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2 - The countryside

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
W. A. Armstrong
Edited by
F. M. L. Thompson
With contributions by
Alan Armstrong ,
C. Baber ,
P. L. Garside  and
D. W. Howell
F. M. L. Thompson
Affiliation:
University of London
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Summary

‘England was early in the field with a productive, expansible agriculture.’ Among specialists in agrarian history there are diverse opinions concerning the extent of changes in farming practices and the rate at which increases in output were achieved before and during the eighteenth century, but no one disputes that England stood in the vanguard of agrarian progress. Moreover it is generally agreed that the agrarian sector was commercialised to an extent unmatched elsewhere, except in Holland. These advances had been accompanied and no doubt in some respects facilitated by changes in the composition of rural society. From the vantage point of the later eighteenth century a marked contrast with the position in contemporary Europe was discernible. English rural society in no way resembled that of territories east of the Elbe, characterised by enormous estates worked by hordes of unemancipated serfs; nor did it exhibit the pattern common to much of Western Europe, where much land continued to be held in relatively tiny units farmed by peasants. In England, through a lengthy process of evolution there had emerged a tripartite system, featuring landlords who were essentially rent receivers but who bore certain responsibilities for the provision of fixed capital; substantial tenant farmers, directly responsible for the working of the land through the application of their entrepreneurial energies and working capital; and landless or virtually landless wage earners whose contribution derived from their application of strength and skill and who were surprisingly numerous even in the sixteenth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 , pp. 87 - 154
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1990

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