Barbados Land Usage

Topic: Gullah History
Histories of Barbados are replete with examples of large plantations.  When James Hay [1] won his grant from Charles I in 1627, he turned 10,000 acres over to a syndicate of his creditors headed by Marmaduke Rawdon. [2]  They recruited seventy settlers with promises of a hundred acres, or 7,000 of their acres. [3]  In 1629, their agent made 140 more grants for 15,872 acres of the original 10,000. [4]

These grants could be subdivided and resold.  Alison Games says former indentured servants were not promised land at the end of their contracts, but could buy it.  They had so little money, they often pooled their resources into partnerships that purchased an average of 2.5 acres. [5]

Hilary Beckles found outside the original 10,000 acre allocation, 776 grants were made between 1628 and 1638 that were at least ten acres. [6]  Ronnie Hughs lists nine men who received a hundred or more acres with the first large grant made in 1630. [7]  These few larger grants accounted for most of the acreage, for Beckles found the average size was 95.78 acres each, and, combined with the original grant, represented 84,329 acres.

Barbados is not elastic like Virginia, where men could claim land in the wilderness beyond the original grant.  It is an island, with finite resources.  Today, its area is 167 square miles, or 106,880 acres.  However, not all that land can be farmed.  Only 16.28% is considered arable, or 11,258 acres. [8]

The island is the exposed section of an ocean ridge formed at the point where one tectonic plate is sinking under another. [9]  The limestone base is covered by a veneer of coral, which means soils are easily depleted.  Henry Colt thought planters were fooling themselves in 1631.  He noticed the soil was “loose sand” and that the ground they thought the most fertile was “but the leaves and ashes of your trees.  Dig but half a foot deep and the will be found nothing else but clay.” [10]  By the 1670s, Richard Blome noted settlers already were leaving worn out plantations for Jamaica. [11]

Perhaps the greatest limiting factor was the island has no water sources: potable water had to be collected in cisterns when it rained. [12]  This, more than anything, perpetuated medieval patterns of land usage.

The Roman concept of settlements organized in grids and joined by connecting roads was long lost in England, [13] and not reintroduced until Christopher Wren rebuilt London after the fire of 1666. [14]  In its place, families lived in settlements [15] near a church and worked land divided into narrow strips. [16]  The best fronted the only road, but many only could be reached by crossing the land of another person. [17]

Anthony Garvan believes settlers in Connecticut imported modified versions of this settlement pattern.  Before 1645, every township included a nuclear village, [18] with lands distributed along a single road whose purpose was allowing “every land owner to access his land.” [19]  As shown in the plan for Weathersfield, the land was laid out in long narrow strips that extended from the road to the township boundaries and crossed whatever terrain existed.  Some strips spanned land, water, and an island. [20]

Richard Ligon drew the map of Barbados shown above in or before 1657.  The detail below shows the twenty-one-mile strip of waterfront on the west side of the island served as a road.  No roads yet existed into the interior.  If one wanted to market one’s crop, one had to be very close to the water.  Richard Dunn has counted 285 plantations, [21] which would make their average width 452.5'.

The one difference between Connecticut and Barbados was the use of surveys.  Garvan says they were introduced in the Netherlands by the Duke of Alba as a way of asserting control on towns. [22]  The lots on the Weathersfield plot are straight lines.  It would be hard to imagine a straight line on Ligon’s map. [23]

Oliver Rackham says the narrow fields in England developed when oxen were used, and reflected the needs of those animals. [24]  The strips in Barbados may have been adjudicated like everything else relating to land of the island, by who brought a boundary area into cultivation first and was able to enforce it against his neighbors.

Graphics
Richard Ligon.  Map of Barbados in A True and Exact History of Barbadoes, 1657.  Reproduction from copy in Bryn Mawr Library posted on National Humanities Center website, 2006.

End Notes
1.  Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, is mentioned in the post for 7 November 2021.

2.  Historians argue over who instigated the claim on Barbados.  Some believe it was Rawdon’s idea and that he used his Hay’s indebtedness as leverage to get him to act. [25]  Others think Hay was responsible, [26] since he also invested in the Virginia Company and the settlement of Saint Kitts. [27]

3.  Larry Gragg.  Englishmen Transplanted: The English colonization of Barbados, 1627–1660.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.  33.

4.  Gragg.  36.

5.  Alison Games.  Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World.  Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999.  126.

