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Agriculture and Economic Growth in England, 1660–1750: Agricultural Change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

E. L. Jones
E. L. Jones
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford
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Extract

Between the middle of the seventeenth century and the middle of the eighteenth century, English agriculture underwent a transformation in its techniques out of all proportion to the rather limited widening of its market. Innovations in cropping took place on a wide, though not a universal, front and independently of any great expansion of demand, which was to stimulate the extension of improved methods during the classic agricultural revolution of the late eighteenth century. Except in the sphere of stock breeding, the remainder of the century really had little to offer in the way of techniques which were new in principle. Yet the initial introduction of the most important advanced techniques had come during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, when the slow and ultimately uncertain growth of population and the modest rise in per capita national income combined to produce only a gradual growth of demand.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 1 - 18
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1965

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References

1 Especially as revealed in the following key sources: Habakkuk, H. J., “English Landownership, 1680–1740,” Economic History Review, X (Feb. 1940), 2–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John, A. H., “The Course of Agricultural Change, 1660–1760,” in Pressnell, L. S. (ed.), Studies in the Industrial Revolution (London: Athlone Press, 1960), pp. 122–155Google Scholar; Mingay, G. E., “The Agricultural Depression, 1730–1750,” Economic History Review, 2d Series, VIII, No. 3 (Apr. 1955), 323–338Google Scholar. The present article is a slightly revised version of a paper given to the joint conference of the Economic History Society and British Agricultural History Society, at the University of Reading, April 10, 1964. Comments by Gordon Mingay and Donald Whitehead, and by B. H. Slicher van Bath and his staff at a seminar in the Department of Rural History, University of Wageningen, Netherlands, have been most helpful.

2 In order to extend our knowledge of agricultural output, an analysis of eighteenth-century farm accounts has now been started at Nuffield College, Oxford, under the direction of R. M. Hartwell and the writer.

3 The account of crop innovations which follows is drawn from references listed below; a good contemporary summary is to be found in Dick, O. Lawson (ed.), Aubrey's Brief Lives (Harmondsworth: Peregrine Books, 1962), especially pp. 28–29Google Scholar.

4 Gaut, R. C., A History of Worcestershire Agriculture and Rural Evolution (Worcester: The Worcester Press, 1939), p. 97Google Scholar; Harrison, F., North Wraxhall, Co. Wilts (London: Macmillan, 1913), p. 155Google Scholar.

5 Allison, K. J., “The Sheep-Corn Husbandry of Norfolk in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Agricultural History Review, V, No. 1 (1957), 27Google Scholar; Defoe, Daniel, A Tour Through England and Wales (London: Dent & Sons, 1928), p. 58Google Scholar.

6 Rashleigh Farm Accounts, uncatalogued, Cornwall Record Office; Rowe, J., Cornwall in the Age of the Industrial Revolution (Liverpool: University Press, 1953), p. 221Google Scholar; on another western county, see Jones, E. L., “Agricultural Conditions and Changes in Herefordshire, 1660–1815,” Transactions of the WooUiope Club, XXXVII (1961), 40Google Scholar.

7 Wilson, Charles, Holland and Britain, (London: Collins, n.d.), p. 108Google Scholar.

8 Vaughan, Rowland, Most Approved and Long Experienced Water Works (London, 1610), no paginationGoogle Scholar; letter to Humphrey Weld from his tenants of Winfrith manor, 1598, Dorest Record Office, Weld Collection D10/E(103). A floated water meadow is one in which river water is conveyed for a series of short periods over adjacent, gently sloping meadow land by means of a complicated system of hatches and ditches. This is in contrast with the older and simpler system of catchwork meadows, watered by washing stream water over hillside grassland. The effects are irrigation, raising the temperature and thus facilitating grass growth, and fertilizing.

9 “Agricultural Progress in Open-Field Oxfordshire,” Agricultural History Review IX, No. 2 (1961), 73–83Google Scholar.

10 There is much scattered evidence on the size of the sheep and cattle populations and the output of their products, the most convenient summary being Deane, Phyllis and Cole, W. A., British Economic Growth (Cambridge: University Press, 1962), pp. 68–74Google Scholar.

11 Southampton Civic Record Office, Petty Custom and Wharfage Books from 1723.

12 See especially Mingay, G. E., English Landed Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1963), pp. 54–55Google Scholar.

13 van Bath, B. H. Slicher, “The Rise of Intensive Husbandry in the Low Countries,” Britain and the Netherlands, I (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), 130–53Google Scholar.

