THE PEASANTS' GOLDEN AGE 149 



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bread-stuff of half the population. Politically and morally, the 

 period was corrupt and coarse ; materially, it was one of the Golden 

 Ages of the peasant. The only drawbacks to the general prosperity 

 of agriculture during the first half of the century were the visita- 

 tions of the rot, and of the cattle plague. ElHs ^ speaks of the rot 

 in 1735 as " the most general one that has happened in the memory 

 of man . . . the dead bodies of rotten sheep were so numerous in 

 roads, lanes, and fields, that their carrion stench and smell proved 

 extremely offensive to the neighbouring parts and the passant 

 travellers." A newer and more mysterious scourge was the cattle 

 plague. Starting in Bohemia, it travelled westward, devastated 

 the north of France, and three times visited England. The only 

 remedy was to slaughter infected animals ; in a single year the 

 Government, paying one-third of the value, expended £135,000 in 

 compensation. 



The great changes which Enghsh agriculture witnessed as the 

 eighteenth century advanced, and particularly after the accession 

 of George III. (1760), are, broadly speaking, identified with J ethro 

 TuU, Lord TowTishend, Bakewell of Dishley, Arthur Young, and 

 Coke of Norfolk. With their names are associated the chief 

 characteristics in the fa rming progress of_th e per iod, which may be 

 summed up in the adoption of improved methods of cultivation, 

 the introduction of new crops, the reduction of stock-breeding to 

 a science, the^'provisiohoT increased facilities of communication and 

 of transport, and the enterprise and outlay of capitahst landlords 

 and Tenant-farmers. The improveaients which these pioneers 

 initiated ,^tau^t, or exemphfied, enabled England to mee^the 

 strain of the Napoleonic wars, to bear the burden of additional | 

 taxation, and to feed the vast centres of commercial industry which ' 

 sprang up, as if by magic, at a time when food supphes could not 

 have been provided from another country. Without the substitu- 

 tion of separate occupation for the ancient system of common cul- 

 tivation, this agricultural progress was impossible. But in carrying 

 out the necessary changes, rural society was convulsed, and its 

 general conditions revolutionised. The divorce of the peasantry 

 from the soil, and the e^inction of commoners, open-field farmers, 

 and eventually^ small freeholders, were the heavy price which the 

 nation_ultimately paidfor the supply of bread and meat tOL_its 

 maimfacUiringpopulation . 



^ Shepherd'' 8 Sure Guide, 1749. 



