the violent ones’, found the money, but the next year they were back with a fancy Bristol attorney to challenge the result. A case of Better Call Saul Junction, there. That’s a *Gloucestershire joke*

However, it turns out court trials are not the same as horse trials, in that nobody likes to spend money on them, or even on recording the outcome, so - here’s the unsatisfying ending - we have *no idea* what happened to Betty Davis or to William

Did they lose everything? Or did Betty take care of business?
In the year 2021, why do I support so many people experiencing financial hardship in Gloucestershire who have the surname Davis?
What happened to all that land and money?
It’s impossible to say.

PS we did not do the KS2 worksheet on Expanded Noun Phrases

FIN

PPS if you like Actual Facts and not stuff I Googled today in a car park for my kids, also stuff about land and history and right now, have a look at the work of @nickhayesillus1 and @guyshrubsole and the campaign for the #righttoroam https://www.righttoroam.org.uk/

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