4 
LANDMARKS IN BRITISH FARMING. 
Rural life, six centuries ago, offered many picturesque and 
striking contrasts to its most familiar aspects at tke present day. 
Yet, up to 1760, the mediasval peasant would still have felt 
himself at home in his ancient village, and on his former hold- 
ing. The system of farming had remained the same ; the crops, 
rotations, live-stock, and land management were as yet un- 
altered. More change has taken place within the last 130 
years than resulted from the whole previous period since the 
Norman Conquest. Necessity proved the mother of agricul- 
tural improvement. The rapid growth of a manufacturing 
population revolutionised the face of the country with the sud- 
denness of an earthquake. Farmers who had been satisfied 
with a domestic industry, which supplied their own wants, woke 
one morning to find themselves forced to become manufacturers 
of bread and meat for millions in the towns. It became neces- 
sary to extract the utmost from the soil, and, though some 
social results of rural changes may be of doubtful benefit, the 
advantages which the nation reaped from the development of 
farming skill are as enormous as they are also indisputable. A 
brief sketch of the most salient features in the history of agi’i- 
cultural progress forms the subject of this paper. 
Our starting-point is a village farm in the twelfth centur}’. 
Archaeologists and historians find interesting fields for study in 
the origin of those associations of tillers of the soil. One group 
of writers sees in them the primary cells of the political or- 
ganism ; another attributes their existence to a development 
from the Roman system of estate management. For the pi’esent 
purpose it is enough to say that, after the conclusion of the 
Anglo-Saxon conquest, the country was covered with a network 
of agrarian communities, whose members had passed from the 
migratory stage of subsistence on the chace or fiocks and herds, 
into the stage of tillage and permanent settlement. Each social 
group of co-partners was self-supporting and self-sufiicing. 
MTthin the limits of each clearing were concentrated all the 
necessaries of life, and all the crafts, trades, and occupations that 
were requisite for complete independence. Traces of these 
pi’imitive settlements are indelibly preserved in local nomencla- 
ture. Words like dens, holts, woods, hursts, folds, indicate the 
outlying forests which formed the boundary of the clearing ; 
within its limits, the hams, tons, worthys, stedes, designate the 
sites of the settled habitations. 
