AGRARIAN EVOLUTION SINCE THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 45 



Oats was the most important cereal and oatmeal was still the labourer's staple 

 food. Wheat was of relatively recent introduction — Leland early in the 

 sixteenth century had remarked that ' Whete is not veri communely sowid in 

 thes partes ' — but at the end of the eighteenth century its use was increasing 

 with the rising standard of living. The strong loams of the Fylde are good 

 wheat soils as well as good oats soils, though the climate is rather too wet and 

 not sufficiently sunny for the highest yields of grain. The continuous 

 cultivation of corn left no room for turnips and although clover was more 

 generally sown, the tenant was generally under a covenant not to sow clover 

 as a preparation for wheat — in flat contradiction to the principles of the New 

 Husbandry. Potatoes were, however, very intensively cultivated and more 

 successfully, so it was claimed, than m any other part of Britain. They formed 

 with oatmeal the standard diet of the labourer and the chats were fed to fattening 

 cattle. 



The Fylde at the end of the eighteenth century, though primarily a corn 

 district, was not wholly so. Leland had noticed long before that of the 

 enclosures more were for grass than for corn, but he was writing of the country 

 east of the Fylde proper. In the eighteenth century the Fylde had been famed 

 for its Longhorn cattle, and good stock implied good grass. At the end of the 

 century more and more land was being laid down to grass partly because, so the 

 Board's Surveyor reports, of the exhaustion of the land by the constant cropping 

 for corn and partly because of the drainage of labour and capital away from 

 farming to manufacture. Some of the new grass was self-seeded end of poor 

 quality, but there was much good grass that carried a cow in milk to every 

 one-and-a-quarter acres, according to Arthur Young, who travelled from 

 Lancaster to Preston in 1771. The Longhorn, ' the prime stock of which is 

 bred in the Filde,' was a general purpose animal. There had been big demands 

 on the best stock in the course of the eighteenth century by breeders in 

 Leicestershire and Warwickshire, and the Lancashire Longhorn formed the 

 basis of Bakewell's improved herd. The Midland graziers transformed the 

 Longhorn into a beef breed, but in Lancashire it was valued more for its milk. 

 Its milk yield was, however, less than that of the improved Shorthorn and, 

 although there were no Shorthorns in the Fylde at the end of the eighteenth 

 century, they came to prevail there during the course of the nineteenth and the 

 Longhorn has now entirely disappeared from the district. Dairying was mainly 

 for cheese and the districts east of the Fylde proper still make the white 

 Lancashire cheese. There were not many sheep kept at this time in the 

 Fylde and they were mainly four-year-old Scotch Blackfaces fattening for 

 the butcher. There were not many pigs either, which was a matter for 

 surprise in view of the potato crop and of the cheese-making. On the other 

 hand, there was an abundance of poultry : ' the Filde,' wrote Holt, ' is the 

 principal district in this county which keeps a surplus stock of poultry.' 

 Cattle and poultry as the major items, sheep and pigs as the minor, were the 

 ieatures of the stock economy of the Fylde at the end of the eighteenth century, 

 as they are to-day. It is possible, however, that this stock- keeping was 

 relatively more important east of the Fylde than in the Fylde itself. Of the 

 six farms near Garstang and Cockerham, of which Arthur Young gives 

 particulars, all had more land in grass than in arable. 



