ENGLISH HISTORY).
The three fields were cropped on a fixed rotation of winter corn (wheat or rye), spring corn (barley, oats, peas or beans, or mixed corn) and bare fallow. In each field the tenants held a certain number . of scattered strips, the original intention being probably to give to every man a share of the good land and the bad, and mingled with them were the strips held by the lord and constituting his demesne. Each tenant f armed his own strips but was required to give a stated number of days' service to cultivate the demesne strips, services which gradually became commuted into payments in money or in kind. At a certain date after harvest the arable land was thrown open to the cattle to wander over, and this of itself prevented any growth of fodder crops. On the lower land by the river would exist an area of meadow land to be laid up for hay and again divided in propor tion with the arable land. The tenure of the particular strips for the year was often balloted for, a practice which still endures in places, as at Yarnton near Oxford. After hay harvest or Lammas the meadows were thrown open for common pasturage, hence the name of "Lammas fields" which still obtains. Besides the arable and the meadows the manor embraced a certain amount of "waste," the origin of what to-day are known as "commons" (q.v.). On this the tenants had right of pasturage and in suitable districts of turbary, that is, the right to cut turf or peat for fuel. It also provided fern for litter, reeds or heather for thatching, furze and brushwood for firing, rushes for the floors and other purposes, rough timber for fencing and building, stone, gravel and sand.
If the conditions of cropping were bad the live stock were in a worse state. The stock of all the tenants and of the lord herded together and were driven afield and tended by the village cow herd, shepherd and swineherd respectively. Which class of stock prevailed depended to some extent upon the class of land; in the open down and heath country sheep were a feature, the acorns and mast of the woodlands finished off the swine before the win ter. Pannage (q.v.) for so many hogs is a common entry in Domesday as an appanage of a particular holding. But with this mixture of everybody's stock little in the nature of selective breeding could be practised. Walter of Henley insists on the value of good boars, but in general the bull and the boar were common to the manor—the result was a "haphazard union of nobody's son with everybody's daughter." Whatever disease came along ran riot through the whole herd or flock. Oxen were chiefly kept for work, and Walter of Henley considered an ox at work should consume half a sheaf of oats a day. Though the greater speed of the horse was recognized, it required more care, cost more to feed and was "carrion" instead of meat when worn out. Cows were kept for milk and the milk was mainly converted into butter and cheese. In the early summer they grazed on the "waste" and marshes or were tethered on the grass baulks ; later they had the aftermath of the meadows and the stubbles. With the advent of winter the worn out oxen and the old cows were killed off and salted down :—"For Easter at Martinmas hang up the beef." During winter the cattle subsisted in the yards on hay, pea and bean haulm and straw. Rarely were cattle stall fattened and the open field farmers sold most of their calves for slaughter. Sheep were from the earliest times an important ele ment in English farming because of the value of their wool. The ewes were often milked, the toothless "crones" being killed for meat. During the open weather they lived on the downs or the waste by day and were folded on the fallow by night, in the depth of winter they were housed or folded and fed upon whatever roughage was available. Swine afforded the chief meat of the community ; they scavenged for a living in spring or summer and fattened upon the "pannage" of the woods. A few were specially fattened upon tail corn and the brewers' grains, for the barley that was grown was very largely turned into ale. The manor aimed at being self-supporting both for food and clothing. Rarely had even the lord any margin of corn for sale ; the chief money rev enue was derived from the live stock, wool, skins, and dairy produce.
Turnips and clover were not the only introductions from the Low Countries ; most of the commoner garden vegetables, as cabbages and cauliflowers, carrots and parsnips are owing to the same source. Fruit trees too were "fetched out of Flanders." Richard Harrys, fruiterer to King Henry VIII., bought "105 good acres in Teynham which he divided into 1 o parcels, and brought plants beyond the seas and furnished the ground with them," which land "hath been the chief mother of all other orchards for these kindes of fruites." Hop growing also had a • similar origin.
Doubtless the same thing happened with live stock, but here the evidence is more meagre because the descriptions of the early writers are so imperfect. But it would seem probable that the large long-woolled white-faced sheep were originally of Roman origin, and the Kents or Romney Marsh, the Lincolns and Leices ters, all on the eastern side of England, may well have been de rived from a very similar sheep which is still found in Flanders. The importations may, indeed, have been earlier, for the English long wool was famous in mediaeval times and was among the first of the staple articles of export, its importance being still com memorated in the "woolsack" on which the Lord Chancellor sits. The earlier long wool chiefly came from the Cotswold country, the home of the other white-faced long-wooled race of sheep, and this possibly may be a remainder from Roman occupation. The black and white cattle which have always been about the Eastern counties were certainly of Low Country origin—the modern Fris ian, Holstein or Dutch Cattle. We may even surmise that some white race of Roman origin (either directly or at second hand from the Rhine provinces) went to the making up of the Short horn race, whose hybrid origin is betrayed by the mixed white and red in the coat colour of the roans.
