4 - Agricultural improvement

Summary

Although the improving movement had a comprehensive regional impact, involving the development of industry and the overhaul of transport and settlement systems it was in agriculture where the greatest changes were made. So much so that the notion of an ‘agricultural revolution’, which is good currency south of the border, has been put forward. There was vigorous action taken to enclose land, to create consolidated holdings and to introduce new rotations, especially during the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Arguably the legislative preconditions had already been satisfied and particular elements of the new agriculture were exemplified in the countryside before 1700. However, a further important act was passed in 1770 relating to entailed estates, authorising longer leases, if tenants agreed to certain improvements, and allowed proprietors to charge to their heirs three quarters of the costs of enclosure and other agricultural improvements. Furthermore the eighteenth century witnessed not simply the application of a number of different ideas to accelerate the growth of agriculture but, rather, comprehensive packages of measures being introduced on each estate. These local development plans involved the landowner taking a lead and concentrating all major decision-making in his hands. Some seventeenth-century proprietors were very much aware of the potential for commercial farming, especially in Lothian, but it has not yet been shown that on any single estate the owner abolished all sub-tenancies and introduced a uniform system of leasing, with associated policies to redeem wadsets, eliminate boundary problems and set up holdings as enclosed and consolidated units.