English Farming Past and Present is based on an article which appeared in the Quarterly Review for 1885. The article was subsequently expanded into a book, published in 1888 by Messrs. Longman under the title of The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming. The book has been out of print for twenty years. Written with the confidence of comparative youth and inexperience, it expressed as certainties many opinions which might now be modified, if not withdrawn. But its motives were two convictions, which time has rather strengthened than weakened. One was, that the small number of persons who owned agricultural land might some day make England the forcing-bed of schemes for land-nationalisation, which countries, where the ownership of the soil rested on a more democratic basis, repudiated as destructive of all forms of private property. The other was, that a considerable increase in the number of peasant ownerships, in suitable hands, on suitable land, and in suitable localities, was socially, economically, and agriculturally advantageous. Since 1888, the whole field of economic history has been so carefully and skilfully cultivated, that another work on a branch of the subject might appear superfluous. But there still seemed to be room for a consecutive history of English agriculture, written from a practical point of view, and tracing the influence of the progress of the industry on the social conditions of those engaged in its pursuit. Great economic changes have resulted from small alterations in the details of manufacturing processes. Similar changes may often be explained by some little-noticed alterations in farming practice. The introduction of the field-cultivation of turnips, for example, was as truly the parent of a social revolution as the introduction of textile machinery. The main object of The Pioneers and Progress of English Farming, and, in greater C4639 detail, of English Farming Past and Present, is to suggest that advances in agricultural skill, the adoption of new methods, the application of new resources, the invention of new implements, have been, under the pressure of national necessities, powerful instruments in breaking up older forms of rural society, and in moulding them into their present shape. Students of economic and social questions-and at the present day most people are interested in these subjects-will decide whether the influence of these simple and natural causes has been greater or less than is suggested. Even those who consider that their importance is exaggerated, may find in the record of their progress a useful commentary on the political explanations which they themselves prefer to adopt. The book may still serve another purpose. It touches rural life at many different points and at many different stages. Dwellers in the country are surrounded by traces of older conditions of society. They may perhaps find, through English Farming Past and Present, a new interest in piecing together the fragments of an agricultural past, and in reconstructing, as in one of the fashionable occupations of the day, a picture of the Middle Ages or of the eighteenth century in the midst of their own familiar surroundings. Now that the book is in print and on the eve of publication, I feel more acutely than ever the disadvantages under which it has been prepared. English Farming Past and Present is the by-product of a life occupied in other pursuits than those of literature. It has been impossible to work upon it for any continuous period of time. Written in odd half-hours, it has been often laid aside for weeks and even months. My thanks are therefore due, in more abundant measure, to Professor Ashley, Sir Ernest Clarke, and Mr. H. Trustram Eve, who have kindly read the proof-sheets and helped me with corrections, and above all to Mr. G. H. Holden, who has also verified the references and prepared the Index. ROWLAND E. PROTHERO. September 6, 1912. CONTENTS Virgin soils traces of sites of early villages : wild field-grass " husbandry; the permanent division of pasture from tillage; manors and trade-guilds; origin of manors; the thirteenth century manor and village; divisions of land according to differences of tenure; villages isolated and self- sufficing; importance of labour-rents in the economy of a manor; the cultivation of the demesne; the crops grown; the live-stock; miscel- laneous produce; the manorial courts: the social grades among the villagers; the system of open-field farming; the arable land; the meadows; the hams; the pasture commons; the prevalence and permanence of the open-field system; the domestic industries of the village. Great landlords as farmers: horrors of winter scarcity: gradual decay of the manorial system and the increased struggle for life: aspects of the change: common rights over cultivated and uncultivated land: tendency towards separate occupation: substitution of labour-rents for money- rents; the Black Death; Labour legislation, and its effect; Manor of Castle Combe and Berkeley Estates; new relations of landlords and tenants substituted for old relations of feudal lords and dependents; tenant-farmers and free labourers; leases and larger farms; increase of separate occupations: William Paston and Hugh Latimer; wage-earning labourers; voluntary surrender of holdings; freedom of movement and The passing of the Middle Ages: enclosures in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries compared; the commercial impulse and its results; conversion of tillage to pasture: enclosures and depopulation: legislation against enclosures; literary attack on enclosures; the practical defence of en- closures: larger farms in separate occupation: loss of employment; enclosures equitably arranged, or enforced by tyranny; legal powers of landowners; open-field farmers not the chief sufferers by enclosures; scarcity of employment and rise in prices; the new problem of poverty: the ranks of vagrants; the Elizabethan fraternity of vagabonds. Paternal despotism: restoration of the purity of the coinage; a definite commercial policy: revival of the wool trade: new era of prosperity among landed gentry and occupiers of land: a time of adversity for small landowners and wage-earning labourers: Statute of Apprentices; hiring fairs; growth of agricultural literature: Fitzherbert and Tusser: their picture of Tudor farming: defects of the open-field system: experience of the value of enclosures; improvement in farming: Barnaby Googe; FARMING UNDER THE FIRST STEWARTS AND THE Promise of agricultural progress checked by the Civil War: agricultural writers and their suggestions: Sir Richard Weston on turnips and clover : conservatism of English farmers; their dislike to book-farming not un- reasonable: unexhausted improvements discussed; Walter Blith on drainage attempts to drain the fens in the eastern counties; the resist- ance of the fenmen : new views on commons: Winstanley's claims : enclosures advocated as a step towards agricultural improvement. |