14 Jones, E. L., “Eighteenth-Century Changes in Hampshire Chalkland Farming,” Agricultural History Review, VIII, No. 1 (1960), especially 7–10Google Scholar; Naish, M. C., “The Agricultural Landscape of the Hampshire Chalklands, 1700–1840” (unpublished M.A. thesis, London University, 1960)Google Scholar, passim.

15 Habakkuk, Economic History Review, X, 5.

16 Havinden (cited in n.9), passim.

17 Compare the categorical dismissal of the ability of open-field fanners to utilize the new crops and the statements (culled from the biased “improving” literature) about the slowness of innovation, in Ernie, Lord, English Farming Past and Present, (6th ed.; London: Heinemann, 1961), pp. 122, 134Google Scholar.

18 Many studies by historical geographers have attempted to measure agricultural differences between light-soiled uplands and heavy-soiled vales, and sometimes between finer units. Such work includes Best, S. E. J., East Yorkshire: A Study in Agricultural Geography (London: Longmans, 1930)Google Scholar; Mills, D. R., “Enclosure in Kesteven,” Agricultural History Review, VII, No. 2 (1959), 82–97Google Scholar; J. A. Sheppard, “East Yorkshire's Agricultural Labour Force in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Ibid., IX, No. 1 (1961), 43–54; D. B. Grigg, “Changing Regional Values during the Agricultural Revolution in South Lincolnshire,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1962), pp. 91–103. But these writers have hardly generalized their findings or pursued the economic implications, while historians are usually content to work with administrative units which often blur agricultural distinctions.

19 See, for example, Kenyon, G. H., “Kirdford Inventories, 1611 to 1776, with Particular Reference to the Weald Clay Fanning,” Sussex Archaeological Collections, XCIII (1955), 78–156Google Scholar; and Chalklin, C. W., “The Rural Economy of a Kentish Wealden Parish, 1650–1750,” Agricultural History Review, X, No. 1 (1962), 29–45Google Scholar. The problems of the rates of assimilation of the new crops by different farming systems are discussed in Jones, E. L., Transactions of Woolhope Club, XXXVII, 32, 38–42Google Scholar, and in his “English Farming before and during the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review, 2d Ser., XV, No. 1 (1962), 145–47Google Scholar.

20 Moreau, Simon, A Tour to Cheltenham Spa (Bath, 1783), p. 62Google Scholar.

21 Smith, J. H., The Gordon's Mill Farming Club, 1758–1764 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1962), p. 149Google Scholar.

22 Chambers, J. D., “The Vale of Trent,” Economic History Review, Supplement 3 (1957), p. 13, n.8Google Scholar; Hoskins, W. G., The Midland Peasant (London: Macmillan, 1957), p. 227Google Scholar; Thirsk, Joan, “Industries in the Countryside,” in Fisher, F. J. (ed.), Essays in the Economic and. Social History of Tudor and Stuart England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 70–88Google Scholar.

23 Defoe, II, 89; Hoskins, W. G., The Making of the English Landscape (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1955), p. 124Google Scholar.

24 The third main division in terms of area, the lowland heath, may however be ignored here as consisting of sandy soils also termed “light,” but too infertile for cultivation except for a little temporary enclosure during periods of exceptionally high prices, such as the Napoleonic wars. See Jones, E. L. and Tubbs, C. R., “Vegetation of Sites of Previous Cultivation in the New Forest,” Nature, CXCVIII, No. 4,884 (June 1963), 977–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25 John (cited in n.l), p. 147.

26 Jones, Agricultural History Review, VIII, No. 1, 9, quoting Nottingham University Archives, Manvers Collection, Rentals.

27 Ibid., 9, citing Stoke Charity Papers, Hampshire Record Office: 18M54/Box E, pkt. A.

28 See Naish, passim.

29 English experience contrasts sharply with that of Europe, where the fall in population and depression in agriculture were very severe. This is of particular consequence with respect to the Low Countries, which had formerly been ahead of England in agricultural techniques but which failed to respond so energetically (or perversely) to the fall in prices. In the reclaimed areas of Holland, the drainage network remained a fixed charge on agriculture when farm-product prices were falling. The status of landowning was lower than in England (seignorial rights could be acquired without buying land) and did not attract investment in the same way. And when returns from agriculture fell after 1650, the one hundred or so Amsterdam merchants who owned land in the Beemster, North Holland—the reclamation of which they had financed-quit their estates and retreated to the city. On the European experience, see van Bath, B. H. Slicher, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850 (London: Arnold, 1983), 206–20Google Scholar. I am also indebted to that author for a typescript of his lecture, “Die Europaischen Agrarvenhältnisse im 17. und der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jarhhunderts,” and to Drs. A. M. van der Woude for showing me the Beemster.