Corn-law Period 51 



which the farms had attained an area of from 1000 to 3000 acres and 

 over 1 . 



Moreover, it was during the corn-law period that the final disappear- 

 ance of the yeomanry took place. The greater part of this class had 

 already vanished in the previous period, having preferred the position 

 of a large farmer to that of a small owner. Those who had not made 

 that really beneficial exchange burdened their estates with mortgages 

 and attempted with the capital so raised to increase the falling profits 

 of their small holdings. In particular, they tried, by all manner of 

 improvements, to increase their production of corn, in order to share 

 in the large profits promised by its high price. But when after 1815, 

 in spite of the corn-laws, the price of wheat failed to return to its 

 former height, these remaining yeomen were the first to suffer. Their 

 decreased profits no longer sufficed to keep up the interest on their 

 mortgages, and they either sold their land or were foreclosed upon 3 . 

 Their estates were swallowed up by the great landlord and the large 

 farmer, so that by 1836 a witness could state that the yeomanry "are, 

 as a body, ceasing to exist at all 3 ." 



Meantime, while the system of the large farm was thus making 

 progress, the counter-movement, begun early in the nineteenth 

 century on social grounds, had little practical effect. The Board of 

 Agriculture and its most zealous supporters had initiated legislation 

 for the purpose of assisting the labourers once more to the use of 

 a bit of land. The agitation for allotments had proved a failure, 

 but it had led to the passing of an Act in 1819 which empowered the 

 overseers to buy or rent land for the purpose of letting it out again 

 "to any poor and industrious inhabitant of the parish 4 ." Another 

 Act was passed in 1832, probably as a result of the agricultural riots 

 of that and the preceding years, recommending that a certain pro- 

 portion of all newly-enclosed land should be let out in allotments 5 . 

 But neither Act produced any marked result 6 . The private agitation 



1 Caird, op. cit. p. 89 (Hants) and p. 130 (Sussex). 



2 Report on the State of Agriculture, 1833, pp. ix f., where it is said of the yeomanry that 

 "The high prices of the last war led to speculation in the purchase, improvement and 

 enclosure of land ; money was borrowed on the paternal estate for speculations of this nature, 

 which, at the time, were not considered improvident. Prices have fallen, the debt still 

 remains, or the estate has changed owners, and the interval between the fall of prices and the 

 adjustment of charge and of expenditure to the altered value of money, has been most 

 pernicious to this body of men." 



3 Report on Agriculture, 1837 (House of Lords), qu. 5107. 



4 Cited by Stubbs, op. cit. p. 41. 



5 Sir G. Nicholls, History of the English Poor Law, Vol. II, p. 202. 



6 The Earl of Onslow, Landlords and Allotments, 1886, p. 10. 



42 



