Not a good story, but interesting that there seem to have been so many women running farms as they were hit by the rinderpest plague that reached its height in 1745. In Marylebone Park (now Regent’s Park), two widows who ran its farms, Jane Francis on the main farm and Mary Hall on the smaller, both saw their businesses fail as a result, as did many other farmers, despite the government paying 40 shillings compensation for each dead beast.
Anne Berry, who farmed on what is now Portman Square “suffered great losses by the death of cows”. She, like a number of farm labourers, was excused from paying parish rates.
These farms must have been primarily dairies, but the park also had another business, haymaking. A Swedish botanist, Pehr Kalm, reported in 1748 that grassland stretched as far as Hampstead and beyond. The fields were cut and the hay stacked in May, again in July, and then in September if the season was good. He reported that this was all for London’s horse population:
As these is an unknown number of horses kept in the stables, it is not wonderful that hay is very dear there, especially at some times of the year, of which these farmers situated near to London are well able and know how to avail themselves.”
(from Regent’s Park: A Study of the Development of the Area from 1086 to the Present Day by Ann Saunders (Ann Cox-Johnson), David & Charles, Newton Abbot, 1969, pp. 51-52)
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