168 JJETHRO TULL AND LORD TOWNSHENB 



shire, and Warwickshire, where it continued to run its course in 

 the seventeenth century. Elsewhere in the Midlands, the counties 

 that formed the area from which London drew its chief supplies 

 of corn, could not have been converted into pasture without raising 

 a storm of opposition. Yet throughout the seventeenth century 

 and during the first three quarters of the eighteenth, enclosures 

 had been most profitable where arable land had been converted to 

 grass, and large tracts of Midland pasture were the result of this 

 movement before Parliamentary intervention had begun. Leicester- 

 shire is a conspicuous example of this conversion. It was, notes 

 Marshall in 1786, " not long ago an open arable county ; now it is 

 a continuous sheet of greensward." The vale of Belvoir, which, in 

 the days of Plattes, was considered to be the richest corn-district 

 in the country, had been laid down to grass before the time of Defoe 

 (1 722-38). l He describes the whole county as given over to grazing. 

 " Even most of the Gentlemen are Grasiers, and in some Places the 

 Grasiers are so rich that they grow Gentlemen." Yet in the first 

 half of the seventeenth century it had been a county of open- 

 fields, famous for the pigs that were fattened on its beans and 

 pease. 2 Apart from difficulties arising from local peculiarities of 

 tenure, or of the shape of open-field farms, or from want of roads, 

 from public opinion, or special legislation, the Midland corn counties 

 perhaps owed some of their immunity to the interested opposition 

 of tithe-owners, whose assent was necessary to Parliamentary 

 enclosure. For the sake of the great tithes, they would always 

 strenuously resist any attempt by private Act to turn open-fields 

 into pasture farms. It was not till after 1765 that their views 

 underwent a change. The improvements in arable farming, which 

 were now possible on separate holdings, together with the high 

 price of com, made it probable that, even when open-fields and 

 commons were enclosed, the area of tillage would not be diminished. 

 These considerations were strengthened during the French wars of 

 1793-1815, which by the stoppage of foreign corn supplies added 

 new reasons for seeking legislative aid in enclosure. 



Up to the accession of George III. (1760) prices of corn ruled low. 

 More than once in the preceding period (1700-60) loud complaints 

 were heard of agricultural depression, of farmers unable to pay 



1 Tour, vol. ii. pp. 332, 335. 



2 The same remark is made by Professor Bradley in his Gentleman and 

 Farmer's Guide for the Increase and Improvement oj Cattle (1729), p. 75. 



