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As the Verneys expanded their estates during the eighteenth century, they extended their social and economic control beyond Middle Claydon to the adjoining parishes of East and Steeple Claydon. This chapter examines the extent to which changes in Middle Claydon in the period 1660 to 1740 were extended elsewhere in the Claydons during the eighteenth century. After 1730 the Claydon correspondence becomes less compendious, and after 1752 fragmentary, dominated by material relating to court cases about the second earl's debts and business affairs. Material about the running of the Claydon estates is episodic, with no long runs of letters, so this analysis is more dependent on conventional sources about rents, farm sizes, and tenants, the structure of landholding and tenancy, and rich occupational data, linked where possible to parish reconstitution. These changes after 1750 mirror a shift in the second Earl Verney's concerns and priorities. His life became London-based and he spent much time on politics and business schemes. Although he rebuilt Claydon, it is doubtful if he lived there for long periods, particularly between 1760 and 1780, when he used Biddlesden House near Stowe and Buckingham as his Buckinghamshire residence. He spent more time in London, following the pattern set by his father and mother after 1721 when they established a permanent residence in Little Chelsea, rather than using the central London lodgings as had been customary for Sir Ralph and Sir John Verney. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Sir Ralph Verney re-organised his Middle Claydon estate by enclosure in 1654–6, he simultaneously made alterations to his house and gardens, and soon after created a deer park. He was creating a country seat typical of the rural residences of the English landed elite from the sixteenth through to the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. These activities set a pattern for the estate for the next eighty years and were complemented by changes in estate management, and the ‘improvement’ of the estate. The enclosure of Middle Claydon completed the fundamental physical changes to the parish, but was only the beginning of the process of re-organising farms and farming practices. By 1660, Sir Ralph had transformed the landscape, increasing the separation of his house, with its gardens, park, and the church, from the houses and farm buildings of villagers and tenants. He introduced hedges and ring-fenced farms and fields where at the beginning of the century there had also been intercommoned rough pasture, common access to woods, and an open-field system with mutual dependence of copyhold, leasehold, and freehold tenants. For most aristocratic and gentry estates in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the policy framework within which landlords and their stewards operated is apparent in their books and letters, from rentals, surveys and leases, and from the general attitudes and demeanour. The Verneys adopted a philosophy of estate management and policies based on the precepts Sir Ralph had enunciated in his letter of 1650, when he was thirty-seven. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period 1821-1914 witnesses the rise of the regional city to the point where it plays a dominant role in the economic and cultural life of the country. Eighteenth-century growth had been accompanied by the multiplication of local marketing centres, but these places were seen as accessories to rural-based ‘improvement’. The expectation that they could attract manufacturing reflected the improvement ethos, encouraged it would seem by landowners seeking to capitalise on their assets, and also by the desire to maintain continuity in local communities: there was some popular misgiving over urban life in large towns, arising perhaps from perceived ‘culture shock’ in transferring from a rural to an urban environment. The situation was now drastically modified by the continuing revolution in technology. The use of coal-fired boilers to produce steam introduced a new scale of industrial production that required greater discrimination over location (particularly in relation to labour supply and coal distribution costs) and placed manufacturing both financially and managerially beyond the capacities of lairds brought up on the ‘general practitioner’ ethos of eighteenth-century estate management. And as steam was also raised in locomotive boilers the constraints of inaccessibility that had defied the canal builders and turnpike road administrators were eventually eliminated. Scotland became a functionally unified country focussing on a group of great cities. Changes in settlement patterns can now be more readily illustrated thanks to the accumulation of census data. It may be helpful to introduce maps of population distribution in Scotland (Figure 7.1) and, in more detail, the Central Belt (Figure 7.2) at this stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the improving movement had a comprehensive regional impact, involving the development of industry and the overhaul of transport and settlement systems it was in agriculture where the greatest changes were made. So much so that the notion of an ‘agricultural revolution’, which is good currency south of the border, has been put forward. There was vigorous action taken to enclose land, to create consolidated holdings and to introduce new rotations, especially during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Arguably the legislative preconditions had already been satisfied and particular elements of the new agriculture