A Short History of English Agriculture

When the early bands of English invaders came over to take Britain from its Celtic owners, it is almost certain that the soil was held by groups and not by individuals, and as t...

In the thirteenth century the manorial system may be said to have been in its zenith; the description therefore of Cuxham Manor in Oxfordshire at that date is of special interes...

After the death of Edward I in 1307 the progress of English agriculture came to a standstill, and little advance was made till after the battle of Bosworth in 1485. The weak gov...

The castles of the great landowners have been so often described that there is no need to do this again. The popular idea of a baron of the Middle Ages is of a man who when he w...

church hearing divine service, to go hunting with greyhounds and other dogs, in the parks and warrens of the lord and of others, and sometimes these hunts were turned into confe...

We have seen that the landlords' profits were seriously diminished by the Black Death, and they cast about them for new ways of increasing their incomes. Arable land had been un...

In this period the average prices of grain remained almost unchanged until the last three decades, when they began slowly and steadily to creep up, this advance being helped to...

until 12 years old should be bound apprentice, and further enacted that no person with less than 20s. a year in land should be able to apprentice his son. Like many other statut...

We have now reached a time when the enclosure question was becoming of paramount importance,[184] and began to cause constant anxiety to legislators, while the writers of the da...

The farming of this period is portrayed for us by Fitzherbert, the first agricultural writer of any merit since Walter of Henley in the thirteenth century. He was one of the Jus...

The period we have now reached was one of steady growth in the value of land and its products. In 1543 Henry VIII, who had given away or squandered, in addition to the great tre...

The cattle and sheep of this period have generally been described as poor animals, and no doubt they would seem small to us. To Jacob Rathgib, a traveller, writing in 1592, they...

The seventeenth century was one of considerable progress in English agriculture. The decay of common-field farming was enabling individual enterprise to have its way. The popula...

The seventeenth century is distinguished by a number of agricultural writers whose works, as they afford the best account of the farming of the time, we may be pardoned for free...

From what has been said in the preceding pages, it will be gathered that a vast amount of compassion has been wasted on the enclosure of commons, for it is abundantly evident fr...

which it appears that the sacks were filled up with leaves, stalks, powder, sand, straw, wood, and even soil, for increasing the weight, by which English growers it is said lost...

[346] _New System of Agriculture_ (ed. 1726), p. 113. Woad is still grown 'in some districts in England' (Morton, _Cyclopaedia of Agriculture_, ii. 1159), but in the Agricultura...

The history of agriculture in the eighteenth century is remarkable for several features of great importance. It first saw the application of capital in large quantities to farmi...

In 1730 Charles, second Viscount Townshend, retired from politics, on his quarrel with his brother-in-law Walpole, who remarked that 'as long as the firm was Townshend and Walpo...

The history of English agriculture in the latter half of the eighteenth century has been so well described by Arthur Young that any account of it at that time must largely be an...

This period, that of the great war with France, was one generally of high prices and prosperity for landowners and farmers. It was a prosperity, however, that was largely fictit...

It must be remembered, however, that the number of Acts is not a conclusive test of the amount of enclosure, as there was a large amount that was non-parliamentary: by the princ...

The summer of 1816 was wretched; the distress, aggravated by the bad season, caused riots everywhere. At Bideford the mob interfered to prevent the export of a cargo of potatoes...

It was proved that Scotch farmers who had farmed highly had weathered the storm. Instead of repeatedly calling on Parliament to help them they had helped themselves, by spending...

About the year 1875 the good times came to an end. The full force of free trade was at last felt. The seasons assisted the decline, and there was now no compensation in the shap...

It is a curious fact that the barriers which protected the British farmer were thrown down shortly before he became by unforeseen causes exposed to the competition of the whole...

Arthur Young at the end of the eighteenth century found only two kinds of cart horses worthy of mention, the Shire and the Suffolk Punch; to-day, besides these two, we have the...