he guaranteed to improving farmers a return for their energy and outlay. Two years before the expiration of a lease, the tenant was informed of the new rent proposed, and offered a renewal. My best bank," said one of his farmers, is my land." At the same time he guarded against the mischief of a long unrestricted tenancy by covenants regulating the course of high-class cultivation. Though management clauses were then comparatively unknown in English leases, his farms commanded competition among the pick of English farmers. "Live and let live" was not only a toast at the Holkham sheep-shearings, but a rule in the control of the Holkham estate. Cobbett was not prejudiced in favour of landlords. Yet even he was compelled to admit the benefits which Coke's tenants derived from his paternal rule. 'Every one," he writes in 1821, made use of the expressions towards him which affectionate children use towards their parents."

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One great obstacle to the improvement of Norfolk farming remained. Farmers of the eighteenth century lived, thought, and farmed like farmers of the thirteenth century. Wheat instead of rye might be grown with success; turnips, if drilled, were more easily hoed and yielded a heavier crop than those which were sown broadcast; marl and clay might help to consolidate drifting soil. But the neighbouring farmers were suspicious of new methods, and distrusted a young man who disobeyed the saws and maxims of their forefathers. Politics ran so high that Coke's Southdowns were denounced as Whiggish sheep." It was nine years before he found anyone to imitate him in growing wheat. "It might be good for Mr. Coke; but it was not good enough for them." As to potatoes, the best they would say was, that "perhaps they wouldn't poison the pigs." Even those who had given up broadcast sowing still preferred the dibber to the drill. Sixteen years passed before the implement was adopted. Coke himself calculated that his improvements travelled at the rate of a mile a year. The Holkham sheep-shearings did much by ocular demonstration to break down traditions and prejudices. These meetings originated in 1778, in Coke's own ignorance of farming matters; small parties of farmers were annually invited to discuss agricultural topics at his house and aid him with their practical advice. Before many years had passed, the gatherings had grown larger, and Coke had become a teacher as well as a learner. The Holkham sheep

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shearing in June, 1806 is described in the Farmer's Magazine 1 in the stilted language of the day, as "the happy resort of the most distinguished patrons and amateurs of Georgic employments." In 1818 open house was kept at Holkham for a week; hundreds of persons assembled from all parts of Great Britain, the Continent, and America. The mornings were spent in inspecting the land and the stock; at three o'clock, six hundred persons sate down to dinner; the rest of each day was spent in discussion, toasts, and speeches. The Emperor of Russia sent a special representative, and among the learners was Erskine, who abandoned the study of Coke at Westminster Hall to gather the wisdom of his namesake at Holkham. At the sheep-shearings, year after year, were collected practical and theoretical agriculturists, farmers from every district, breeders of every kind of stock, who compared notes and exchanged experiences. In many other parts of England similar meetings were held by great landlords, like the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, or Lord Egremont at Petworth, who in their own localities were carrying on the same work as Coke.

At Holkham and Woburn sheep-shearings, both landlords and farmers were learners; both required to be educated in the new principles of their altered business. It was by no means uncommon to find landlords who prevented progress by refusing to let land except at will, or bound their tenants by restrictive covenants to follow obsolete practices. There was, moreover, a tendency among the land-owning class to expect from rent-paying tenants a greater outlay on the land than a farmer's capital could bear or an occupier was justified in making. The question of improvements had not yet assumed the complicated forms which have developed under modern agricultural methods. But it had already been raised in the simpler shape. The liability for improvements of a permanent character required to be defined; no distinction was yet drawn between changes which added some lasting benefit to the holding and those whose effects were exhausted within the limits of a brief occupation. Expenditure which might legitimately be borne by landlords was often demanded from tenants at will or even from year to year. Thousands of acres still lay unproductive because owners looked to occupiers for the reclamation of waste, the drainage of

1 Farmer's Magazine, August, 1806.

2 For a description of a Woburn sheep-shearing, or "this truly rational Agricultural Fete," see Farmer's Magazine for July, 1800.

swamps, or an embankment against floods. It was one of the lessons which were taught by the agricultural depression after the peace of 1815 that landowners must find the money for lasting improvements effected on their property.

