system of husbandry, he protected his land against impoverishment by excessive cropping. The "Practical Norfolk farmer" (1808) holds up Coke's example as in this respect especially worthy of imitation. "In vain," he says, "are Acts passed for the inclosing heaths and commons, if the old cultivated lands are suffered to remain, by this bar to improvement of having no leases, in a state of semi-cultivation." Though long leases and clauses of management were innovations, Holkham farms commanded the pick of English tenants. Cobbett was no friend to landlords; but even he acknowledged the benefit which

HOLKHAM HALL, NORFOLK.

(By permission of the Right Hon. the Earl of Leicester.)

the tenantry derived from Coke's paternal rule. "Every one," he wrote in 1818, "made use of the expressions towards him which affectionate children use towards their parents.'

The useful work which Arthur Young had done in disseminating the latest improvements in farming practice has been already noticed. Mr. Coke followed in the same path. The Holkham sheep-shearings did much to break down prejudices and diffuse knowledge, and similar meetings were organised in other parts of the county by such landlords as the Duke of Bedford and Lord Egremont. The Holkham meetings began in 1778, when The Mr. Coke, then himself ignorant of farming matters, gathered Holkham parties of farmers to his house to aid him with their experience. From that time forward the gatherings were held annually. Dr.

Meetings.

The Fall in Prices.

Rigby in 1818 describes one of these meetings, when open house was kept for a week, and hundreds of persons assembled from all parts of Europe and America. The mornings were spent in inspecting the farm buildings, the crops and the stock; at three o'clock six hundred persons sat down to dinner, and spent the rest of the day in speeches and toasts

The close of the Napoleonic War in 1815 terminated the period of agricultural progress and prosperity. It was followed by twenty years of almost unexampled adversity. Contracts of all kinds had been made in the expectation that the inflated prices of the war would continue to prevail. When these fell, landlords and tenants, who had borrowed capital, were confronted with wholesale ruin. Land had sold for exorbitant suns; reckless competition for farms had produced excessive rentals; extravagant standards of living, undue expenditure on buildings, had been the result of inflated prices; heavy mortgages had been charged on estates to meet annuities, legacies and portions, which falls in prices rendered improvident and disproportionate; invaluable pasture, which had been ploughed up in years when wheat rose to 115s. the quarter, was ruined. War prices and the Corn Laws made farming almost a gambling speculation; the wheat area alternately swelled and contracted; violent fluctuations in the purchasing power of money accentuated the depression, which resulted in widespread distress among both landlords and tenants, and aggravated the bitter discontent of the agricultural labourer. The table of the House of Commons groaned under petitions for relief. Select Committees sate to investigate the crisis in 1820, 1821, 1822, 1833, and 1836. The evidence shows that the loss had been enormous. It could scarcely have been otherwise when prices dropped, between January, 1819, and July, 1822, in the following proportions: Wheat (per quarter), from 74s. to 43s.; beef (per stone), from 4s. 6d. to 2s. 5d.; mutton (per stone), from 5s. 8d. to 2s. 2d. To increase the misery, in 1810, 1824, and 1830–1 the rot swept off vast numbers of sheep; in the latter year it is stated that two million perished. Richard Preston, M.P., writing on "The State of the Nation," in 1816, says that some of the best estates of the kingdom were selling at a depreciation of 50 per cent., and that one of the finest grass farms in Somersetshire sold at ten years' purchase. Evidence given before the Select Committee in 1833

shows that landlords had lost nine millions, by reductions alone, on their rentals of previous years; that many farmers had lost all they had, and were working on the road; that in the weald of Kent and Sussex there was not one solvent tenant.

Yeomanry

It was during this disastrous period that the old yeomanry The practically disappeared. More substantial than the open-field Disappear. farmers or cottagers, they had maintained the struggle for existence with more tenacity. The evidence of the Agricultural Commission of 1833 proves that they still existed in almost

every county; but their numbers had greatly diminished. The causes of their disappearance are not difficult to discover.

Lambard, in his "Perambulation of Kent" (1576), says:

"A man may find sundry yeomen (although otherwise for wealth comparable with many of the gentler sort) that will not yet for all that change their condition, nor desire to be apparayled with the title of Gentrie."

