Exmoor Reclamation. 
79 
Mr, Frederick Winn Knight, then just elected to represent his 
native county of Worcestershire in Parliament. 
This gentleman's first step was, with the help of his agent, 
Mr. John Mogridge, of Molland (one of a family well known to 
all admirers of pure North Devon cattle), to build a number of 
farm-houses, which were completed with remarkable economy 
and success, as may be seen at the present day. Mr. Knight 
drew all the plans of the farm-steadings himself ; he built them 
of stone delved on the moors, and with labour hired by the 
piece from the neighbouring villages. In a word he succeeded, 
without the costly assistance of an architect or surveyor, in 
producing comfortable and convenient, but certainly not pic- 
turesque, farm-steadings. 
The idea in preparing these large farms was to follow the 
system that had been so successfully carried out in the wolds 
and heaths of Lincolnshire — to let the farms at very low rents, 
in their wild unimproved state, with a tenant-right like that of 
Lincolnshire, to farmers of capital and enterprise. 
Such tenants, however, were not at that date to be found 
in the neighbourhood. The Devon and Somerset farmers, a 
quarter of a century ago, considered that to attempt to farm 
on Exmoor, or to use it for anything but summer grazing, was 
sheer madness. They would not have it at any price, although 
some of them occupied fields of the same soil, divided only 
from Exmoor by a boundary fence. 
When in 1850 Mr. John Knight died at Rome, Mr. Frederick 
Knight found himself saddled with the farm devoted to the 
horse-breeding stud and many thousand acres of wild land in 
hand, besides a number of new farms unoccupied. The only 
income he obtained from over 10,000 acres of wild land was the 
poll-rent paid for the summer feed of sheep and cattle, and the 
produce of herds of Exmoor ponies, which fetched less money as 
three-year-olds than Mr. Frederick Knight's six-months-old pony 
foals have realised for the last half-dozen years at Bampton fair. 
The first set of men then who signed agreements to occupy 
tracts of land on Exmoor, and for whom Mr. Knight undertook 
to erect fences and houses and to make roads, were strangers to 
the country and climate. 
If the prices of live-stock and dairy produce had kept up to 
the scale of preceding years, on which these men had made 
their calculations, some of them would probably have succeeded. 
But the groundless panic and consequent fall in the price of 
corn, meat, and live-stock, which took place after the passing 
of Sir Robert Peel's Free Trade measures, cleared Exmoor of 
most of the strangers who had first settled down under Mr. 
Frederick Knight's low rents and liberal leases. 
