Introduction xi 



During the nine years Young farmed at North Mimms in 

 Hertfordshire — for that was his ultimate choice — he worked 

 both with pen and plough. " No cart-horse," he writes, 

 " laboured as I did." Yet the years were years of anxiety 

 and wretchedness. What he earned was wrung out with the 

 sweat of his brow, almost of his heart's blood, and debt and 

 failure closed the yearly accounts. But to others the decade 

 1 768-1 777 was pregnant with wise counsel. Singularly quick 

 in apprehension, eager in search of new facts, his penetrating 

 mind grasped, analysed, and tabulated both the results of 

 his own unwearied experiments and the inherited traditions 

 of practical tillers of the soil. His business training, too, at 

 Lynn, brief and distasteful as it was, endowed him with in- 

 estimable habits of accuracy and method wholly absent among 

 the rule-of-thumb farmers of his time.i Second and third 

 editions of the Six Weeks' Tour were issued in 1769 and 1772; 

 in quick succession followed : A n Essay on the Management of 

 Hogs, in 1769, republished, with additions, in 1770; A Six 

 Months' Tour through the North of England, dealing with 

 agriculture, manufactures, etc., and with descriptions of the 

 seats of the nobility, four volumes, 1770 and 1771; The 

 Farmer's Guide iyi Hiring and Stocking Farms, with Plans and 

 Sections, 1770; Rural Economy, 1770, 1773; A Course of 

 Experimental Agriculture, two volumes, 1770; The Farmer's 

 Tour through the East of England, ijji ; The Farmer's Calendar, 

 iTJi ; Observations on Waste Lands, 1773 ; Political Arithmetic, 

 1774. In addition to these works. Young published during 

 this period several political treatises and carried on a heavy 

 correspondence with private friends and public men in that 

 bold legible hand of his. Young tells us that he often filled 

 a quire of foolscap in a day. 



But North Mimms! It will doubtless surprise the reader 

 of a passage in the Travels (p. 49 in this edition), where the 

 author vituperates the accommodation at the inn at St. 

 Geronds, to learn that epithets failed him adequately to 

 characterise the nature of the land he farmed. It was " a 

 himgry, vitriolic gravel ; " for nine years he occupied the " jaws 

 of a wolf." There were, however, some social distractions. 

 Young was a welcome guest at dinner parties in town or 

 country; among his wide circle of friends were numbered the 



^ The table in Thorold Roger's History of Agriculture and Prices, "voXJvii. 

 part ii. pp. 624-635, is compiled from Arthur Yoxmg's " elaborate and 

 valuable calculations." 



