AN AGRARIAN REVOLUTION ^ 291 



contrary, they paid more dearly for aU necessaries of subsistence, 

 and the increased cost of living was not adequately met by a corre- 

 sponding rise in wages. At the same time, the steps which were 

 required for the adoption of those agricultural improvements, by 

 which the manufacturing industries as well as large owners and 

 occupiers of land were profiting, multipHed the numbers and increased 

 the sufferings of landless labourers. The extinction of open-field 

 farms reduced numbers of small occupiers to the rank of hired wage- 

 earners ; the appropriation of commons deprived many cottagers, 

 not only of free fuel, but of the means of supplementing wages by 

 the profits of their live-stock, their poultry, and their geese. In the 

 eighteenth as in the sixteenth century it was still partially true that 

 " enclosures make fat beasts and lean poor people." 



The structure of rural society was affected to its very foundations \.ifif I 

 by the agrarian revolution which was in progress. A great popula- 

 tion, standing on the verge of famine, and beginning to gather in 

 industrial centres, cried aloud for food. Technical improvements in 

 farming had been tested, which promised to supply the new demand 

 for bread and meat, if only free play w^ere allowed to the modem 

 methods of production. It was from this point of view that agri- 

 cultural experts, almost to a man, were unanimous in requiring the 

 removal of mediaeval obstacles to progress, and the addition of 

 every possible acre to the cultivated area. As open-field arable 

 farms were broken up, as pasture-commons were divided, as wastes 

 were brought iuto cultivation, the face of the countrj^ altered. The 

 enclosing movement was attacked on various grounds. To its 

 effects were attributed the disappearance of the yeomanry, using 

 the words ia the strict sense of farmer-owners ; the monopoly oij^^, ^cX^ 

 farms, or, in other words, the consolidation of a number of holdings !<; 

 iato single occupations ; the depopulation of rural villages ; the 

 material and moral loss which was alleged to be inflicted on the poor. 

 Round these different points raged the contest of the latter half of 

 the eighteenth century. Meanwhile the work of enclosure went on 

 without interruption. At the present day the changes seem to have 

 been surprisingly rapid ; but to men who were hving under the stress 

 of war and scarcity, they appeared almost criminally slow. They so 

 appeared to William Marshall, perhaps the most experienced and 

 the least bigoted of the agricultural observers of the day. Writing 

 in 1801, before the full pressure of famine prices had been felt, he 

 says : " Through the uncertainty and expense attending private 



