The Past Harvests Project
The Past Harvests Project
Posted by es970
2 November 2026The Past Harvests Project is featured in the latest edition of the Society for Landscape Studies Newsletter, with an article written by our Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dr Alex Hibberts.
Here is the extract of the article in the newsletter:
Research News: The Past Harvests Project
A team of researchers at the University of Exeter have partnered with five English Estates, Powderham, Chatsworth, Holkham, Belvoir and the Duchy of Cornwall, for an exciting project called Past Harvests. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, this project will decipher historical documents recording land use and past agricultural practices from four reference periods between 1250 and 1850. The premise of the project is that there is valuable data available from the UK’s unusually well-preserved records of land management that can help inform current farming policy. The aim is to build a picture of what a sustainable farming system might or might not look like. While the project’s case studies are within England, the results will have UK-wide relevance.
Achieving sustainable agricultural land use is proving to be an intractable public policy challenge in the UK, and dialogue between opposing viewpoints has never been more polarised. Proposed approaches include the ‘land sharing’ model, where food production and nature restoration co-exists on the same land, and the ‘land sparing’ approach which sets aside land for either food or nature restoration.
Rich source material has so far been uncovered both from the private archives of partner estates and from local and national public record offices. One notable treasure has been the Assession Rolls and Books at the Duchy of Cornwall. These record the size (in English and in ‘Cornish’ acres), tenants and rents of properties in the Duchy’s Assessionable manors, typically every seven years, between the late medieval period and the early nineteenth century. Elsewhere, at Powderham Castle in Devon, the 1787 George Lang Survey has provided a vital base layer to reconstruct field sizes, predominant agricultural practices and ownership in the late eighteenth century. Over at Chatsworth in Derbyshire, a seventeenth book of deeds included a survey of cattle at Chatsworth in 1614 and a contemporary list of the (then) Earl of Devonshire’s horses!
More recently, the team have visited Holkham Hall in Norfolk and Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire. So far, both archives have proved invaluable, providing data crucial to the project. In particular, maps available at both estates – some potentially dating back to the late sixteenth century – offer significant insights into changing patterns of land use and field size. These will enable our in-house ecologist to reconstruct past biodiversity measures based on the estimated area of hedgerows, field margins and woodland copse. Our work has benefitted immensely from the insights and expertise of each estate’s archival staff. We look forward to continuing our collaboration as we move into the next research stage. More anon!
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https://www.landscapestudies.com/
