Marginal farming conditions in northwest England

The counties of Cumberland and Westmorland have been described as backward and impoverished (Appleby, 1975), and the area ‘remote from large industrial and trading centres; much of it was inaccessible to travellers, and all of it regarded with repulsion by outsiders’ (Thirsk, 1967). In addition, Cumberland and Westmorland were left almost untouched by the various agricultural revolutions that spread across the rest of the country during the 16th and 17th centuries. This was mainly the result of the inefficient feudal form of production that persisted long after it had been replaced by the capitalist mode elsewhere; by the end of the 18th century, the Cumbrian peasantry were still firmly entrenched and retained control over a third of the land in the region compared with a national figure of 15% (Searle, 1983). Thus, the far northwest of England was an economically retarded area for much of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries and experienced periods of growth of population which it supported with increasing difficulty. In 1587, 1597 and 1623, the region suffered very high mortality, which Appleby attributed to famine crises; he thought it unlikely that Cumberland suffered famine in the first half of the 16th century, but admitted that parish records were too few and too unreliable for analysis before 1570. However, the parish registers of Greystoke in the Eden Valley in Cumberland in 1623 where people were described as dying from food shortages provided convincing evidence that the pastoral upland area of the northwest was vulnerable to famines which were, he argued, Malthusian checks operating when the growth of the population outstripped the available food supply (Appleby, 1973).