AGRICULTURAL STATISTICS IN 1696 145 ments. On the eve of this change, it may be of interest to note a contemporary estimate of the agricultural population and wealth of the country at the close of the eighteenth century. Gregory King, whose training and experience specially qualified him for the task, drew up a statistical account of the "State and Condition" of England and Wales in 1696. His estimates of the actual numbers of the population are the result of an investigation by a competent and careful observer, who made the fullest use of the information supplied by such figures as those contained in the Hearth-office, the assessments on Births, Marriages, and Burials, the Parish Registers, and Public Accounts. The substantial accuracy of this part of his work has stood the test of subsequent criticism, in spite of his prophecy that in 1900 the population would have risen to 7,350,000. For the rest of his estimates he mainly depended on guess-work. Confidence is scarcely created by his laborious calculation of the numbers of hares, rabbits, and wild fowl in the country. King's figures were largely used by Davenant,1 but his actual manuscript remained unpublished till 1801.2 King estimated the total acreage of England and Wales at 39 million acres; of which 11 million acres were arable, averaging a yearly rent per acre of 5s. 10d.; and 10 million were meadow or pasture, averaging 9s. an acre. Of the 11 million arable acres, ten million were under the plough for corn, pease, beans, and vetches; one million acres were allotted to flax, hemp, saffron, woad and other dyeing weeds, etc. He goes on to calculate the live-stock of the country thus: "horses (and asses)," 600,000; cattle, 4 million; sheep, 11 million; pigs, 2 million. The total population in 1696 is estimated at 5,500,000 persons, distributed into 1,400,000 urban, and 4,100,000 rural, inhabitants. The total yearly income of the nation in 1688 is calculated at £43,500,000. Of this total, con 1 An Essay upon the Probable Methods of making a People Gainers in the Ballance of Trade, by Charles Davenant, 1698 (Section I. "Of the People of England," and Section II. "Of the Land of England and its Product"). * Published in An Estimate of the Comparative Strength of Great Britain, by George Chalmers (1802), under the title of "Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England, 1696; by Gregory King, Esq., Lancaster Herald." The actual figure is 37,319,221 acres. K siderably more than half (£24,480,000) belonged to the following families: 364,000 Labouring People and Out-servants- Average Yearly Income. £84 0 0 50 0 0 44 0 0 15 0 0 6 10 02 King's estimates bring into strong relief the vast revolution which the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced in the distribution of population and of wealth. The same point is illustrated from a different point of view by a comparison of the wealth of the different counties in 1696 and at the present day. Material for such a comparison is found in the frequent assessments which were made of the counties during the seventeenth century for various fiscal purposes. The central counties are the richest; then follow in order of wealth the south, the east, the west. Poorest of all is the north. Throughout the whole period, Middlesex is the richest and Cumberland the poorest county. The most conspicuous change was that of Surrey, which rose from the eighteenth place in 1636 to the second in 1693. Excluding Middlesex, and excepting Surrey, the wealthiest district throughout the whole period was formed by a block of six agricultural counties north of the Thames-namely Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, and Northamptonshire. Their position illustrates the importance of London as a market for agricultural produce. Already its rapid growth was exciting alarm, lest" the Head "should become "too big for the Body." According to Gregory King, its population was 530,000 souls out of an urban population of 1,400,000, and a total population, urban and rural, of 5 millions. Throughout the whole period, again, the seven poorest counties, though their order in the list varies, were Cheshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland. The assessment of the whole district north of the Humber, comprising one-fifth of the total area of England, was not greater than that of 1 It should be noted that freeholders included not only owners and occupying owners, but tenants for life and lives, as well as copyholders. For tables of estimates drawn up by King and Davenant, see Appendix IV. POVERTY OF THE NORTH OF ENGLAND 147 Wiltshire. In the latter half of the following century not only wealth but population migrated northwards, and the inhabitants of rural districts began to flow into the centres of trade and manufacture which crowded round the coal and iron fields and waterpower of the northern counties. CHAPTER VII. JETHRO TULL AND LORD TOWNSHEND. 