were exemplified in the countryside before 1700. However, a further important act was passed in 1770 relating to entailed estates, authorising longer leases, if tenants agreed to certain improvements, and allowed proprietors to charge to their heirs three quarters of the costs of enclosure and other agricultural improvements. Furthermore the eighteenth century witnessed not simply the application of a number of different ideas to accelerate the growth of agriculture but, rather, comprehensive packages of measures being introduced on each estate. These local development plans involved the landowner taking a lead and concentrating all major decision-making in his hands. Some seventeenth-century proprietors were very much aware of the potential for commercial farming, especially in Lothian, but it has not yet been shown that on any single estate the owner abolished all sub-tenancies and introduced a uniform system of leasing, with associated policies to redeem wadsets, eliminate boundary problems and set up holdings as enclosed and consolidated units. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour costs at Fassaroe, 1837–1886 Richard Barrington's data on labour costs were derived from the meticulous farm accounts kept by his father and then himself over a period of fifty years on their tenant farm at Fassaroe in the parish of Kilmacanogue, in the barony of Rathdown, county of Wicklow. They came to their tenancy in the 1830s. The annual average extent of the tillage cultivation over the 50 years to 1886 was 120 acres, with at times as much as 140 to 150 acres. These were Irish acres. On conversion into statute measure the average size was 194 acres, varying from 227 to 243 acres. The crops grown included potatoes, turnips, mangolds, vetches, rape, wheat, oats, barley, clover and rye-grass. Of the main crops potatoes and turnips were grown in all years, wheat in all years except 1870, oats in all years except 1839, and barley was not grown in 1873, 1874, 1880 and 1882. The usual rotation was in seven courses; oats, potatoes, wheat, turnips, barley, meadow and pasture. The most of any single crop grown in any year in Irish acres was, 22 acres of potatoes in 1842, 27 of turnips in 1851, 45 of wheat in 1841, 24 of oats in 1869, and 32 of barleyin l852. Richard Barrington explains that his accounts were ‘kept with a detail which is not usual with farmers’. These consisted of six main books. They contained such details as weekly wages, the amount and type of work performed, and on which crops that work was performed, thus allowing the labour cost per crop to be deduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Crop yields in Ireland, 1847–1914, Crop yields in Ireland, 1847–1914 – weight per acre (cwts) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The annual agricultural returns, known as the June Returns, have long been used by geographers and historians as a basis for studying the longterm trends in English and Welsh agriculture since 1866. It was in that year that the first British agricultural census was introduced and subsequently systematised. Twenty years earlier the collection of annually aggregated agricultural data was pioneered in Ireland. It began in 1847, in the wake of the onset of the Great Famine, but before the full trauma of that event had been played out. Indeed several years earlier an agricultural census of sorts was attached to the 1841 population census. This early census recorded livestock numbers at the national, provincial and county levels, though some of those data are suspected of underestimation. This is certainly the case with the cattle numbers, and also with the pig numbers if 1841 is to be regarded as a contemporary ‘average year’. The 1841 census also gave an appraisal of landholding distribution, across space, and also by size categories under four main landholding size groups. Some of these data are the subject of very severe criticism; there is the suspicion that the enumerators of the census used a mixture of statute and Irish acres, where the latter is 1.62 times the size of the former. Nevertheless, the 1841 census, in association with the 1845 Poor Law Commissioners' Report is widely used as a pre-Famine benchmark in the study of Irish agriculture. If census enumeration is a learning-by-doing exercise then the post-Famine agricultural statistics when they appeared were reputedly ‘free from major error’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction This study has endeavoured to explore the ways that the Irish agricultural economy responded to the various changes in the internal and external economic circumstances which confronted it in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decade or so of the twentieth century. In isolation from the international world, and solely in comparison with the rest of the UK, the Irish agricultural industry seemed to respond positively to economic stimuli, and looked in an increasingly healthier position than its larger neighbour across the Irish Sea. When the comparisons were widened to embrace countries on the European mainland some of that initial enthusiasm for the Irish performance could still be maintained, though in a diluted form, but in specific comparison with some of the leading Western European economies the light which appeared to emanate from the Irish industry dimmed considerably. The models which have been used in the central chapters above were related to considerations of gross agricultural income and physical output. In this final chapter of conclusions we pose what has become a fundamental question in nineteenth-century Irish economic