![\"Picture](\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/pastharvests\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/689\/2026\/07\/Holkham-Hall-visit-1-1024x683.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nSo, that is about as good as it is ever going to get for us, in terms of records that provide information about yields, crops, inputs and outputs, livestock numbers and even the profitability of farms. It doesn\u2019t end there, though. A generation earlier, the managers of the home farm at Holkham also kept extremely detailed accounts, between 1731 and 1747. Forty years before that, a diligent estate steward combed the archives to explain to a young Robert Coke how his estate had been managed over the previous century. In the mid-seventeenth century, the gatherers of tithes for Holkham and some other parishes, provide a detailed record over a decade of crops grown, yields and prices. A century before that, in the 1530s and 1550s, their predecessors kept detailed records of the numbers of sheep in the communal flocks on the \u2018fold-courses\u2019 \u2013 sometimes wrapping their accounts in parchment fragments of medieval manuscripts from the area\u2019s dissolved monasteries and priories. Two hundred years before that, assiduous reeves recorded the output of oats, rye and barley, and the numbers of livestock sold off the manor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Was there something in the water in north Norfolk that made them compulsive record keepers? Probably not, but the combination of market-oriented agriculture and the careful preservation of evidence about title, rights and practices created a uniquely detailed illustration of farming in the region over six or seven centuries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This blog was provided by Professor Henry French, Lecturer in Social and Early Modern History, at the University of Exeter and co-lead on the Past Harvests project.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Research on the estate archives for this project is always fascinating. However, it can also be frustrating. It is almost as if all those estate stewards, reeves, bailiffs, surveyors, mapmakers, and account-keepers didn\u2019t know that 300 or 400 years later a bunch of researchers would come along wanting to know about outputs per acre, nutrient […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2765,"featured_media":613,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-607","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n