76 
Exmoor Reclamation. 
cestershire squire, Mr. John Knight (of the same family as 
Payne Knight), who gave 5/. an acre for the forest, and obtained 
about 10,000 additional acres of adjoining land, of a similar 
character, at about the same price — a compact estate of 21,000 
acres, in a state of nature — producing nothing that was not self- 
sown and self-sustained ; without fences, without roads across it, 
or communication with the surrounding towns and ports, and 
without dwellings, except a public-house at Simon's Bath, 
which often sheltered smugglers and poachers, and female 
fugitives from the law of settlement. Except that the prices 
of labour and live-stock were low, the year 1818 did not seem 
favourable for a great reclamation scheme. The long wars 
that sprang out of the French Revolution of 1798 had been 
closed at Waterloo ; war prices for corn had only been tem- 
porarily sustained by two bad harvests ; but the war taxes 
remained, and threatened to be increased by an approaching 
return to cash payments. Wheat brought 5/. a quarter in 1814, 
and only 40s. in 1822;. while beef in Newgate Market was 
quoted from 2s. ^d. to 3s., and mutton at 2s. to 2s. IQd. per 
stone. 
Still, the retrospect of the reclamations of the past century 
was tempting to an energetic man who was familiar with 
the agricultural literature that Arthur Young had created, who 
had been one of the guests at the Woburn sheep-shearings, 
who had seen the result of the conversion of some 400,000 
acres of heath and moor in Bedfordshire, Norfolk, Lincolnshire, 
and his native Worcestershire, into rich, rent-paying farms. 
He was familiar with the successive steps of claying and 
marling, root-growing and sheep-feeding, and with the four- 
course system then perfected in Norfolk by the invention of the 
drill and the horse-hoe, and the use of crushed bones and rape- 
cake, the earliest portable manures. He had studied the means 
and the management by which Mr. Thomas Coke, afterwards 
Earl of Leicester, had created a princely estate out of the 
desert where he " saw, when he took possession, two rabbits 
fighting for one blade of grass." In his character and his 
acquirements, in his ample means and tenacity of purpose, 
Mr. John Knight had every qualification for success except one 
— the art of profiting by experience. He began grandly, and 
the monuments of his early enterprise remain to this day. 
It is difficult for the present generation to form the least idea of 
the state of isolation in which many fertile districts of the 
kingdom, and especially of the West, existed in the early years 
of the present century, when they lay even a short distance from 
the mail-coach roads, and the ports and creeks of the sea-coast. 
A map of Northern Devon and Western Somerset will show 
