Note 264 — Chapter IV · THE PEASANTRY (continued)

Thus the yeomen seem to have increased in prosperity at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century (though at the same time large classes of agrarian workers were suffering terribly), because the rise in prices made corn-growing a gold-mine. The collapse came probably after 1815 (see Johnson, The Disappearance of the Small Landowner, chap. vii.).