Arthur Young, himself an unceasing advocate of enclosure, de plored the evils that had resulted therefrom. By nineteen En closure Acts out of twenty, the poor are injured, in some grossly injured. . . . The poor in these parishes may say, and with truth, Parliament may be tender of property; all 1 know is that I had a cow, and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me." The Agricultural Labourer.—With enclosure at any rate began the creation in rural Britain of a race of landless men, dependent for employment upon the larger holders of land; and though the darkest days of this class did not come until the close of the i8th and the first third of the i 9th century, when the pauperization caused by the old Poor Law became universal, the lot of the agricultural labourer, still the worst paid and worst housed section of the community, was established. Thomas Mozley writes of his parish in Northants in .1829, "There were many farmers, several yeomen, very many small freeholders, as many tradesmen as the place could find work or customers for, and not one single labourer, in the sense of an independent work man offering his labour for wages, but a multitude of paupers." The labourer class was also recruited from those yeomen proper who obtained small farms after enclosure but were unable to hold on to them. It requires neither fraud nor force to displace the small proprietor; the mere pressure of economic change is suf ficient. A run of bad seasons. the constant temptation to mort gage, the inheritance by a widow, and the neighbouring proprietor who wants to add land to land finds his opportunity, especially where, as in England, land has also for so long possessed a non economic social value. Special opportunities were also offering to active men in industries and commerce, and since many of the old yeomen farms could produce but the barest living for their occu pier, they were sold and merged in larger holdings because the owner was no longer content with the income derivable from them. In other countries peasant farming has subsisted largely because there were no alternative occupations with a higher standard of living within reach and because the layout of the land on the open field system persisted and did not permit of putting to gether large units of farming. The open field system nevertheless persisted into the i9th century ; and even in 1927 a non-enclosed parish farmed on the old English plan can be seen at Laxton in Northamptonshire, while the parishes of Epworth and Haxey in the Isle of Axholme remain in strips, though the owners crop them as they please.
Moreover, with the prevalence of enclosed fields, the improve ment of live stock could be taken up with some prospect of rapid achievement. Robert Bakewell (q.v.) was the pioneer, and though he was unfortunate in selecting the Longhorn cattle to work upon, his creation of the Leicester breed of sheep persisted and led to rapid amelioration of all the long-wooled sheep. His methods were taken up by other men; Charles Colling (q.v.) made the Shorthorn breed, and John Ellman (1753-1832) the Southdown sheep which has been the progenitor of all the other "down" breeds. England developed a race of breeders who com bined the instincts of the fancier with certain definite principles. They began by selecting their breeding stock for conformity to an ideal type in which the meat was laid on in the most valuable places; by close line-breeding, even by inbreeding, the type was fixed and the "pedigree" sires became capable of stamping their own type in a few generations upon the common country-bred stock. Early maturity, the capacity to grow rapidly on good food, proved to be equally obtainable by selection, and the result was that in the i9th century Britain was possessed of a number of definite breeds of cattle, sheep and pigs that were doubly or trebly more efficient than were the old unimproved stocks. Their value may be gauged from the way the flocks and herds of the new countries of the world have been populated with stock of British origin. Shorthorns, Herefords and Devons are the great meat producers of the Americas, Australia and New Zea land; the only non-British breeds that have achieved any world wide extension are the Merino sheep because of their wool and adaptability to arid climates, and the Friesian cattle because of their unrivalled milk yield.
Thus in England the great landowners were the leaders of agriculture along its path of progress in the i8th century, even though most of the actual improvements, especially in stock breeding, were the work of tenant farmers like Bakewell, Colling and Ellman. A few large proprietors led the way; they created the atmosphere of enterprise and confidence in the industry, and they rendered better farming possible by their expenditure on reclamations and buildings. They introduced the improved live stock to their tenants and they enforced sound methods of crop ping by the covenants inserted in the conditions of tenancy. Prominent among them were the 2nd Viscount Townshend (q.v.) Pope's "Turnip Toi,vnshend," who devoted himself to the im provement of his estate in Norfolk on a basis of turnip growing, with the use of the drill and the horse hoe. He is generally cred ited with the Norfolk four-course rotation, but it had been evolved before his time and he only gave to it a wider extension. The ideas that Townshend put into practice were chiefly derived from Jethro Tull (q.v.) of Berkshire, the greatest original thinker about farming processes that England had then produced. His "Horse Hoeing Husbandry," published in 1731, was the basis of all im provements in the operations of cultivation during the i8th and early 19th centuries. A little later Townshend's neighbour, "Coke of Norfolk," st Earl of Leicester (q.v.) made a productive estate at Holkham of what had been little more than a rabbit warren, and became famous for his annual gatherings, the Holkham sheep shearings, where all the improving landlords and farmers of the day met and exchanged their experiences. There, too, the im proved live stock of the time could be seen and judged. The duke of Bedford was equally active and held similar meetings at Woburn. A little later we may single out the earl of Egremont in Sussex, and in Scotland Hope of Rankeillor and Sir John Sinclair of Caithness, first president of the newly formed National Board of Agriculture.
