Description:William Lewis was employed as an Estate Agent on the Sutherland estates in the early nineteenth century, taking over from Francis Suther in 1817. Lewis was responsible for overseeing the Leveson-Gower family’s English Estates. From 1827 until his death in 1836, Ross Wordie writes that the management of the English Estates was ‘increasingly’ left to Lewis’s ‘discretion’.
Lewis oversaw the family Estates in Staffordshire and Shropshire by travelling between places on horseback, often visiting different towns within the same day. As Ross Wordie suggests, this ‘endless galloping’ caused Lewis’s health to break down in 1821 and his death is often attributed to exhaustion from overwork.
Between 1816 and his death in 1836, William Lewis kept a memoranda book recording his daily activities overseeing the Leveson-Gower family’s estates. This diary provides a fascinating account of his work and life on the estates during this period. The book tells us where Lewis had travelled each day and why, providing an insight into his responsibilities as Estate Agent. Lewis also included remarks about the weather and his family which tell us about the life of this extraordinary man.
Follow the links below to read extracts from the Memoranda Book from the 1820s and 1830s.
Contextual Information from Ross Wordie Estate Management in Eighteenth-Century England (Royal Historical Society, 1982)