222 LARGE FARMS AND CAPITALIST FARMERS 



swamps, or an embankment against floods. It was one of the 

 lessons which were taught by the agricultural depression after the 

 peace of 1815 that landowners must find the money for lasting 

 improvements effected on their property. 



That farmers should have realised the possibility of improving 

 traditional practices was a great step in advance. The new race 

 of men, who were beginning to occupy land, were better educated, 

 commanded more capital, were more open to new ideas and more 

 enterprising than their predecessors. Their holdings were larger, 

 and offered greater scope for energy and experiment. The Reporters 

 to the Board of Agriculture on Northumberland (1805) lay stress 

 on the size of the farms, and on the spirit of enterprise and in 

 dependence which now animated the tenants. " Scarcely a year 

 passes without some of them making extensive tours for the sole 

 purpose of examining modes of culture, of purchasing or hiring the 

 most improved breeds of stock, and seeing the operations of new- 

 invented and most useful implements." The Reporter on Middle- 

 sex (1798) emphasises the stagnation of farming among small 

 occupiers. "It is rather the larger farmers and yeomen, or men 

 who occupy their own land, that mostly introduce improvements 

 in the practice of agriculture, and that uniformly grow much 

 greater crops of corn, and produce more beef and mutton per acre 

 than others of a smaller capital." The Oxfordshire Reporter (1809) 

 says : "If you go into Banbury market next Thursday, you may 

 distinguish the farmers from enclosures from those from open 

 fields ; quite a different sort of men ; the farmers as much changed 

 as their husbandry quite new men, in point of knowledge and 

 ideas." Elsewhere in the same Report, it is Arthur Young who 

 writes, occurs the following passage : The Oxfordshire farmers 

 " are now in the period of a great change in their ideas, knowledge, 

 practice, and other circumstances. Enclosing to a greater pro- 

 portional amount than in almost any other county in the kingdom, 

 has changed the men as much as it has improved the country ; they 

 are now in the ebullition of this change ; a vast amelioration has 

 been wrought, and is working ; and a great deal of ignorance and 

 barbarity remains. The Goths and Vandals of open-fields touch 

 the civilisation of enclosures. Men have been taught to think, 

 and till that moment arrives, nothing can be done effectively. 

 When I passed from the conversation of the farmers I was recom- 

 mended to call on, to that of men whom chance threw in my way, 



