Chapter 4 Improving the estate

Women like Jane Ashley, Amabel Hume-Campbell, Anna Maria Agar, Sarah Dawes and Mary Cotterel were all involved in pushing through parliamentary enclosure awards, while Elizabeth Prowse introduced wide-ranging agricultural improvements after the informal enclosure of the open fields at Wicken. The contributions of these women and others like them to a bundle of related practices – including parliamentary enclosure and agricultural improvement, but also non-agricultural sources of estate income – are discussed in this chapter.