4 INTRODUCTION 



northern Society encouraged Mr. Clay to try and follow their 

 good example. 



Details as to the earliest movements in the direction of 

 agricultural organisation are difficult to ascertain, for the 

 records are so- scattered, accounts of early societies were so 

 badly kept and have been sometimes entirely lost, and the 

 time available for research is so limited, that a full hist( ry of 

 the subject cannot be offered here ; nor is it necessary to give 

 more than a few notes to illustrate the tendency towards 

 combination. 



Apart from the important agrarian movements, usually but 

 wrongly spoken of as rebellions, organised by Wat Tyler and 

 John Ball, " The crazy priest of Kent," in 1381, by Jack Cade 

 in 1450, and Robert Kett of Norfolk in 1549, which are fully 

 dealt with by Mr. Jesse Collings in his " Land Reform,"* the 

 earliest known society of any sort appears to have been " The 

 Honourable Society of Improvers in the Knowledge of Agii- 

 culture in Scotland," founded in 1723, with its headquarters 

 in Edinburgh. This was almost entirely composed of land- 

 owners. The next was the Farming Club at Gordon's Mill, 

 Inverness, 1758-65 (Aberdeen Journal, 30th May, 1911). 

 Thus Scotland was the pioneer. The Brecknockshire Agri- 

 cultural Society, founded in 1755, claims to be the oldest 

 society of its kind south of the Tweed. The Bath and West 

 and Southern Counties Society was started in 1777, and 

 became the most important Society in England until the 

 formation in 1838 of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. 

 Other Societies, however, existed previous to 1777, for in the 

 Journal of the Society for 1891 (Vol. I., Fourth Series), refer- 

 ence is made to agricultural societies at York, Norwich and 

 Manchester, which gave Mr. Rack (the founder of the Bath and 

 West Society) the idea of starting a similar society in the 

 West of England. t An Agricultural Society also nourished 

 at Odiham, Hants, in 1785, for in June of that year Arthur 

 Young was elected an honorary member, in recognition of his 



* Longmans, 1906. 



f Journal of Bath and West and Southern Counties Society, 191:!. 

 vol. viii., Fifth Series. 



