ARTHUR YOUNG 195 



on the agriculture of the thirteenth century. The stagnation was 

 mainly due to the prevalence of wastes, the system of open-field 

 farming, the risk of loss of capital in improvements made under 

 tenancies-at-will, the poverty and ignorance of hand-to-mouth 

 farmers, the obstinacy of traditionary practices, the want of mar- 

 kets, and difficulties of communication. Till these obstacles were 

 to some extent overcome, agricultural progress could not become 

 general. It is with the removal of these hindrances that the name 

 of Arthur Young is inseparably connected. 



Bom in London in 1741, Arthur Young was the younger son of 

 the Rev. Arthur Young, who o^\•ned a small estate of 200 acres at 

 Bradfield in Suffolk. From his father he inherited his literary 

 tastes, a habit of negligence in money matters, and ultimately a 

 landed property. Out of Lavenham School he passed, at the age 

 of seventeen, into a wine merchant's office at Lynn. A youthful 

 fop and gallant, he there began his literary career in order to pay 

 for books and clothes. Before he was nineteen, he had pubhshed 

 four novels and two political pamphlets. On his father's death in 

 1759, he abandoned trade for literature, and Lynn for London, 

 where he launched a monthly magazine called The Universal 

 Museum, which only ran for six months. The venture was unpro- 

 fitable. Without profession or employment, he drifted back, in 

 1763, to his mother's home at Bradfield, married, and settled down 

 to farming as a business. As a practical farmer he failed, and the 

 impression left by his writings is that he always would have done 

 so. On three farms, which he took in rapid succession, he lost 

 money. Meanwhile he was succeeding better as a writer. Books 

 and pamphlets flowed from his pen with prodigious rapidity, and 

 his income was considerable. In 1767 he began those farming 

 tours, in the course of which he drew his graphic sketches of rural 

 England, Ireland, and France.^ His careless ease of style, his racy 

 forcible EngHsh, his gift of happy phrases, his quick observation, 

 his wealth of miscellaneous detail, make him the first of EngHsh 

 agricultural writers. Apart from the value of the facts which they 



1 A Six Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties of England and Wales 

 (1768) ; A Six Months' Tour through the North of England (1770), 4 vols. ; 

 The Farmer's Tour through the East of England (1771), 4 vols. ; Tour in 

 Ireland, 1776-7-8 (1780), 2 vols. ; Travels during the Years 1787, '88, '89 and 

 1790, undertaken more Particularly with a view of ascertaining the Cultivation, 

 Wealth, Resources, and National Prosperity of the Kingdom of France (1792-4), 

 2 vols. 