1700-1760. Agricultural progress in the eighteenth century; enclosures necessary to advance; advocates and opponents of the enclosing movement; area of uncultivated land and of land cultivated in open-fields; defects of the open-field system as a method of farming; pasture commons as adjuncts to open-field holdings; the necessary lead in agricultural progress given by large landowners and large farmers; procedure in enclosures by Act of Parliament: varying dates at which districts have been enclosed: influence of soil and climate in breaking up or maintaining the open-field system: the East Midland and North Eastern group of counties: improved methods and increased resources of farming; Jethro Tull the "greatest individual improver "; Lord Townshend's influence on Norfolk husbandry. THE gigantic advance of agriculture in the nineteenth century dwarfs into insignificance any previous rate of progress. Yet the change between 1700 and 1800 was astonishing. England not only produced food for a population that had doubled itself, as well as grain for treble the number of horses, but during the first part of the period became, as M. de Lavergne has said, the granary of Europe. Population before 1760 grew so slowly that the soil, without any great increase in farming skill or in cultivated area, produced a surplus. Under the spur of the bounty, land which had been converted to pasture was again ploughed for corn, and proved by its yield that it had profited by the prolonged rest. The price of wheat, between the years 1713 and 1764, in spite of large exports, averaged 34s. 11d. per quarter; poor-rates fell below the level of the preceding century; real wages were higher than they had been since the reign of Henry VI. In England, at least, there was little civil war or tumult, no glut of the labour market, no sudden growth of an artisan class. The standard of living improved. Instead of the salted carcases of half-starved and aged oxen, fresh meat began to be eaten by the peasantry. Wheaten bread ceased to be a luxury of the wealthy, and, at the accession of George III. had become the THE PEASANTS' GOLDEN AGE 149 bread-stuff of half the population. Politically and morally, the period was corrupt and coarse; materially, it was one of the Golden Ages of the peasant. The only drawbacks to the general prosperity of agriculture during the first half of the century were the visitations of the rot, and of the cattle plague. Ellis 1 speaks of the rot in 1735 as "the most general one that has happened in the memory of man the dead bodies of rotten sheep were so numerous in roads, lanes, and fields, that their carrion stench and smell proved extremely offensive to the neighbouring parts and the passant travellers." A newer and more mysterious scourge was the cattle plague. Starting in Bohemia, it travelled westward, devastated the north of France, and three times visited England. The only remedy was to slaughter infected animals; in a single year the Government, paying one-third of the value, expended £135,000 in compensation. The great changes which English agriculture witnessed as the eighteenth century advanced, and particularly after the accession of George III. (1760), are, broadly speaking, identified with Jethro Tull, Lord Townshend, Bakewell of Dishley, Arthur Young, and Coke of Norfolk. With their names are associated the chief characteristics in the farming progress of the period, which may be summed up in the adoption of improved methods of cultivation, the introduction of new crops, the reduction of stock-breeding to a science, the provision of increased facilities of communication and of transport, and the enterprise and outlay of capitalist landlords and tenant-farmers. The improvements which these pioneers initiated, taught, or exemplified, enabled England to meet the strain of the Napoleonic wars, to bear the burden of additional taxation, and to feed the vast centres of commercial industry which sprang up, as if by magic, at a time when food supplies could not have been provided from another country. Without the substitution of separate occupation for the ancient system of common cultivation, this agricultural progress was impossible. But in carrying out the necessary changes, rural society was convulsed, and its general conditions revolutionised. The divorce of the peasantry from the soil, and the extinction of commoners, open-field farmers, and eventually of small freeholders, were the heavy price which the nation ultimately paid for the supply of bread and meat to its manufacturing population. 1 Shepherd's Sure Guide, 1749. |