S INCE the publication of SirJohn Habakkuk's seminal article on English landownership2 it has generally been held by historians that in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a discernible trend of change in the pattern of landownership, which produced a period of stability from about I750. Most of Habakkuk's evidence, however, was drawn from two possibly untypical counties, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire,3 and the results of research published since he wrote have revealed several weaknesses in his argument. As a result a number of modifications to his central thesis have been suggested. Much of this work has been in the form of family studies and few attempts have been made to test Habakkuk's model against the evidence of one other county or region in order to assess its applicability on a national scale.4 The purpose of this article is to apply the model to the evidence of one particular areaCumbria-and to suggest how the results of this analysis, together with other published work, challenge or lend support to Habakkuk's original thesis. The study of landownership on a local basis presents two problems, one relating to the method of analysis to be used and the other to the choice of area. The most straightforward division of landowners into the commonly accepted social groups -peerage, gentry, and the mass of lesser owners variously known as yeomen, freeholders, and owner-occupiers-involves using categories based on social and political distinctions which are not always clear cut. Habakkuk divided his landowners along both economic and social lines, distinguishing between the aristocracy, the substantial squires of C8oo to C2,oooa year, and the smaller squires ofjC8oo a year or less.5 The difficulty of analysing landowners in groups based on their annual landed income is that an area is seldom self-contained. Some landowners, particularly the more substantial, had scattered estates, only a part of which will have been in the area under consideration. As a result the use of economic divisions can lead to the comparison of unequal data: peers and gentry obtaining only part of their income from the area would be bracketed alongside