Do grow beneath their shoulders?
Contemporary view of tenant farmers
THE DAWN OF INDUSTRY
By the late seventeenth century, Britain had colonies in the West Indies, the western seaboard of America and a large part of Canada. The Royal African Company had established trading posts in West Africa to trade slaves in exchange for British goods, which would become the major economic mainstay for such western British cities as Bristol and Liverpool, which formed the third corner of the so-called triangular trade with Africa and the Americas. The East India Company had been in existence since 1600 and Britain acquired Bombay and Tangier in 1661, on the marriage of Charles II to Catherine de Braganza. When William of Orange ascended the English throne in 1688, bringing peace between the Netherlands and England, a deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the Indonesian archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England.
One of William’s first acts after his coronation was to declare war on his old enemy, France, and to impose a trade embargo on French goods which was to have a profound effect on British agriculture. In the seventeenth century very little distilling of spirits was known in Britain; the Company of Distillers made spirits under strict regulations, mainly for apothecaries who used it as a base for medicines. Some home-made alcohol was sold by street vendors, described by Daniel Defoe as ‘Foul and gross, but they mixed them up with such additions as they could get, to make them palatable’. The rich drank imported French brandy and the embargo with France left a gap in the booze market, which William promptly filled in 1690 by passing an Act of Parliament ‘for encouraging the distilling of brandy and spirits from corn’.
This new industry would lead, the Act promised, to ‘the greater consumption of corn and the advantage of tillage in this Kingdom’. To help things along, he withdrew the monopoly on distilling from the Company of Distillers, removed virtually all regulations and, working on the theory that if spirits were cheap, more people would drink them, lowered the tax on spirits made from malted corn to a penny a gallon. British farmers now faced the challenge of demand created by colonisation and the new distilling industry; they had to improve production or go out of business.
The eighteenth century was a period of rapid change for every section of society, but none more so than for farmers, with landowners leading the way in agricultural improvements. The four-field rotation system was accepted as the new method of cultivation, the limitation being the hopelessly inefficient method of broadcasting seed by hand. It is obviously important that individual plants have sufficient space to grow and ripen, and there was an enormous amount of waste until Jethro Tull, a Berkshire landowner, invented a seed drill for sowing seed in rows. He also advocated the use of horses instead of oxen, which were still commonly used for farm work, and invented a horse-drawn hoe for clearing plant growth, particularly among turnip crops. The powerful Whig politician, Viscount Townsend, of Raynham Hall, in Norfolk, carried out a variety of improving experiments on his estate, mostly involving turnips. He was a fervent believer in the efficacious qualities of turnips for all agricultural improvements and became known as ‘Turnip Townsend’ from his habit of introducing his opinions of the plant into every conversation.
Joseph Foljambe of Rotherham, in Yorkshire, perfected a vastly superior plough which remained in use until the tractor was invented 170 years later.
DRAUGHT HORSES
In the early part of the century, the Duke of Hamilton imported six black Flemish stallions from Flanders which were crossed with local horses on his estates at Clydesdale, near Glasgow, to produce the eponymous Clydesdale horse. Clydesdales were the perfect multi-purpose work horse, which were eventually exported all over the world. At the beginning of the twentieth century there were over 140,000 Clydesdales in Scotland alone, and in 1911, 1,600 stallions were exported from Britain to various countries. By 1949, there were just eighty horses registered in Britain, and in 1975 the Rare Breeds Survival Trust listed the breed as ‘vulnerable’. Clydesdales have since seen a resurgence in popularity and population, resulting in the breed’s status being reclassified favourably as ‘at risk’, with an estimated global population of just 5,000 specimens.
At the same time, other landlords, such as the Earls of Chesterfield and Huntington, were developing regional draught horses by importing continental stallions from Zeeland. Later in the century, Robert Bakewell of Derbyshire, the famous improver of cattle and sheep, developed the Improved Black Horse, which was to become world famous as the Shire horse.
NEW ADVANCES IN GOODS TRANSPORTATION
As Britain moved into the age of industry, in the middle of the century, there was a desperate need to find some method of transporting bulky raw materials and finished products. The Toll Pike Trusts set up by Act of Parliament in 1706, with powers to collect road tolls for maintaining the principal highways in Britain, were still in their infancy. Most goods were transported by long trains of pack horses or great cumbersome wagons to the nearest port, on roads which in most places had scarcely improved since the Middle Ages. There had been some early attempts to improve inland river navigation in the seventeenth century; the government of King James established the Oxford-Burcot Commission in 1605 which began a system of locks and weirs on the River Thames and was opened between Oxford and Abingdon by 1635. Sir Richard Weston designed and built the Wey navigations in 1635, a canal running 25 kilometres from Weybridge to Guildford, allowing barges to transport heavy goods via the Thames to London. Timber, corn, flour, wood and gunpowder from the Chilworth Mills were moved up the canal to London whilst coal was brought back. The Aire & Calder Navigation, in West Yorkshire, was opened 1703, the Trent Navigation in 1712, the Kennet in 1723 and the Mersey and Irwell Navigation in 1734, which provided a navigable route to Salford and Manchester.
CARVING OUT THE CANALS
These were all improvements to existing rivers; but the first artificial canal, a waterway designed on the basis of where goods needed to go rather than where a river happened to be, was built by the Duke of Bridgewater. The Duke commissioned the engineer James Brindley to build a canal which would transport coal quickly and efficiently from his mines in Worsley to the rapidly industrialising city of Manchester. Brindley’s design included an aqueduct carrying the canal over the River Irwell, and this engineering wonder immediately attracted tourists when it opened in 1761. The Duke’s canal proved to be highly successful; barges carrying thirty tonnes of coal were easily pulled by one horse walking along a tow path – more than ten times the amount of cargo per horse than was possible with a cart. Time spent moving goods was cut to a fraction and, because of the massive increase in supply, the Bridgewater canal reduced the price of coal in Manchester by nearly two-thirds within a year of its opening. It was a huge financial success, earning what had been spent on its construction within just a few years – which was a relief to the Duke, who had funded the whole venture himself.
THE BRIDGEWATER CANAL STARTED A FEVER OF CANAL BUILDING ACROSS THE ENTIRE COUNTRY UNTIL THERE WAS A NATIONWIDE NETWORK OF TRANSPORT COMMUNICATION BETWEEN ENGLAND AND WALES, AND IN SCOTLAND, FROM THE SEA PORTS ON THE EAST AND WEST COASTS. IT WAS AN INCREDIBLE UNDERTAKING.
The Bridgewater canal started a fever of canal building across the entire country until there was a nationwide network of transport communication between England and Wales, and in Scotland, from the sea ports on the east and west coasts. It was an incredible undertaking. Armies of ‘navvies’ (as in navigators) laboured under engineering geniuses such as Telford, Brindley, Rennie or Dadford, creating aqueducts, boat lifts, tunnels, inclined planes and caisson lifts.
The new canal system enabled both goods and people to move around the country in a manner that must have seemed
