154 JETHRO TULL AND LORD TOWNSHEND 



conditions prevailed. Nathaniel Kent, writing in 1775 {Hints to 

 Gentlemen of Landed Property), says " that within thirty miles of 

 the capital, there is not less than 200,000 acres of waste land." As 

 late as 1793, Hounslow Heath and Finchley Common were described 

 as wastes, fitted only for " Cherokees and savages." In 1791, the 

 Weald of Surrey still bore evidence of its desolation in the posts 

 which stood across it as " guides to letter-carriers." In Essex, 

 Epping and Hainault Forests were in 1794 " known to be a resort 

 of the most idle and profligate of men ; here the undergraduates in 

 iniquity commence their career with deer stealing, and here the 

 more finished and hardened robber retires from justice." Counties 

 more remote from London had a still larger area of wastes. When 

 Young made his Farmer's Tours in the first decade of the reign 

 of George III., Sedgmoor was still one vast fen, the Mendip Hills 

 were uncultivated, and eighteen thousand acres on the Quantock 

 Hills lay desolate. Over Devonshire, Cornwall, and the whole of 

 Wales, stretched, in 1773, " immense " tracts of wastes. To bring 

 some of these wastes into cultivation was part of the work which 

 agriculturists undertook in the eighteenth century, and if the 

 estimates of Gregory King (1696) and of the Board of Agriculture 

 (1793) are approximately correct, upwards of two miUion acres 

 were added to the cultivated area before the close of the period. 



It is possible that in_1700 at least half the arable land of the 

 country was still cultivated on the ope n-field syst em — that is, in 

 village farms by associations of agricultural partners who occupied 

 intermixed strips, and cultivated the whole area under common 

 rules of cropping. Out of 8,500 parishes, which in round numbers 

 existed at the Reformation, 4,500 seem to have been still laid out, 

 in whole or in part, on this ancient method. John Laurence in 

 1726 had calculated that a third of the cultivated area " is what 

 we caU Common Fields." The agricultural defects of the open- 

 field system were obvious and numerous. So long as farming had 

 been unprogressive, and population had remained stationary, the 

 economic loss was comparatively unimportant. When improved 

 methods and increased resources were commanded by farmers, and 

 when the demand for food threatened to outstrip^he supp ly, the 

 need for change became irnperative. Under the primitive system, 

 the area under, thp; pj rmgh^ was excessive, and much land, which 

 might have been more profitably employed as pasture, was tilled 

 for corn. A quantit y of the a r able^ land was wasted in innumerable 



