30 Large and Small Holdings 



ruptcy of the yeomen, or that they sold their land in order to take 

 up some inferior occupation, to migrate to the towns, or to leave the 

 country 1 . Such occurrences became prominent at a later time, namely 

 in the period of the corn-laws. But between 1760 and 1815 they 

 were exceptional. At that time the yeomanry as a rule gave up 

 their land with a light heart They ceased to be small owners in 

 order to become large farmers. There is abundant evidence of this 

 fact 2 . It is described by Albrecht Thaer, whose knowledge of English 

 agricultural literature was unrivalled. The small owner saw, he says, 

 that the tenant of a large farm was in a better position than himself 

 and made a larger income, and he made up his mind to sell his land, 

 and with the capital so acquired to devote himself afresh to farming, 

 but now as a tenant. This, he continues, was the reason why in certain 

 districts the yeoman class had almost entirely vanished, and only 

 farmers and cottiers were to be found 3 . Marshall wrote of the Norfolk 

 yeomen " that many, seeing men whom they lately held their inferiors 

 raised by an excessive profit, which had been recently made by farming, 

 became dissatisfied with the homeliness of their situation, and sold 

 their comparatively small patrimonies in order that they might 

 agreeably with the fashion or frenzy of the day become great 

 farmers 4 ." Sinclair, too, mentions it as " a well-known fact" that 

 small owners frequently sold their estates in order to become large 

 farmers 8 . 



That the yeomen should have found tenant-farming more profitable 

 than working their own land is natural enough under the circumstances 

 of the time. They would feel all the effects of the rising corn-prices 

 as other small holders felt them, with the exception that they did not 

 have to pay increasing rents out of their decreasing profits. They, 

 too, were pasture-farmers and market-gardeners, that is to say were 

 devoted to those branches of farming whose profitableness was 



1 Cp. Levy, Der Untergang klein-bduerlicher Betriebe in England, in Conrad's Jahr- 

 biichem, 1903, p. 147. 



2 E.g. Th. Stone, Suggestions for rendering the Enclosure of Common Fields a Source of 

 Population and Riches, 1787, pp. 42 f. : "It has been a common circumstance, in counties 

 where a spirit for improvement in agriculture first broke forth, that the yeomanry, or persons 

 possessed of small estates in their own occupations, have been induced to sell them, to 

 purchase a stock sufficient to improve larger tracts of land, the property of other persons, 

 which they have hired upon improving leases." 



* A. Thaer, Einleitung zur Kenntniss in die englische Landwirtschaft, Hanover, 1801, 

 Vol. I, pp. 25 f. 



4 Cp. Johnson, op. cit. p. 142. 



5 Sinclair, Code of Agriculture, 1817, p. 37. 