6.  Hilary MacDonald Beckles.  “White Labour in Black Slave Plantation Society and Economy: A Case Study of Indentured Labour in Seventeenth Century Barbados.”  PhD dissertation.  The University of Hull, August 1980.  His source is Some Memoirs of the First Settlement of the Island of Barbados.  Barbados: Wm. Beeby, 1741.  l–25.

7.  Ronnie Hughes.  “Presugar Land Distributiion in Barbados.”  Department of History seminar paper.  University of West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados, November 1980.  Table reproduced on “1630-1644: Land holdings of 100 acres or more” on Roots Web website.  Beckles thanks “Hughes, from the University of the West Indies, for his greatly valued assistance while working on the manuscripts in the Barbados Archives” in his Acknowledgments.

8.  “Geography of Barbados.”  Wikipedia website.  The exact numbers probably were slightly different in 1630.

9.  R. C. Speed.  “Geology of Barbados: Implications for an Accretionary Origin.”  International Geological Congress, 26, Paris, 7–17 July 1980.  Proceedings 259–265.

10.  Henry Colt.  “The Voyage of Sir Henrye Colt Knight to the Ilands of the Antilleas.”  Cambridge University Library MSS, Mm. 3, 9.  In Vincent T. Harlow.  Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623-1667.  London: The Hakluyt Society, 1925; since reprinted.  67.  Spelling modernized; the original is “For your soyle yt is naught, nothinge ele but loose sand.  Your growned wch you esteeme ye best is but ye leaues & ashes of your trees.  Digg but half a foot deep & the wilbe found nothinge else but Clay.”  To clear the land, they cut trees and burned them in place.

11.  Richard Blome.  A Description of the Island of Jamaica.  London: T. Milbourn for Robert Clavel, 1672.  Cited by Laura Hollsten.  “Controlling Nature and Transforming Landscapes in the Early Modern Caribbean.”  Global Environment 1:80–113:2008.  It was after this period that planters began using manure to keep their land productive.

12.  Ligon. 28.  Copy on internet from Missouri Botanical Garden.

13.  Anthony N. B. Garvan.  Architecture and Town Planning in Colonial Connecticut.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1951.  29.  There probably are more recent works on this subject, but Garvan was chairman of my graduate school department and he and this book are what influenced my thinking.

Oliver Rackham.  The History of the Countryside.  London: J. M. Dent, 1986.  164.  He thought the period of the Black Death was the “high water mark of the open field.” [28]  After that time, large landowners began converting land to sheep pasture by replacing the strips and common land into enclosed areas.  Tenants were evicted. [29]  Enclosures were more common where men had left during the plague or where warfare was a problem, like along the border with Scotland. [30]

14.  Garvan.  33.
15.  Rackham. 178.
16.  Rackham.  164.
17.  Rackham.  165.
18.  Garvan.  40.
19.  Garvan.  42.
20.  Garvan.  52.

21.  Richard S. Dunn.  Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972.  29.

22.  Garvan.  19.

23.  Beckles says Rawdon’s syndicate hired a surveyor, John Swan, to “organise their land into large tenanted estates.” [31]  That does not mean Swan was using geometry rather than the older system of metes and bounds.

24.  Rackham.  165.

25.  Gary Puckrein.  “Did Sir William Courteen Really Own Barbados?”  Huntington Library Quarterly 44(2):135–149:1981.

N. Darnell Davis.  Cavaliers and Roundheads in Barbados.  Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887.  51.

26.  Roy E. Schreiber.  “The First Carlisle, Sir James Hay, First Earl of Carlisle as Courtier, Diplomat and Entrepreneur, 1580–1636.”  American Philosophical Society Transactions 74(7):1–155:1984.  “Though it is possible that the merchant-financiers who backed the earl forced him into these disputed projects, it is difficult to believe he was incapable of deflecting their schemes had he been so inclined” (page 139).

27.  Schreiber.  Virginia, 168; Saint Kitts, 170.
28.  Rackham.  170.

29.  Wilhelm Hasbach.  Die englischen Landarbeiter in den letzten hundert Jahren und die Einhegungen.  Leipzig: Duncker und Humblot, 1894.  Translated as A History of the English Agricultural Labourer by Ruth Kenyon.  London: P . S . King and Son, 1908.  33–34.

30.  Hasbach.  29.

31.  Beckles.  16.  His source is: John Oldmixon.  The British Empire in America.  London: John Nicholson, Benjamin Tooke, Richard Parker and Ralph Smith, 1708.  2:1.