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 the disenfranchised in the early 1800s. Yet, during his transformative ‘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. In doing so he reveals a striking irony: despite Cobbett's fierce public objections to the escalating National Debt and the paper-money system, he himself borrowed extensively, exploiting the very credit system he despised. 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.

© 2026 Whitefox Publishing (E-boek): 9781918191769

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E-boek: 6 augustus 2026