transport networks and what today we would call marketing opportunities. It was never simply a matter of finding the best soil to grow a particular crop. Take, for example, the vegetable farms around Sandy in Bedford. Here, as any vegetable gardener could tell you, the Ouse Valley terrace gravels in their natural state are rather too light and well drained to grow the top-quality brassicas, such as the Brussels sprouts that are still such a noted speciality of the region; and it was only the addition of much manure and fertiliser, together with the ready availability of the vast market provided by a rapidly growing London population, that allowed the vegetable trade to develop successfully.
Plotting the development of early modern (1550–1750) farming has been a process which has owed much to economic historians and geographers, such as Joan Thirsk and Eric Kerridge, and without the basis of their pioneering research the recent work of more archaeologically orientated scholars, such as Susanna Wade Martins and Tom Williamson, would not have been possible. Today agricultural history is going through a very exciting period indeed. Thanks to people like Joan Thirsk we have long since abandoned some of the rather simplistic ideas – I almost said ideals – exemplified by terms such as the Agricultural Revolution and are now in the throes of creating a new history of rural Britain, based more on facts unearthed from survey and from detailed examination of sources such as estate records, than on over-arching concepts that sound good, but actually mean little. I shall return to the evidence for the timing of that supposed agricultural ‘revolution’ shortly.
In the later 1950s and 1960s Kerridge, followed in the seventies and eighties by Thirsk, together with other economic historians, began to produce maps that plotted the extent of early modern agricultural specialisation in England. These maps were actually plotting complexity, so they themselves can be daunting to read. But I make no apologies for that. I don’t think it’s necessary to grapple with precise details of individual regions, unless, of course, one has a specific interest, but the overall picture is nonetheless important, so I have reproduced Thirsk’s simplified general plan here. This map was based on two more complex maps, the first of which showed English agricultural regions in the century and a half from the start of the sixteenth century (actually from 1500 to 1640); the second illustrated how the situation developed in the following century or so, from 1640 to 1750.13
The two detailed maps are, however, important because they illustrate well the growing complexity of the post-medieval farming landscape. Both show a sharp distinction between mixed farming (arable and pasture) and pasture farming, which in turn is subdivided into woodland pasture and open pasture. All three main categories are then further subdivided into different varieties of mixed, woodland and open pasture farming. In the earlier map there is still a broad swathe of mixed farming that extends if not quite from Somerset, then from the south, through the Midlands, Lincolnshire, most of east Yorkshire and up to County Durham and Northumberland. Although this zone has altered somewhat from the Central Province of the earlier Middle Ages it is still broadly recognisable, despite now extending into parts of Norfolk, Kent and Essex. By the time we get to the second map, the areas of mixed farming have slipped south and east, largely departing from the medieval pattern.
FIG 2 Map showing the farming regions of early modern England (1500–1750).
The principal difference between the two maps is the far greater complexity of the second, later, one. Take just two regions. Post-medieval innovations are perhaps most marked in my own area, the Fens, which are shown in the earlier map (and indeed in the simplified one reproduced here) as a single region, given over to open pastoral farming involving stock-fattening with horse-breeding, dairying, fishing and fowling. After 1640, and the first phase of widespread, though still incomplete drainage, the earlier style of farming has been confined to a narrow area of marshland around the Wash, whereas the bulk of Fenland now comprises two broad areas, one to the north of silty soils that are devoted to stock- and pig-keeping, fattening, and corn-growing, while to the south the more peaty land is still mainly used for grazing and, of course, no cereals are grown. Incidentally, somewhat later, in the earlier nineteenth century, following the introduction of steam pumps, we see a further near-complete transformation of this particular landscape.
In Kent and Sussex, although the distinctive oval shape of Wealden geology continues to exert an influence (as indeed it does to this day), the varieties of farming become very much more complex in the period covered by the later map. This in part reflects the arrival of entirely new ideas, such as the introduction of fruit orchards and hop fields. The point to emphasise here is that early modern farming was a dynamic and increasingly specialised business which was becoming ever more dependent on the growth of towns and cities. Nowhere was this more important than around the two principal capitals of Edinburgh and London, which by the end of the Middle Ages had come to dominate the region and countryside around them. The areas peripheral to the large towns and cities not only provided food and raw materials for the growing urban population, but perhaps as significantly, they also provided a constantly renewing pool of labour, especially following the recurrent waves of plague that bedevilled many of the larger cities in later medieval and early post-medieval times.
We are still in the realms of general economic history and I want soon to come down to earth and see how individual farms and fields were adapted as economic conditions changed around them. But first we must briefly examine the idea of the ‘Agricultural Revolution’ which is traditionally thought to have happened between 1760 and 1830. A slightly longer view (1700–1850) would allow the main events to have happened in three stages, the first stage being completed sometime around 1750–70. These initial developments involved the introduction of new crops, especially root crops such as turnips, which we now know were pioneered not in Britain, but in the Low Countries, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.14
As early as 1600 growing Dutch influence had seen the introduction of cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips, carrots, parsnips and peas to market gardens around London. Turnips were introduced to East Anglia from Holland in the mid-sixteenth century and they then formed an important element in the famous Norfolk four-course (crop) rotation of wheat, turnips, barley, clover and/or grasses.15 The Norfolk four-course rotation required the land to lie fallow for less time (if the land had become too depleted the final crop of clover and/ or grass could be extended for an additional season).This cycle of crops produced more grazing and fodder in the form of turnips which in turn resulted in more and fatter livestock and, perhaps just as important, more manure to be spread on the fields. I also believe it must have given livestock farmers greater security and peace of mind.
As I have discovered to my cost, in seasons when late winter rains continue into March and April it can be unwise to turn young animals out onto muddy fields and waterlogged pasture. As any livestock farmer knows to his cost, fast-grown grass is deficient in minerals and both ewes and lambs can soon develop ‘grassland staggers’. So you house them for longer, but the next thing you discover is that the hay and straw they have been happily consuming over winter simply lack the nourishment that growing lambs so desperately need and soon they start to look thin, lanky and bony. They also lack vigour and don’t rush about in that wildly enthusiastic, but completely mad and pointless fashion that can make them so endearing. In such situations today one buys in (expensive) supplements usually in the form of ‘cake’, but as farmers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries knew only too well, the sprouting heads of growing parsnips and the roots themselves were almost equally nutritious – and a lot cheaper.
Perhaps the most significant reform that enabled changes to happen in the British countryside was the concept of enclosure. Having said that, we shouldn’t go overboard in our enthusiasm. For a start, huge areas of the later medieval landscape had never come into collective ownership and large estates, both private and owned by ecclesiastical authorities, were already in existence in the Middle Ages. As we saw at Shapwick, the latter could readily be transferred
