Agricultural Revolution in England 1500 - 1850

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• 1. An enduring myth
• 2. More food for more people
• 3. Crop yields
• 4. Farming systems
• 5. More food per worker
• 6. Find out more
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An enduring myth

For many years the agricultural revolution in England was thought to have occurred because of three major changes: the selective breeding of livestock; the removal of common property rights to land; and new systems of cropping, involving turnips and clover. All this was thought to have been due to a group of heroic individuals, who, according to one account, are 'a band of men whose names are, or ought to be, household words with English farmers: Jethro Tull, Lord Townshend, Arthur Young, Bakewell, Coke of Holkham and the Collings.'

These men are seen as having triumphed over a conservative mass of country bumpkins. They are thought to have single-handedly, in a few years, transformed English agriculture from a peasant subsistence economy to a thriving capitalist agricultural system, capable of feeding the teeming millions in the new industrial cities.

All these details are in some dispute, but there is general agreement that the role of the 'Great Men' as pioneers and innovators has been exaggerated. 'Turnip' Townshend, for example, was a boy when turnips were first grown on his estate, and he could not, as the textbooks tell us, have introduced them from Hanover. Jethro Tull was something of a crank and not, as we have been told, the first person to invent a seed drill, which in any case was not used by farmers on any scale until a century after his treatise Horse hoeing husbandry was first published in 1731.

'Arthur Young, the agricultural writer, has been described as a 'a mountebank, a charlatan and a scribbler'.'

To continue, Coke of Holkham was a great publicist (especially of his own achievements), but some of the farming practices he encouraged (such as the employment of the Norfolk four-course rotation in unsuitable conditions) may have been positively harmful. And Arthur Young, the agricultural writer, has been described as a 'a mountebank, a charlatan and a scribbler' by one author, although others see him as a proto-social scientist. Finally, Bakewell's New Leicester sheep was a success, but his Longhorn cattle were not. It seems that only the Collings brothers, who developed the shorthorn cattle breed, can escape criticism. Despite this evidence, the myths associated with these individuals have proved extremely difficult to dislodge from literature not directed at a specialist historical audience.

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Published: 2002-09-19