At the same time the science of agricultural chemistry was being explored and the theory of the nutrition of the plant—what it draws from the soil, the water and the air—a theory of which Justus von Liebig (q.v.) had given a brilliant preliminary sketch in his British Association address, provided a rational basis for manuring. By 185o the manufacture of artificial fertilizers was in full swing and though all too many farmers lagged behind in their application, their use, together with the employment of foreign feeding stuffs like linseed and cotton cake, the fertilizing ingredients of which found their way to the land through the farmyard manure made by their consumption, had by 187o raised the general level of production from British land from 20 to 30 bushels of wheat per acre. As already described, up to 1840 an average of about 20 bushels per acre was all that the land could yield when the farm was strictly self-contained ; it was the ex traneous sources of fertility which made the higher yields possi ble. Fertilizers and feeding stuffs were indeed not the only fac tors at work, though the other improvements influence perhaps more the extension of the cultivated area than its increased yield. Field drainage was applied to great areas of heavy land under the influence of James Smith (1789-185o), of Deanston in Scotland, and of Josiah Parkes (1793-1871) whose demonstrations of the value of drainage (q.v.) became easy of application with Scragg's invention in 1845 of a machine for moulding cylindrical tiles. Smith drained shallow, 3o inches ; Parkes put his drains in at 4f t., and much of his work has been in consequence wasted. Only since the great controversy between the two schools has it be come clear that Smith's is the way to deal with ordinary heavy land which suffers because it cannot get rid of the rainfall, whereas Parkes's is the best method to cut off underground water rising from below. The improvements in cultivating machinery con tinued and in 1853 Croskill put an efficient reaper at the farmers' service. The steam plough was designed and ever since has had a valuable if limited field of action. Pedigree stock made rapid progress; one by one the existing breeds of cattle, sheep and pigs became differentiated; breed societies and flock and herd books grew up. Improvements in crops also followed; Shirreff, Cheval lier, Le Couteur and Hallet introduced the idea of "pedigree" into cereals.
In these years from 185o to 1874 farming was a prosperous business and money was poured into the land ; British farming may then be said to have reached its high water mark of techni cal excellence. Of some farmers it was reported that they offered a reward to anyone who could find a weed on their cultivated land; no other country could show such yields of corn and roots; men came from all over the world to buy British live stock with which to improve their native races.
The other great factor was the appreciation of gold which began when Germany started to form a gold reserve after the war of 187o and was accentuated by the falling yields from what had been the chief gold-producing centres of California and Australia. The situation was not rectified until the Transvaal became a big producer in the nineties of the last century. The prices of all commodities fell, wheat more than the rest [Sauerbeck's index, i.e., all commodities fell 4o%, wheat %], and some economists have considered that to this cause alone was due the fall in agri cultural prices and the resulting depression. But the vast increase of production must have also had its effect or the demand from the rapidly growing population would have counter-balanced it. During this period there was always a surplus of wheat and it was being grown at less than the cost of production, indeed it has been said that the only profit the pioneering American farmer made out of all the plenty lay in the eventual appreciation in value of the land he had settled.
