ESSEX 5 



A real calamity has fallen upon a wide district. The 

 farmers and labourers have gone. The farms, where let, 

 have been taken rather as ranches for cattle than for 

 serious cultivation. The farmers who have survived 

 have lost heart." ^ 



The stages of this process are clearly indicated in Mr 

 Pringle's report. Essex farmers began to break as soon 

 as wheat went below 50s a quarter, from 1875 onwards. 

 The season of 1879 crippled the remaining old tenants, 

 ruined many new tenants, and threw a large number of 

 farms upon the hands of owners, who cultivated them for 

 some years with heavy losses. " Farmers continued 

 struggling along as best they could, paying rent in 

 driblets, getting involved in various ways, and gradually 

 allowing their stiffest fields to drift out of cultivation." 



Between 1880 and 1889 there were an enormous 

 number of changes of tenancy. Everywhere farms have 

 been falling from old rents of 40s to 25s down to a 

 shilling or two, or the tithe, or absolutely nothing. One 

 witness says, "In this parish more than half the land has 

 gone out of cultivation. I am the only old tenant left 

 On many farms, tenants, two or three deep, have come 

 and gone within the last ten years, the greater part either 

 completely ruined or nearly so." " Landlords will accept 

 any rent rather than take exhausted land into their own 

 hands." There are fewer unoccupied farms in Essex 

 now than ten years ago, largely because the land which 

 has tumbled down to rough herbage is now capable of 

 being used for temporary sheep runs, and is let for that 

 purpose at a nominal rent. 



The soil and subsoil in most of the Essex corn area 

 have been as responsible for these disasters as the great 

 fall in prices. The Essex farm has always and will 

 always be costly to work. It is costly even where the 

 blue clay has a porous, gravelly subsoil. It is still more 

 costly when the subsoil is, in the words of one of Mr 

 Pringle's witnesses, "stiff, tough, numb, dumb, and 

 impervious, so that during heavy rains the vegetable 



1 Notes of visit of Mr Shaw Lefevre, p. 5. 



