

THE PEASANTS' GOLDEN AGE 149 



bread-stuff of half the population. Politically and morally, the 

 period was corrupt and coarse ; materially, it was one of the Golden 

 Ages of the peasant. The only drawbacks to the general prosperity 

 of agriculture during the first half of the century were the visita- 

 tions of the rot, and of the cattle plague. Ellis x speaks of the rot 

 in 1735 as " the most general one that has happened in the memory 

 of man . . . the dead bodies of rotten sheep were so numerous in 

 roads, lanes, and fields, that their carrion stench and smell proved 

 extremely offensive to the neighbouring parts and the passant 

 travellers." A newer and more mysterious scourge was the cattle 

 plague. Starting in Bohemia, it travelled westward, devastated 

 the north of France, and three times visited England. The only 

 remedy was to slaughter infected animals ; in a single year the 

 Government, paying one-third of the value, expended 135,000 in 

 compensation. 



The great changes which English agriculture witnessed as the 

 eighteenth century advanced, and particularly after the accession 

 of George III. (1760), are, broadly speaking, identified with Jethro 

 Tull, Lord Townshend, Bake well of Dishley, Arthur Young, and 

 Coke of Norfolk. With their names are associated the chief ri 

 characteristics in the farming progress of the period, which may be 

 summed up in the adoption of improved methods of cultivation, 

 the introduction of new crops, the reduction of stock-breeding to 

 a science, the provision of increased facilities of communication and 

 of transport, and the enterprise and outlay of capitalist landlords 

 and tenant-farmers. The improvements which these pioneers 

 initiated, taught, or exemplified, enabled England to meet the 

 strain of the Napoleonic wars, to bear the burden of additional 

 taxation, and to feed the vast centres of commercial industry which 

 sprang up, as if by magic, at a time when food supplies could not 

 have been provided from another country. Without the substitu- 

 tion of separate occupation for the ancient system of common cul- 

 tivation, this agricultural progress was impossible. But in carrying"""^ 

 out the necessary changes, rural society was convulsed, and its 

 general conditions revolutionised. The divorce of the peasantry 

 from the soil, and the extinction of commoners, open-field farmers, 

 and eventually of small freeholders, were the heavy price which the 

 nation ultimately paid for the supply of bread and meat to its 

 manufacturing population. 



1 Shepherd's Sure Guide, 1749. 