history: to whose benefit did the structural changes in Irish agriculture accrue? Was it a question of a drain of benefits back to the colonial master? Of course not. Instead, after the Famine, slowly perhaps but inexorably, colonialism as a force of economic power (as distinct from a political reality) was turned on its head. Much of Ireland earned its economic independence by 1914, and soon afterwards full political independence followed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction When the literature on post-Famine Ireland is reviewed to seek a link between labour supply and changing agricultural production, it reveals a series of essentially conflicting stories and interpretations. The basic choices are of two sorts: was there a shortage of labour as a consequence of the mid-century crisis which determined changes in production out of tillage and into livestock; or was there a change in the terms of trade between tillage and livestock production which enhanced livestock production, independent initially of labour supply issues, but which then necessarily was labour saving, and therefore in turn led to people leaving the land; or was there a combination of the two? In this chapter this literature is reviewed, before the empirical exercise which confronts some of these issues is presented. Conflicting models: labour constraint or market forces? The demonstrable switch in emphasis in Irish agriculture from tillage to pasture after the Famine has been directly associated in official papers with a decline in labour supply. The clearest statement of this is contained in the comment by William Coyne, the Superintendent of Statistics at the Department of Agriculture, in his introduction to the 1901 Agricultural Statistics. Adverting to the continuing contraction of the arable land of the country – this is, of course, the outstanding feature of these returns, especially when the process is regarded, not from year to year, but as an historical tendency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction Cormac Ó Gráda's suggestion that by the turn of the century ‘the humble farmyard hen and duck were adding more to agricultural output than wheat, oats and potatoes combined, crops which in the early 1840s accounted for more than half of output’ summarises much of the story of post-Famine Irish agricultural change. The arable sector most decidedly shrank, and there was an expansion of the animal sector. The increase in birds is not intended as the measure of this, because more importantly there was the rise of cattle and milk, and other livestock or livestock products. In land-use terms the country became greener. In addition, the inclusion of hay (meadow and clover) as a crop, and hence as a bolster to the tillage acreage, does not hide the fact that ultimately most hay output was intended for animal use. A doubling of the hay acreage from 1850 to 1910 from 1.2 million acres to over 2.4 million acres is therefore a ready expression of the overall land-use changes. The hay and pasture acreage combined increased from 9.995 million acres in 1851, to 12.08 million acres in 1881, and 12.42 million acres by the Great War. The arable acreage declined from 4.6 million acres in 1851, to 3.2 million acres in 1881, and 2.3 million acres by 1911. This chapter therefore looks more closely at land-use change by looking at the decline in arable farming and the countervailing rise of the livestock industry. National distributions in particular will be investigated, though there will also be a consideration of regional change. The agricultural depression of 1859–64 will be identified as a possible watershed in Irish agricultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Changes in the institutional context under which farming was carried out are important for their impact on output and productivity, but they are also of great significance in their own right because they are concerned with the structure and organisation of agricultural production and with the lives of those working on the land. The bulk of this chapter is taken up with landholding and social relationships in the countryside. This involves considering changes in the ways in which land was held; particularly the establishment of leasehold as the almost universal form of tenure by the nineteenth century, and the elimination of most common rights. These two processes were often, but not necessarily, associated with the process of enclosure. Enclosure also influenced the process of social differentiation; that is changes in the relative size and importance of different social groups, particularly in their relation to the holding of land. In a nutshell, by 1850 most of the land of England was farmed by tenant farmers under conditions of private property, renting their farms for a period of years from landlords, and employing landless labourers to work on their farms. But before considering how these conditions evolved, the chapter begins with a survey of the main developments in the marketing of agricultural produce between the sixteenth century and the nineteenth century. The market A market is a place that provides a forum for the meeting of buyers and sellers who exchange commodities for money. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Included in Gregory King's many calculations made during the final decade of the seventeenth century are his estimates of the future population of England. He expected the population of the country to grow from 5.5 million in 1700, to 6.42 million by 1800, and to 7.35 million by 1900. In fact, as Figure 3.1 and Table 3.5(a) indicate, the population of England stood at 8.66 million in 1801 and 30 million in 1901. His forecast for the maximum population of the country was around 11 million people, which he did not expect to be reached until the year 3500 (in fact it was achieved by 1820). King's projections were so wide of the mark because he thought the country had insufficient land to support more people. His assumption was that, with a finite area of land and an agricultural technology that was virtually static, anything other than a very gradual growth in population was impossible. This assumption was based on a lesson from history. Before the mid-eighteenth century English population seemed to have a natural ceiling of around 5.5 million people. Whenever population grew (during the Roman occupation, in the thirteenth century, and again in the sixteenth century) agriculture had the greatest difficulty in meeting the increased demand for food. In each case there appears to have been a check: the rise in population was halted because the increase in agricultural output was insufficient to sustain the rise in population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter returns to the theme of Chapter One. It re-emphasises the case for an ‘agricultural revolution’, or rather an ‘agrarian revolution’ consisting of two related transformations; first a transformation in output and productivity, and second, a transformation in the institutional framework of farming. The chapter concludes with an exploration of some ideas about the driving forces behind these agrarian changes; first in terms of responses to market prices, and second through the social relations of production embodied in agrarian capitalism. Before that, however, the first part of the chapter returns to the question of regional variety in farming discussed in Chapter Two, following a brief comparison of farming in the mid-nineteenth century with farming in the early sixteenth century. High farming The apogee of the conventional ‘agricultural revolution’ in 1850 was ‘high farming’. ‘High’ was used as an adverb meaning excellent, and while many contemporary farmers regarded high farming as excellent, its meaning came to be associated with an intensive system of farming with high inputs and high outputs. The basis of high farming was mixed farming embodying the principles of the Norfolk four-course; but by 1850 the rotation had been extended and production intensified. In many light-soil areas, high farming was intensive mixed farming, with a corn crop taken two years in every four or five, and the remainder of the arable under fodder. By the 1850s, catch crops had been introduced on the short fallows between the major crops, so that fodder crops now included swedes, turnips, rape, vetches, kale, mangolds, rye grass, clover, cabbages, sainfoin and kohl-rabi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years the history of English agriculture since the sixteenth century has been dominated by rival notions of an ‘agricultural revolution’: a period when changes in agricultural output and sometimes also in the organisation of production are held to be of particular significance. While there is a general consensus that an ‘agricultural revolution’ involves technological change of some kind, there is no consensus as to what are the significant changes, nor is there any agreement over the chronology of such ‘revolutionary’ events. Despite this uncertainty, the substantive issues of the debate remain of central importance to understanding the development of both English agriculture and the English economy in the three and a half centuries from 1500 to 1850. This chapter will briefly review the debate before making the case for a set of criteria appropriate for identifying an ‘agricultural revolution’. Agricultural revolutions Phases of ‘revolution’ have been identified for at least five periods between 1560 and 1880, and each has been characterised by a different combination of ‘significant’ agricultural developments. Yet despite these differences there is a remarkable consensus, which stretches back to the earliest writing on the subject, that the essence of the ‘agricultural revolution’ was an increase in cereal yields per acre, that is the amount of grain that could be produced from a given area of land sown with a particular crop. The mechanism for raising yields was described by William Marshall in 1795: ‘No dung – no turnips – no bullocks – no barley – no clover – nor … wheat.’ [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interpretive problem arises in the search for causes of the regional agricultural divergence. High autumn indices of marriages are ambivalent. They could have resulted from high employment in grain production for integrated markets and extralocal consumption, or from a lack of market integration between places, necessitating the subsistence production of grain. Parishes might have been producing grain, no matter what other additional employments were practised, because grain, the main foodstuff, was not being obtained from more distant suppliers. They would have been ‘bound and localized’ economies, with grain as the subsistence crop. Low autumn seasonality, in contrast, is prima facie evidence for market orientation; it can only mean that the area is dependent on interregional trade for its supply of breadstuffs. The observed shift away from autumn seasonality in some regions, and its retention in others, is therefore subject to multiple constructions, not always mutually exclusive: thoroughly integrated regions could have been readjusting their market-oriented specializations in response to changes in relative prices; or