Botley Farmer

William Cobbett, best known today as the author of Rural Rides, was a towering figure in nineteenth-century British history. A radical reformer and journalist, his Political Register and other writings gave a thunderous voice to a disenfranchised in the early 1800s. Yet, during his transformative and "middle years" in Hampshire. Cobbett's public crusade for reform was mirrored by a more private, bold quest for social prestige and financial autonomy. Focusing on his time at Botley, historian David Chun provides a reconstruction of Cobbett's life as a landed gentleman. Through rigorous archival research and the first-ever cartographic identification of his estate's boundaries. Chun exposes the dubious financial foundations of Cobbett's landowning ambitions, showing how notwithstanding his objection to the escalating National Debt and the paper-money system he himself borrowed extensively to buy land, making use of the cheap credit that the paper-money system provided. The narrative shows how a tightening grip of debt and government prosecution – he spent two years in Newgate prison midway through this period – took Cobbett from apparent affluence to insolvency and finally bankruptcy. This is an in-depth study of a man whose struggle with money and land ownership provides a vital, human dimension to his political legacy.