Note 206n — INDEX
Reading edition
[440] Northern Tour, i. 9. For an interesting account of Young, see R.A.S.E. Journal (3rd Series), iv. 1.
[441] In 1726 Bradley had urged the use of liquorice, madder, woad, and caraway as improvers of the land in the Preface to the Country Gentleman.
[442] Rural Economy (1771), pp. 173-5. Trusler, who wrote in 1780, mentions 'the general rage for farming throughout the kingdom.'—Practical Husbandry, p. I.
[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 an acre thirty years before, and he said the county had increased in annual value fourfold, (Contemporary MS., unpublished.)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 grass 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.; butter, 51/2d. to 8d.; cheese, 31/2d. to 4d.; beef, 3d. to 5d.; mutton, 31/2d. 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 Gloucestershire, 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 Herefordshire, p. 29; Marshall, Review of Northern Department, p. 375.
[476] Tooke, History of Prices, i. 50; Hallam, Constitutional 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: Warwickshire, Agriculture.
[489] In Lancashire 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 grass, 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 Lancashire).
[490] 1820, p. 173 et seq.
[491] See Hasbach, op. cit. pp. 77 sq.; Annals of Agriculture, xxxvi. 497; Scrutton, Commons and Common Fields, p. 139.
[492] Defoe, Tour, ii. 178 et seq.
[493] R.A.S.E. Journal (3rd Ser.), ii. 9.
[494] Horner, Inquiry into the Means of Preserving the Public Roads (1767), pp. 4 et seq.
[495] Victoria County History: Northants., ii. 250.
[496] Young, Southern Tour (ed. 2), p. 88.
[497] Tooke, History of Prices, i. 68. It is difficult to understand the price of the quartern loaf, 1s. 6d. in 1766, as wheat was only 43s. 1d. a quarter. Prices of wheat in these years were:
s. d.
1767474
176853 9
176940 7
177043 6
177147 2
177250 8
177351 0
1774 528
1775 48 4
1776 38 2
177745 6
1778 42 0
177933 8
These returns differ from those of the Board of Agriculture; see Appendix III.
[498] Annals of Agriculture, iii. 366.
[499] Baker, Seasons and Prices, pp. 224 et seq.
[500] A. Stirling, Coke of Holkham, i. 249.
[501] But in other parts of it the cultivation of turnips was well understood, for the Complete Farmer, s.v. Turnips (ed. 3), says that about 1750 Norfolk farmers boasted that turnips had doubled the value of their holdings, and Norfolk men were famous for understanding hoeing and thinning, which were little practised elsewhere. Further, Young, Southern Tour, p. 273, says: 'the extensive use of turnips is known but little of except in Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. I found no farmers but in these counties that understood anything of fatting cattle with them; feeding lean sheep being the only use they put them to.'
[502] A. Stirling, op. cit. i. 264.
[503] R.A.S.E. Journal (1895), p. 12.