or clay pipes, these then emptied into ditches along the field’s edges, which in turn had to be deepened and improved. The work was often paid for by landowners.26 The other major innovation which has left a distinct mark in the landscape, mostly of western Britain (although it was tried without the same success in drier East Anglia, too), was the extensive ‘floating’ of land through the construction of artificial water meadows in the years between 1600 and 1900.27
These projects involved the digging of numerous channels to carry water from a main cut, usually alongside a natural river, and from there into a series of subsidiary streams carefully positioned to distribute it evenly across the meadow. These flooded meadows could be extensive, covering many acres, and their construction also involved the erection of numerous sluice gates which had to be opened and closed in a specific order, depending on what was needed. In fact the actual business of operating and maintaining water meadows required labour, plus considerable skill and experience, which might help explain why they failed to thrive after the opulent period known as Victorian high farming (which I’ll explain later) was brought to an end by the great agricultural depression of the 1870s.28
Ultimately water meadows were intended to extend the initial flush of spring and early summer grass, both through simple watering and by the laying down of a very thin layer of flood-clay (alluvium) which provided early season nourishment to the growing grass. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and well into the nineteenth, water meadows made the keeping of sheep and the growing of corn on the chalk downlands of Wessex and southern England such a profitable business. This is because the rather thin grass cover of the chalk downs doesn’t really start growing in earnest until May, so the new water meadows on the richer soils of the valley bottoms meant that abundant grazing was now available in March and April, when stocks of hay were nearly exhausted. Almost as important, it also meant that the arable parts of the farm now had an even more plentiful supply of 29 manure.
There is now a general consensus that the concept of a short-lived and as such truly revolutionary period of agricultural ‘improvement’ is mistaken and instead we should be thinking of a more extended era of ‘improvement’, from, say, 1500 to 1850. And many, myself included, would reckon that such a length of time – some 350 years – was more evolutionary than revolutionary.30 It’s roughly the same length of time that separates the present from the execution of King Charles I. With all of this in mind, I prefer to refer to the period as the era of agricultural development – because it could be argued that, with hindsight, some of the so-called ‘improvements’ were actually nothing of the sort.31
Whatever one’s definition of the period, the changes I have just been discussing are generally seen to have been the result of pioneering work carried out by enlightened, reform-minded, high-profile individuals, who are usually lumped together under the general heading of agricultural ‘Improvers’. Jethro Tull, largely I suspect because of the 1970s rock band named after him, is the best known of these ‘Improvers’. I remember being taught at school that he invented the seed drill, whereas in reality he urged its adoption and was a great believer in it. He didn’t actually invent it. Other important ‘Improvers’ were the 1st Earl of Leicester, Thomas William Coke (1754–1842) of Holkham Hall, Norfolk (known at the time as ‘Coke of Norfolk’), and the Whig Cabinet Minister Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend (1674–1738) who helped to promote the Norfolk four-course rotation. We must not forget that the period also saw the introduction of important new breeds of livestock through the researches of men like Robert Bakewell (1725–95), of Dishley Grange, who farmed the heavy clay lands of Leicestershire.32
When one reads the correspondence of the different ‘Improvers’ it is hard not to be carried along by their sheer infectious enthusiasm. It is abundantly clear that they were convinced that their work was important for the general good of society. They were not in it either to create agricultural ‘improvements’ for their own sake, or just to make money (although that helped). The concept of ‘improvement’ had a philosophical basis firmly rooted in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. It was seen as a part of the new rational ideal, the triumph of civilisation over nature. It’s not for nothing that great agricultural ‘Improvers’, such as Coke of Norfolk, were also keen landscape gardeners. As with the new style of farming ‘Neatness, symmetry and formal patterns, so typical of the eighteenth-century landscape garden, represented the divide between “culture” and “nature”. Indeed, many landlords saw little difference between the laying out of parks around their houses and the new farmland beyond.’33
The ‘Improvers’ were undoubtedly remarkable men, but for various reasons to do with their social status at the time, or their enthusiasm for the promotion of a pet project (such as Tull and the seed drill), they have been treated more favourably by history than many of their humbler contemporaries. Modern research is, however, starting to redress this imbalance, largely thanks to detailed studies of individual estates and farms by historians such as Susanna Wade Martins, whose work is helping to transform our understanding of the period.
I hope readers will forgive me, but at this point I cannot help thinking how strange it is that certain remarkable people can drift in and out of one’s life, barely leaving a ripple in their wake. Only later do you kick yourself for not seeking out their views at the time. It’s rather like being the man who chose to argue the price of eggs with Sir Isaac Newton. In the case of Susanna Wade Martins, her husband Peter was the director of an Anglo-Saxon excavation I took part in, in 1970, at their home village in Norfolk. Susanna was around and about, but I knew her interests lay outside our dig and, afflicted by the myopia of youth, I failed to discover what she was researching at the time. A major lost opportunity, that.
Over the years, and perhaps more than anyone else, Susanna has thrown light on the lives of individual farmers; maybe this is in part because her academic work is deeply rooted in the experience that she and Peter have acquired running their own small farm. Indeed, as I have related elsewhere, we bought our first four sheep from them, back in the early 1980s.34 Peter warned me that sheep could become addictive – and he was dead right.
Susanna sees the initial development of modern British farming as being the responsibility of ‘yeoman farmers’. These men and their families emerged from the slow collapse of the feudal system and became very much more common in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yeomen were independent, small farmers who usually owned most, if not all of their own land. Later, they might enter into tenancy agreements with larger landowners, while retaining a core of land for themselves. In some instances they used the profits of their land to acquire estates and to better themselves in the greater worlds of politics and industry. A good example of a successful yeoman family were the Brookes of Coalbrookdale who did so much to develop the iron industry there in the later sixteenth century – but more on them in Chapter 5.
It was yeoman farmers who developed the system of ‘up and down husbandry’ in the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This system involved a sort of long-term rotation where the land was cropped for arable – usually cereals – for, say, seven successive years, before it was returned to pasture to recover for a slightly longer period of up to a dozen years. This sort of farming was very productive and was adopted across most of the English Midlands. Interestingly, although the population of Britain was rising from 1670, grain prices actually fell year on year – which indicates, if anything can, the productivity of ‘up and down husbandry’.35
Landowners only start to become generally interested
