A Short History of English Agriculture Part 25

[443] In 1780 Sir Thomas Bernard, travelling through Northumberland, saw 'luxuriant plantations, neat hedges, rich crops of corn, comfortable farmhouses' in a county whereof the greater part was barren moor dearly rented at 1s. 6d. an acre thirty years before, and he said the county had increased in annual value fourfold, (Contemporary MS., unpublished.)

[444] _Rural Economy_, p. 26.

[445] _Farmer's Letters_ (3rd ed.), p. 89.

[446] Slater, _English Peasantry and Enclosure_, p. 95.

[447] Ibid. p. 101.

[448] Young, _Northern Tour_, iv. 340, about 1770 estimates the cultivated land of England to be half pasture and half arable, and, in the absence of reliable statistics, his opinion on this point is certainly the best available. The conversion of a large portion of the richer land from arable to gra.s.s in the eighteenth century was compensated for, according to Young, by the conversion, on enclosure, of poor sandy soils and heaths or moors into corn land. Hasbach, _op.

cit._ pp. 370-1.

[449] Young, _Northern Tour_, i. 222.

[450] _Rural Economy_, p. 252.

[451] Ibid. p. 271.

[452] Cf. above, p. 180.

[453] _Farmer's Letters_ (3rd ed), p. 372.

[454] _Northern Tour_, iv. 167.

[455] Ibid. iv. 186.

[456] This large item is explained by the fact that a bailiff was employed to sell, and no bailiff could find customers 'without feeling the same drought as stage coachmen when they see a sign'.--Young, _Farmer's Letters_, p. 403.

[457] _Rural Economy_, p. 314.

[458] 1775, pp. x-xiii.

[459] _Northern Tour_, iv. 192-202.

[460] See _Parliamentary Reports Commission_ (1881), xvi. 260.

[461] _Dissertations on Rural Subjects_, p. 278.

[462] _Farmer's Letters_, p. 433.

[463] _History of Hawsted_, p. 169.

[464] Hasbach, _op. cit._ p. 127; Kent, _Hints to Gentlemen_, p. 152.

[465] _Southern Tour_, p. 324. He says nothing of the manufacturing towns, which had not yet began to influence the wages of farm labourers near them as they soon afterwards did.

[466] Some prices at this time were: bread per lb., 2d.; b.u.t.ter, 5-1/2d. to 8d.; cheese, 3-1/2d. to 4d.; beef, 3d. to 5d.; mutton, 3-1/2d. to 5d.

[467] _State of the Poor_, i. 562.

[468] According to Walter Harte, though the yeoman in the middle of the seventeenth century ate bread of rye and barley (maslin), in 1766 even the poor cottagers looked upon it with horror and demanded best wheaten bread. Yet in 1766 the quartern loaf in London was 1s.

6d.--Tooke, _History of Prices_, i. 68.

[469] _History of Hawsted_, p. 184.

[470] Eden, _State of the Poor_, i. 513.

[471] _Rural Economy of Gloucesters.h.i.+re_, i. 53.

[472] Eden, _op. cit._ i. 547.

[473] _Farmer's Letters_, i. 300

[474] The pulling down of cottages began to be complained of in the seventeenth century; they harboured the poor, who were a charge upon the parish, and repairs were saved.--_Transactions Royal Historical Society_ (New Series), xix. 120.

[475] Hasbach, _op. cit._ 82; Clarke, _General View of Herefords.h.i.+re_, p. 29; Marshall, _Review of Northern Department_, p. 375.

[476] Tooke, _History of Prices_, i. 50; Hallam, _Const.i.tutional History_, iii. 302.

[477] _Northern Tour_, iv. 420. The increase in population in the first half of the eighteenth century was slow; after the Peace of Paris in 1763, when the commerce and manufactures of the country were extended in an unprecedented degree, it was rapid.

[478] _The Way to be Rich and Respectable_, London, 1780.

[479] Grose, _Olio_, pp. 41-4; Lecky, _History of England in Eighteenth Century_, vi. 169 et. seq.

[480] Cullum, _History of Hawsted_, p. 219.

[481] Cullum, _History of Hawsted_, p. 225.

[482] _Thoughts on Enclosure, by a Country Farmer_ (1786), p. 21.

[483] Johnstone, _Account of Elkington's Draining_ (1797), pp. 8-9.

[484] _R.A.S.E. Journal_ (1894), p. 11, from which this account of Bakewell is mainly taken.

[485] According to some, Joseph Allom originated the breed, and Bakewell vastly improved it. We may safely give the chief credit to so careful and gifted a breeder as Bakewell.

[486] _Culley on Live Stock_ (1807), p. 56.

[487] Marshall, _Rural Economy of the Midland Counties_, i. 273.

[488] _Victoria County History: Warwicks.h.i.+re, Agriculture_.

[489] In Lancas.h.i.+re at this date it was not uncommon, when a tenant wished for his farm or a particular field to be improved by draining, marling, liming, or laying down to gra.s.s, to hand it over to the landlord for the process; who, when completed, returned it to the tenant with an advanced rent of 10 per cent. upon the improvements.--Marshall, _Review of Reports to Board of Agriculture_ (under Lancas.h.i.+re).

[490] 1820, p. 173 et seq.

[491] See Hasbach, _op. cit._ pp. 77 sq.; _Annals of Agriculture_, x.x.xvi. 497; Scrutton, _Commons and Common Fields_, p. 139.