Whatever the ultimate causes of the break in prices it had a disastrous effect upon British farming. Neither farmers nor land lords realized how continuous the fall was going to be, or how com pletely indifferent would the price remain to the occurrence of a short crop at home ; farmers could not readjust their methods and in many cases landowners did not reduce their rents in time to avoid a crash. Much of the old perfection of British farming had to go because of its expensiveness in labour, for during the whole of the period wages were tending to rise rather than to fall. Farm of ter farm was thrown upon the owners' hands; in Essex great areas of clay land became for a time derelict or were let to Scots men who would undertake to pay tithes and rates. In some cases the landowners had to farm them selves on an extensive scale, in others farmers who had acquired an art of cheap management had farm after farm thrust upon them until they were operating areas of 4,00o to io,000ac. These big businesses which grew up towards the close of the century are not reflected in the statistics, for the separate farms were still returned in the rate books as units. In deed they were farmed as units, each with a bailiff but on the com mon system which the farmers had found to work; the buying and selling only were centralized. Though prices did turn slightly after 1895 it was not until the close of the century that the conditions began to appear at all stabilized. By that time men had learned to cheapen their methods in the purely arable districts and in others the growing demand for milk had afforded an outlet. The Essex clay lands came back into use, if not under the plough, with a new race of Scotch and Devonshire milk producers. Prices of meat and wool had fallen though not to the same extent as with cereals, and the distress in the west and north of England had never been so great as in the purely arable countries. In some districts special crops solved the farmers' difficulties; a great potato industry developed in the Fen country, where energetic men with intensive methods built up large holdings out of the bankrupt small farms : but the price of potatoes, like that of milk, was made at home, foreign competition being negligible here, while the demand was growing with a larger and more prosperous pop ulation. The growth of vegetables, fruit and flowers provided also an expanding industry, and the demand for such things increased with the rise in the standard of living.
For all the reduction of cultivation and the lower standard of farming the period was not entirely one of retrogression. Im provements in the quality of live stock, especially in the direction of early maturity, in the production of milk, and in the special branches of potato growing, market gardening and fruit growing continued. The self-acting reaper and binder began to be imported in 1873 and proved the great labour-saving implement of the period, though at the outset it only intensified the pressure of com petition, since it was worth more to the wheat grower in new countries short of labour than it was to the British farmer. This distressed state of agriculture became the subject of more than one royal commission and parliamentary enquiry, none of which, with protection ruled out as contrary to national policy, could suggest any substantial alleviation. The one legislative action of importance was the creation in 1889 as a special department of State of the Board of Agriculture whereby the importance of agri culture in the national economy was recognized, no other industry having this kind of representation in the machinery of govern ment. The new Board took over certain existing services such as the collection of statistics, the control of scheduled animal dis eases, the administration of tithes, enclosures, and university and college estates, and was also charged with one function of a con structive character, the allocation of f 5,000 a year for the assist ance of agricultural and dairy schools.
The period from the beginning of the century to the outbreak of the World War was one of steady recovery and quiet progress under the favouring wind of slowly rising prices. Knowledge was growing, both from the example of successful practitioners under the new conditions, and from the technical instruction that was becoming more generally diffused. Statistically the industry con tinued to decline ; the arable land of England diminished by a further million acres between 190o and 1914, nor was there any compensating increase in the numbers of live stock, though the output was improving as better methods of feeding and breeding brought the animals earlier to market. All over the country examples could be found of progressive and prosperous farmers who were taking advantage of the resources science was in creasingly putting at their disposal. But many were still set in old ways; mindful of the bad times that were not far off they sought the path of safety first and were distrustful of all enterprise that might cost money. In the use of lime, fertilizers and other ameli orations of the soil our farmers were falling behind their com petitors in Holland, Denmark and Germany, just as in the applica tions of machinery they could not rival the farmers of America and Australia. Labour was still too cheap in the agricultural coun ties of England; farmers still clung to the traditions that had answered when wages were 7s. a week and wheat over 6s. a bushel.
The one political measure of outstanding importance was the Small Holdings Act of 1908 which empowered County Councils to acquire land and equip it for small holdings and allotments (see ALLOTMENTS and SMALL HOLDINGS). This Act may be taken as one of the signs of a growing public interest in agriculture, of the feeling among thinking people that the urbanization of Great Britain was proceeding too fast and that some measures should be sought to check the drift of men away from the land. The triumphal march of industrialism from factory to factory had lost some of its attractiveness; statesmen no longer regarded the simple theory of Great Britain wholly given up to manufacturing, and exchanging its goods for food, as desirable or even safe. So the Small Holdings Act was an attempt to recreate the peasantry that had always been dying out in Britain, and to provide an access to the land for men whom circumstances had driven into the towns but who still felt a call to the soil. The growth of small holdings could do little towards reducing the volume of imports ; the im pulse was social rather than economic, but a small holding might give a jumping-off point for the energetic man who would move into larger and larger farms, and new blood was needed in the farming community. The statutory small holders rarely failed to establish themselves, but their numbers barely sufficed to keep pace with the wastage that was elsewhere going on (see also post section on Small Holdings).
One other technical advance may be noted. Towards the close of the period the tractor plough, driven by an internal combustion engine, began to appear in our fields. The new tool could be operated on a farm of ordinary British size, whereas the steam plough was only . economic on an extraordinary acreage and had become an emergency implement only hired for special work. Imperfect as the motor implement was and still is, it offers poten tialities of speeding up and economizing manual labour which have not as yet been fully realized.