More than a century later the Spectator thus describes a member of the same class :

"He is a yeoman of about one hundred pounds a year, an honest man; he is put within the Game Act, and qualified to kill a hare or a pheasant: he knocks down a dinner with his gun once or twice a week, and by that means lives much cheaper than those who have not so good an estate as himself. He would be a good neighbour if he did not destroy so many partridges; in short, he is a very sensible man, shoots flying, and has been several times foreman of the petty jury."

The Effect

on Agriculture.

Towards the close of the eighteenth century men of this class were still prosperous. In Hampshire, Vancouver (1813) says that there were many farmers who were also possessors of small estates which their thrifty management keep upon the increase." In Kent, Boys (1793) says that "the number of the yeomanry of this county seems annually on the increase. There is no description of persons who can afford to give so much money for the purchase of an estate as those who buy for their own occupation. Many estates in the eastern part of the county have been so sold, within these few years, for forty, and some for fifty, years' purchase, and upwards.” In Essex (1807) land was bought up by the farmers, so that "there is a prospect of the tenure of land returning to the conditions of the seventeenth century, when the county was filled with small gentry residing upon their estates." In Berkshire (1813), Mavor reports that one-third of the soil was cultivated by the owners themselves in small estates. In Norfolk (1804) there was said to be an increasing number of small estates. In Suffolk (1794) numerous yeomen flourished, cultivating estates of value rising from a hundred to four hundred pounds a year,

Similar evidence might be gathered from other counties to show that the yeomanry had weathered the storm of enclosures. But during the French war a very large number had consulted their pecuniary interests by selling their estates at the fancy prices which then prevailed. Those who retained their properties too often mortgaged their land to make provision for their children, to increase or improve their estate, or to erect farm buildings. When prices fell after the peace, the debt remained. The struggle was brief. Their farming deteriorated, their buildings fell out of repair, and finally their estates were sold. The new purchasers were not small capitalists, but neighbouring landlords, or successful merchants. In Yorkshire, for example, if one small freeholder went, his place, in former years, was taken by another; after 1820 this ceased to be the case. In Kent and Sussex, again, many freeholders retained their land by vigorous economy and by wholly ceasing to employ labour: but all who had mortgages or annuities to pay were forced to sell.

The change is on social grounds deplorable enough; but, at the time, both economically and commercially, the nation.

1815-1832)

gained. Without capitalist landlords, agriculture could not have recovered from the prolonged misery of 1818-36, and its rapid revival was due to the new conditions of British landownership, which the nineteenth century saw firmly established and daily becoming the almost universal system.

Probably J. E.

SYMES.

THE war had severely strained national resources. one out of every six adult males served in the army, navy, or The Social militia, yet the exhaustion of men was perhaps less felt than the Economy. exhaustion of wealth. In 1778, Hume, the acutest of living observers, thought that the size of the National Debt threatened the very existence of the nation. Since then the debt had more than trebled. In 1792 it was less than two hundred and forty millions. In 1815 it exceeded eight hundred and sixty millions.

Manchester

Industrial

tion.

There can be no doubt that it was the Industrial Revolution Effects (Vol. V., p. 816 seq.) that enabled our country to bear the of the great burden of the war. Under its influence England had Revoluceased to be a mainly agricultural nation, and big towns with factories and workshops had suddenly sprung up. had already 140,000 people; Birmingham 80,000; Sheffield and Leeds each about 50,000. These numbers do not sound very impressive to us; but we must remember that only a century earlier Manchester was scarcely more than a village, with only 12,000 inhabitants. The total population of England and Wales had risen, in spite of the war, from eight and a half millions in 1790 to about eleven millions in 1815, and the nation's wealth had increased even more rapidly. The wage-earning classes had, however, gained little advantage from this increase. Their wages had seldom risen proportionally to the prices which they had to pay for the necessaries of life. The new wealth which the manufacturing industries were creating provided a fund from which the expenses of the war were defrayed. It was those classes that had profited by the industrial revolution who advanced the successive loans; though the masses had to bear a large share of the burden of paying the interest on these loans. They escaped, indeed, the income tax, which had now risen to two shillings in the pound; but indirect taxes were imposed on many of the necessaries of life. Bread, boots, and salt may be taken as specimens of the things that were taxed.

Social

Conditions

in 1815.