A Short History of English Agriculture | Page 2

The last attempt of the English peasant to obtain
redress by force.
1586. Potatoes introduced.
1601. Poor Law Act of Elizabeth.
1645. Turnips and clover introduced as field crops.
1662. Statute of Parochial Settlement.
1664. Importation of cattle, sheep, and swine forbidden.
1688. Bounty of 5s. per quarter on export of wheat, and high duty on
import.
1733. Tull publishes his _Horse-hoeing Husbandry_.
1739. Great sheep-rot.
1750. Exports of corn reached their maximum.
1760. Bakewell began experimenting.
1760 (about). Industrial and agrarian revolution, and great increase of

enclosure.
1764. Elkington's new drainage system.
1773. Wheat allowed to be imported at a nominal duty of 6d. a quarter
when over 48s.
1777. Bath and West of England Society established, the first in
England.
1789. England definitely becomes a corn-importing country.
1793. Board of Agriculture established.
1795. Speenhamland Act.
About same date swedes first grown.
1815. Duty on wheat reached its maximum.
1815-35. Agricultural distress.
1825. Export of wool allowed.
1835. Smith of Deanston, the father of modern drainage.
1838. Foundation of Royal Agricultural Society.
1846. Repeal of the Corn Laws.
1855-75. Great agricultural prosperity.
1875. English agriculture feels the full effect of unrestricted
competition with disastrous results.
" First Agricultural Holdings Act.
1879-80. Excessive rainfall, sheep-rot, and general distress.

CHAPTER I
COMMUNISTIC FARMING.--GROWTH OF THE
MANOR.--EARLY PRICES.--THE ORGANIZATION AND
AGRICULTURE OF THE MANOR
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 this was the practice of the
conquerors also they readily fell in with the system they found.[1]
These English, unlike their descendants of to day, were a race of
countrymen and farmers and detested the towns, preferring the lands of
the Britons to the towns of the Romans. Co-operation in agriculture
was necessary because to each household were allotted separate strips
of land, nearly equal in size, in each field set apart for tillage, and a
share in the meadow and waste land. The strips of arable were unfenced
and ploughed by common teams, to which each family would
contribute.
Apparently, as the land was cleared and broken up it was dealt out acre
by acre to each cultivator; and supposing each group consisted of ten
families, the typical holding of 120 acres was assigned to each family
in acre strips, and these strips were not all contiguous but mixed up
with those of other families. The reason for this mixture of strips is
obvious to any one who knows how land even in the same field varies
in quality; it was to give each family its share of both good and bad
land, for the householders were all equal and the principle on which the
original distribution of the land depended was that of equalizing the
shares of the different members of the community.[2]
In attributing ownership of lands to communities we must be careful
not to confound communities with corporations. Maitland thinks the
early land-owning communities blended the character of corporations
and of co-owners, and co-ownership is ownership by individuals.[3]
The vills or villages founded on their arrival in Britain by our English
forefathers resembled those they left at home, and even there the strips
into which the arable fields were divided were owned in severalty by

the householders of the village. There was co-operation in working the
fields but no communistic division of the crops, and the individual's
hold upon his strips developed rapidly into an inheritable and partible
ownership. 'At the opening of Anglo-Saxon history absolute ownership
of land in severalty was established and becoming the rule.'[4]
In the management of the meadow land communal features were much
more clearly brought out; the arable was not reallotted,[5] but the
meadow was, annually; while the woods and pastures, the right of
using which belonged to the householders of the village, were owned
by the village 'community'. There may have been at the time of the
English conquest Roman 'villas' with slaves and coloni cultivating the
owners' demesnes, which passed bodily to the new masters; but the
former theory seems true of the greater part of the country.
At first 'extensive' cultivation was practised; that is, every year a fresh
arable field was broken up and the one cultivated last year abandoned,
for a time at all events; but gradually 'intensive' culture superseded this,
probably not till after the English had conquered the land, and the same
field was cultivated year after year.[6] After the various families or
households had finished cutting the grass in their allotted portions of
meadow, and the corn on their strips of tillage, both grass and stubble
became common land and were thrown open for the whole community
to turn their stock upon.
The size of the strips of land in