That farmers should have realised the possibility of improving traditional practices was a great step in advance. The new race of men, who were beginning to occupy land, were better educated, commanded more capital, were more open to new ideas and more enterprising than their predecessors. Their holdings were larger, and offered greater scope for energy and experiment. The Reporters to the Board of Agriculture on Northumberland (1805) lay stress on the size of the farms, and on the spirit of enterprise and independence which now animated the tenants. "Scarcely a year passes without some of them making extensive tours for the sole purpose of examining modes of culture, of purchasing or hiring the most improved breeds of stock, and seeing the operations of newinvented and most useful implements." The Reporter on Middlesex (1798) emphasises the stagnation of farming among small occupiers. "It is rather the larger farmers and yeomen, or men who occupy their own land, that mostly introduce improvements in the practice of agriculture, and that uniformly grow much greater crops of corn, and produce more beef and mutton per acre than others of a smaller capital." The Oxfordshire Reporter (1809) says: "If you go into Banbury market next Thursday, you may distinguish the farmers from enclosures from those from open fields; quite a different sort of men; the farmers as much changed as their husbandry-quite new men, in point of knowledge and ideas." Elsewhere in the same Report,-it is Arthur Young who writes,-occurs the following passage: The Oxfordshire farmers are now in the period of a great change in their ideas, knowledge, practice, and other circumstances. Enclosing to a greater proportional amount than in almost any other county in the kingdom, has changed the men as much as it has improved the country; they are now in the ebullition of this change; a vast amelioration has been wrought, and is working; and a great deal of ignorance and barbarity remains. The Goths and Vandals of open-fields touch the civilisation of enclosures. Men have been taught to think, and till that moment arrives, nothing can be done effectively. When I passed from the conversation of the farmers I was recommended to call on, to that of men whom chance threw in my way,

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I seemed to have lost a century in time, or to have moved a thousand miles in a day. Liberal communication, the result of enlarged ideas, was contrasted with a dark ignorance under the covert of wise suspicions; a sullen reserve lest landlords should be rendered too knowing, and false information given under the hope that it might deceive, were in such opposition, that it was easy to see the change, however it might work, had not done its business. The old open-field school must die off before new ideas can become generally rooted." In Lincolnshire, in the early years of George III., Arthur Young had found few points in the management of arable land which did not merit condemnation. The progress, which he noted as Reporter to the Board of Agriculture in 1799, was largely due to the changed character of the farmers. "I have not," he says, seen a set more liberal in any part of the kingdom. Industrious, active, enlightened, free from all foolish and expensive show, they live comfortably and hospitably, as good farmers ought to live; and in my opinion are remarkably void of those rooted prejudices which sometimes are reasonably objected to this race of men. I met with many who had mounted their nags, and quitted their homes purposely to examine other parts of the kingdom; had done it with enlarged views, and to the benefit of their own cultivation."

CHAPTER XI.

OPEN-FIELD FARMS AND PASTURE COMMONS

(1793-1815).

Condition of open-field arable land and pasture commons as described by the Reporters to the Board of Agriculture, 1793-1815; (1) The North and North-Western District; (2) West Midland and South-Western District; (3) South-Eastern and Midland District; (4) Eastern and North-Eastern District; (5) the Fens; the cumulative effect of the evidence; procedure under private Enclosure Acts; its defects and cost; the General enclosure Act of 1801; the Inclosure Commissioners; the new Board of Agriculture.

It might perhaps be supposed that in 1793 the agricultural defects of the ancient system of open arable fields and common pasture had been remedied by experience; that open-field farmers had shared in the general progress of farming; that time alone was needed to raise them to the higher level of an improved standard ; that, therefore, enclosures had ceased to be an economic necessity. In 1773, an important Act of Parliament had been passed,1 which attempted to help open-field farmers in adapting their inconvenient system of occupation to the improved practices of recent agriculture. Three-fourths of the partners in village-farms were empowered, with the consent of the landowner and the titheowner, to appoint field-reeves, and through them to regulate and improve the cultivation of the open arable fields. But any arrangement made under these powers was only to last six years, and, partly for this reason, the Act seems to have been from the first almost a dead letter. At Hunmanby, on the wolds of the East Riding of Yorkshire,2 the provisions of the Act were certainly put in force, and it is 113 Geo. III. c. 81.

2 Isaac Leatham's General View of the Agriculture of the East Riding of Yorkshire (1794), p. 45. Thomas Stone, in his Suggestions for Rendering the Inclosure of Common Fields and Waste Lands a source of Population and Riches (1787), says that he knew of no instance in which the Act had been put in force.