Economic Aspects 107 



large farms fowls, eggs, vegetables, fruit, honey, etc. are only produced 

 for home consumption, whereas it would be hard to find a small 

 farmer who does not send considerable quantities of these products to 

 market 1 . Accordingly, districts specially suited for fruit or vegetables 

 are usually covered with small holdings, as in the famous Vale of 

 Evesham, one of the best fruit districts in England, and also one 

 exclusively occupied by small holders 2 : and in a strawberry-growing 

 district in the neighbourhood of Southampton, where the largest fruit 

 gardens are not more than 35 acres, and the ordinary size is from 

 \ to 10 acres 3 . " In the Chatteris neighbourhood of Cambridgeshire, 

 numbers of small holders have been able to pay rents of over 2 

 an acre... and have made a good thing out of holdings of four to fifty 

 acres, growing potatoes and early carrots, besides other produce," wrote 

 Mr Channing in his summary of the evidence before the 1894 Com- 

 mission 4 . All these branches of production belong to the small 

 holder. Corn-growing, on the contrary, and particularly corn-growing 

 for the market, is a point in which they are very weak. 



The corn-production of the small holdings is almost entirely for 

 home consumption, whether for bread for the family, or, what is much 

 more common in modern times, for the purpose of providing fodder 

 and straw. Allotment holders of 4 5 acres and upwards, even if they 

 have any arable, sell no corn, but feed it all to their pigs and cattle, 

 their horse if they keep one, and their fowls. But even on small 

 holdings of a larger size corn-growing plays a very small part, as the 

 statistics quoted have shown. Even in those rare cases where such 

 a holding is mainly arable, as in the often-quoted Isle of Axholme 

 (celebrated even in Arthur Young's time), this holds good 5 . A local 

 expert 6 informed the present writer that a holding of 60 acres would 

 as a rule be divided as follows : 8 acres under permanent pasture, 

 10 under potatoes, 4 under turnips, 3 under mangold, 5 under clover, 

 and the remaining 30 acres under wheat, oats and barley. The occu- 

 pier's main source of income would be his potato crop, together with 

 the three or four cows and ten or twelve pigs he would keep, and any 

 other live-stock. His oats, barley, turnips, clover and mangolds would 

 be fed to his beasts. The product of the 8 acres of wheat would be 



1 H. Rew, Report on North Devon, 1895 (C. 7728), p. 15 : " It is the regular practice 

 for the wives and daughters of the small farmers... to take poultry, eggs, butter and clotted 

 cream, as well as garden produce, honey etc., into the market once a week and there sell it 

 direct to the customers." Cp. also Eyre, op. cit. pp. 10 f. 



2 W. E. Bear, in Journal X. A. S., 1899, pp. 36, 40. 



3 Ibid., p. 47. 4 Final Report, p. 358. 



5 Levy, Der Untergang etc., p. 160 ; Bear, op. cit. pp. 14-24. 



6 Mr John Ross, of Belton, Lincolnshire. 



