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This article investigates the social structure and the distribution of agricultural wealth in Cumbria, England. The challenge thrown to a growing group of historians may well turn out to be beneficial. There is little doubt, for example, that the examination and analysis of probate inventories, covering large geographical areas, and for long curiously neglected, will eventually produce working estimates of changing wealth levels which will in turn permit inter-regional as well as inter-local comparisons. It is explicitly assumed that a person's economic and social position at the time of his death-when the inventory was made-may not reflect his wealth and status at the peak of his career as a farmer, dealer, or craftsman. The apparent wealth levels suggested by inventories may have been influenced by a host of variables-the most important being mean death ages in a period, time, or region, ages at marriage, the sizes of families, inheritance customs and types of tenure. Plainly, if a strong element of homogeneity exists, these damaging or worrying variables become much less frightening, although it is taken for granted that elaborate demographic investigation must follow at a later stage, and that no dubious assumption will be left unchecked. Finally, it should be stressed that this is a study of stages in the growth of wealth and not a study of poverty.

The article assesses the influence which the Corn Laws had on the level of protection offered to British cereal farmers in the 19th century. When the sliding-scale Corn Law was introduced in 1828, the list of inspected towns was revised, with 21 of the smaller markets being replaced by towns from inland areas. This meant that, for the first time, major consumption centres such as Derby, Nottingham, Leicester and Birmingham were allowed to influence the national average. With the introduction of the sliding scale, the calculation of the quarter-day averages was abandoned and the duties were adjusted weekly on the basis of the average of the previous six weeks' prices. Although the protective effects of the Corn Laws could be softened in the short-run, the Laws do seem to have offered cereal producers protection in the longer run. Although repeal did not lead to a dramatic undermining of domestic prices by a flood of cheap imports, the increased importation of foreign grain prevented rising home consumption from raising prices by the pressure of demand. Many British cereal producers became caught in the price-cost squeeze as wages and rents moved upwards but prices did not. This encouraged many of them to adopt mixed farming or move out of cereals altogether into pastoral agriculture where the prospect of profits was relatively more attractive, partly because there was less competition from imports.

Examines how the English farmers responded to the market conditions during the Napoleonic Wars. Distinction between convertible husbandry and alternate husbandry; Change from pastoral land use to arable; Fluctuation of the price of grains during the period.

The article presents a study that investigates the social change on the Leveson-Gower estates in England during the period 1714-1832. It discusses the economic and social conditions of small farmers and agricultural laborers during the period. The sizes of tenant farms and the methodology used in the study are presented. It provides an explanation on the source of the data used for the study. The article also discusses the fate of the English "yeoman" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of the small owner-occupier, who has been generally equated with the English yeoman.

The article focuses on agriculture in England during the sixteenth century. It discusses the factors which quickened the pace of economic life in medieval England and the agrarian problems during the sixteenth century. A comparison of the labor plight in England during the thirteenth and sixteenth century is presented. In the sixteenth century, as in the thirteenth, there were tenant-farmers who were in a strong enough position to resist all efforts by their landlords to raise rents. The article suggests that in the sixteenth century those who acceded to the passage of the enclosure legislation did not use it. and those who needed protection did not need protection from the threat of enclosure.

The article presents information about the British 19th-century Corn Laws. Many opponents of the Corn Laws, agreed with the farmers about the probable results of free trade while disagreeing about their desirability. However, this simple picture has been confused by later and more sophisticated free trade arguments which held that the Corn Laws could safely be abolished because foreign competition had been exaggerated and no cheap surplus was forthcoming. It is this version of the facts, apparently confirmed by the course of events after 1846, which dominates modern historical thinking on the subject. Thus the Laws appear to have made little difference to British grain prices. The ability of contemporaries to understand their own affairs is discredited, and the whole Corn Law controversy is made to seem pointless and much ado about no thing. The Laws are reduced to a symbol in the struggle between landlord and manufacturer, which could be ceremonially abolished to mark the victory of the latter.