regions could have been becoming better integrated into supraregional or international markets, dropping their dependence on local grain supplies; or households in areas less suited to growing grain could have been becoming better integrated into market production, dropping the subsistence output of grain in favour of other products, Tawney's peasantry yielding to capitalist agriculture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the revaluation in techniques around 1840, draining was promoted as a productive agricultural improvement. If excess water were effectively removed, draining was credited not only with the physical ability of making land more easily cultivable, valuable in its own right, but also with the potential to enhance crop yields and to transform farming systems, bestowing considerable economic advantages. As landlord and tenant investment in draining was based on the expectation of increasing agricultural output from land injured by waterlogging, the extent to which these benefits were realized had a significant influence on the spread of the improvement. At the same time, an examination of the changes that occurred in farming practice on the adoption of draining is essential for an assessment of the value of the improvement to nineteenth-century English agriculture. The effectiveness of draining systems To be a viable and productive agricultural improvement for both landlord and tenant, draining had not only to be effective but durable, with a life that extended beyond the period of interest payment. Contemporary opinion diverged over the improvement's claims to these qualities. While James Caird, George Darby and George Ridley, all Inclosure Commissioners, attested the general reliability of draining carried out from the 1840s to function beyond twenty-five years, the report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on the improvement of land in 1873, an expression of landowning concern in capital investment in agriculture, carefully identified both the limited life and the likelihood of failure of draining systems. These differing views reflected respective interests in the improvement, but in general the effectiveness of draining depended on the systems and materials employed and the level of subsequent maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the analysis of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century agriculture, considerable use has been made of the dichotomy between heavy lands and light lands to explain changes in farming systems and agricultural productivity. The free-draining light lands had experienced marked agricultural progress both economically and technically from at least the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, founded on the adoption of a system of grain and livestock farming being integrated by the use of rotations which incorporated the growth of cereals and fodder crops, especially the turnip. It has generally been argued that the light-land mixed-farming systems based on turnip husbandry and high feeding made that sector of agriculture more dynamic, productive and prosperous than any other in the eighteenth century and for the greater part of the following century. Agricultural systems on the clay-based heavy lands were much less advanced. Both the heaviness and moisture-retentiveness of such soils made them difficult to work, compressed the working season and rendered them unsuitable for the growth of fodder crops, especially turnips, for feeding stock through the winter. As a result, farming practices on heavy lands lacked the flexibility of those on light lands. On arable, rotations were dominated by wheat, oats or beans, and a bare fallow. Wheat was recognized as the main cash product and fallows persisted as a means of cleansing land after grain crops, being accepted as the penalty for the wheat crop. In grassland areas, meadow and pasture were strictly delimited and immune from the plough. Winter fodder came from meadow land, not fodder crops, and both the area of profitable summer grazing and the number of stock were restricted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Such a run of wet seasons as we have had the last ten or eleven years would have produced a famine a century or two ago. In traditional Britain the choice of foodstuffs was severely limited. Most people ate only what their local area produced, and even then, they largely confined themselves to what it could produce most easily and abundantly. The volume of the crop was more important than its quality, for they lived for much of their lives on the edge of starvation. It was cereal crops which, under conditions prevailing in traditional societies, yielded most abundantly and most reliably, and it was on the breadgrains that most people depended for the greater part of their food supply. The bread throughout the land [wrote William Harrison] is made of such grain as the soil yieldeth, the gentility commonly provide themselves sufficiently of wheat for their own tables, whilst their household and poor neighbors in some shires are enforced to content themselves with rye or barley; yea, and in time of dearth, many with bread made either of beans, peason, or oats, or all together and some acorns among … The factors governing diet, that is the variety and the relative abundance of foodstuffs, were many. Among them the local soil and terrain were of foremost importance. Without anything beyond an empirical knowledge of agronomy and soil science, people had learned to adapt their cropping systems as far as was practicable to local conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]