AGRICULTURE
After the creation of the town Witney manor, encompassing the three rural townships, remained predominantly agricultural, with profits from rents and farming
forming the bulk of the lord's income: in 1552 the
manor was valued at just under £94 gross, compared
with only £9 6s. 10¼d. received from the borough. (fn. 1) A
considerable demesne farm, including up to 500 a. of
arable in the early 13th century, was administered
throughout the Middle Ages from the bishop's manor
house near Witney church, with its extensive
agricultural buildings; (fn. 2) from the 1390s the land was
usually leased, though tenants such as the Brice family
continued to farm it from the manor house until the
17th century, and agricultural buildings there remained
in use by local farmers until the 19th. The demesne's
extent and administration is discussed below: most of it
lay west and south of the town in Curbridge township,
perhaps because fields belonging to the pre-urban settlement of Witney had been taken into Curbridge at the
borough's foundation, while detached woods in Hailey
and Crawley townships were usually also kept in hand. (fn. 3)
In other respects, too, the town retained strong agricultural links until the 20th century. Several prominent
medieval burgesses held assart land in Hailey and sometimes sizeable estates elsewhere, while in the 16th and
17th centuries many leading clothiers, woolmen, and
fullers were sheep farmers on a significant scale: many
held land in the townships, and in the 15th and 16th
centuries were often implicated in piecemeal inclosure. (fn. 4)
Other better-off townsmen supplemented their income
by small-scale arable farming or stock-rearing, either in
closes outside the town or in gardens and plots attached
to their houses. The clothier Nicholas Ifield (d. 1587) left
hops and fruit from his orchard as well as cattle and corn
on a Somerset farm, while the wealthy tanner Thomas
Taylor (d. 1583) had poultry and pigs in the inner and
outer courts of his house, and a few cattle 'in the close'. (fn. 5)
An averagely prosperous weaver, with goods (including
his own loom) worth £31, left hay, corn, pigs, and 62
sheep in 1621, while a small clothier in 1638 had a close
of wheat worth £6 and malt worth £1 5s., and in 1719 the
wealthy blanket-maker John Wiggins had a ground of
barley worth £18. (fn. 6) Butchers and innkeepers, too, often
rented small pieces of meadow or pasture outside the
town. (fn. 7) The pattern continued in the 19th century, when
prominent townsmen such as the banker John Clinch
(d. 1827), the dyers and coal merchants James and
William Marriott, and, at Woodgreen, the currier
Samuel Shuffrey were all involved in farming, (fn. 8) and until
the 19th or 20th century barns, agricultural buildings,
and grazing animals remained a feature of the town. (fn. 9)
The demand for agricultural land was evidently
recognized, a land agent in 1776 remarking that closes
belonging to a Hailey farm would probably yield higher
rents if 'let as separate grounds to Witney tradesmen'. (fn. 10)
Until the 19th century such opportunities were probably confined to better-off townsmen. None of the
poorest inhabitants seem to have left crops or livestock,
and the small Corn Street plots on which weavers'
cottages were built in the 16th century had little land for
gardening. (fn. 11) By the 1830s, however, allotments for
paupers and landless factory workers were being
promoted by philanthropic manufacturers, allegedly in
the face of opposition from local farmers. In 1838 the
blanket-maker John Early claimed that 'most of the
men' had small allotments which could provide bread,
cheese, and sometimes bacon, while two paupers whom
he had set up on 2 a. of land each at £3 an acre, on the
understanding that produce must be consumed or fed to
their pigs, were said not to have required poor relief
since. One, with three pigs, had accumulated wheat,
barley, beans, and potatoes worth over £30; he and his
family worked the land with a horse and cart lent by
Early, who reported that the scheme was becoming
'more generally adopted'. (fn. 12)
Alongside those engaged in peripheral agriculture
were full-time farmers resident in the town, but working
land outside. A tenth of those for whom wills survive
between the 16th and late 18th centuries called themselves husbandmen or yeomen, and a dozen or so
farmers were still noted in the town in the mid 19th
century, along with large numbers of agricultural and
general labourers. Agricultural trades such as malting
remained important into the 19th century, carried out
on a commercial scale. (fn. 13) A Corn Exchange was built in
1863, and sale of corn and livestock at the fairs and
weekly market continued in and around the market
square until the 20th century. (fn. 14)