34 Large and Small Holdings 



part of a large farm. But its late owner prospered in his new position 

 and profited by the rising price of corn. In some cases he actually 

 made so much money that he was able to buy his farm, and with it 

 sometimes the very fields which he had previously utilised as a small 

 proprietor 1 . 



The disappearance of the yeomanry is thus one more proof of the 

 extraordinary force of the economic tendency to the development of 

 the large farm system*. As Mr Prothero has well expressed it, the 

 small farm had become an anachronism 3 . 



The improvements introduced by the larger unit of holding in the 

 methods and results of arable farming were indeed brilliant ; but the 

 social consequences of this agrarian revolution were disastrous. To 

 it is due the development of that agricultural proletariat which is 

 now the rule on English soil. The rise in the profits of large-scale 

 corn-growing expropriated the old race of landholding day-labourers. 

 Not only they themselves, but also their wives and children, who had 

 hitherto found employment on their own land, now became entirely 

 dependent on wage-labour. The effect of the same conditions on the 

 position of the little farmer and the smaller yeomen was even more 

 cruel. Hitherto living almost entirely on the produce of their own 

 holdings, they now descended to the dependent position of labourers on 

 other men's farms. Thousands of small agriculturists, forced to give 

 up their farms or to sell their little estates, had to submit to this fate 4 . 



1 Sinclair, Code, p. 37. 



2 The economic causes of the decay of the yeoman class, as described above, are treated 

 as quite secondary in Arnold Toynbee's Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England, 

 1884, chapter v. He finds the main causes " in social and political facts," which led to the 

 buying out of the small owners. But he recognises that their disappearance was an important 

 factor in the formation of the large farms. " Small arable farms would not pay, and must in 

 any case have been thrown together." And if the economic position of the yeomen had not 

 been undermined, they would probably have made a much stronger resistance to the pressure 

 put upon them by the social and political ambitions of their richer neighbours. So that in 

 any case the economic conditions were decisive in the matter. 



8 Prothero, op. cit. p. 65. 



4 Cp. Davies, The Case of Labourers, p. 55 : "The landowner, to render his income 

 adequate to the increased expense of living, unites several small farms into one, raises the 

 rent to the utmost, and avoids the expense of repairs. The rich farmer also engrosses as 

 many farms as he is able to stock ; lives in more credit and comfort than he could otherwise 

 do ; and out of the profits of several farms, makes an ample provision for one family. Thus 

 thousands of families, which formerly gained an independent livelihood on those separate 

 farms, have been gradually reduced to the class of day-labourers." Also Kent (Hints), 

 pp. 211, 712: "So soon as the little schools of industry are grasped into the hands of an 

 over-grown, rapacious farmer, the former occupiers are, at once, all reduced to the state of 

 day-labourers : and when their health or strength fails, there is but one resource ; they, and 

 their children, are thrown upon the parish." Cp. also Traill, Social England, Vol. v, 1896, 

 pp. 455 and 673 f. : "The result of enclosures, which were the great social feature that 



