Arthur Young's Rural Idylls

On enclosure and the enchantment of private property

Nowadays, historians of political economy have a tendency to speak of multiple agricultural revolutions transforming rural England instead of one continuous revolution unfolding across three centuries (roughly, 1560 to 1840). It’s not very hard to see why. Reducing three centuries of development to a single process or scale risks obscuring regional differences and varying rates of change–not to mention different types of causal influence, like the different forms that enclosure took (commons vs. waste, Tudor/Elizabethan enclosure (16th/17th cent.) vs. enclosure by parliamentary approval (the dominant method in 18th and 19th cent.)); changes in demography, religious belief, ecclesial identity; the invention of the horse-drawn seed drill (etc.); or the development of fodder crops like turnips. The rise of rural capitalism in England, which predated and made the industrial revolution possible, has an extremely complicated history with roots that go back to the late fourteenth century. In the face of such wide swathes of time, social change, and technological innovation, it can sometimes feel silly to insist on a single pattern or form of development. Still, there are moments in the historical record where the reader feels compelled to point out continuity in the face of so much difference. The feeling can be particularly acute when you come across texts that double down on the novelty of their own moment. 

The Hay Wain [1821], John Constable (1776-1837), oil on canvas, National Gallery.

Consider the case of Arthur Young (1741-1820), farmer, writer, pamphleteer, and champion of “improved” agriculture in the British Isles. Across a fifty year career, Young authored numerous books, pamphlets, and articles on agricultural method and political economy. It’s not an exaggeration to say that he did more to disseminate the core ideas of “convertible husbandry” and the ideology of improvement than anyone else in Britain or the Americas. “Convertible” refers to the rotation of crops, grasses, and fallow through the same acreage in regular, labor-intensive patterns. Without getting too deep in the weeds, in the convertible or “improved” system Young championed, the same piece of land goes through a couple of rotations of “corn” (wheat or barley), a leguminous crop like clover or sainfoin that fixes atmospheric nitrogen in the soil, and then pasture for sheep, before starting the whole process again. 

In the older, open-field system, arable land was broken up into strips that were divided between peasant families living on a manor. Rotations between crops usually happened according to the “three field” system: ⅓  wheat or rye; ⅓ oats, barley,  or legume; and ⅓ fallow. Both commons and waste were managed cooperatively and overseen by the manorial court system. Except in extraordinary circumstances, customary rights were passed down or exchanged between peasant families from one generation to the next. 

However, for the convertible system to work, farmers and landowners needed a couple of conditions in place. First, they needed unfettered access to the land. Convertible husbandry required constant intervention in the biology of soil. Without the dissolution of the customary rights of the peasantry, farmers and landowners were unable to reap profits from significant portions of their holdings. It’s hardly a coincidence that, from 1750 to 1850, approximately 7 million acres were enclosed and the customary rights of the peasantry dissolved.¹ Second, they needed a steady and cheap supply of labor to enclose the land and amend it. Champions of convertible agriculture insisted on the importance of animals and marl (or limestone chalk). These were two keys to fertility, but digging up chalk and collecting manure were extremely labor intensive. So, too, was the even application of these materials at regular intervals across the growing seasons (not to mention the labor that went into enclosing/improving commons and waste, sowing, weeding, and harvest). Landowners and farmers seeking to enclose and improve land came to see that a cheap and steady supply of wage labor was necessary if profits were to roll. The rural population became less of a problem than an opportunity. 

 Young’s personal record as an improver was mixed. Most of his own farming endeavors ended in failure. But for many years Young served as the secretary of the newly formed Board of Agriculture, a “semipublic instrument” by and for large landowners that advocated for the enclosure and improvement of common and waste lands.² He also served as editor and contributor to the forty-five volumes of his own widely read periodical, the Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts (1784-1806). 

The historian Jim Handy has argued that, in the early years of the Annals, Young took a proto-Malthusian attitude towards the rural population.³ It was plain to Young that the peasantry stood in the way of progress. So long as they maintained their cottage gardens and the open field system, the whole country would suffer. “Without inclosures there can be no good husbandry; while a country is laid out in open field lands, every good farmer is tied down to the husbandry of his slovenly neighbours, it is simply impossible that agriculture should flourish.”⁴ The only solution to the “slovenly” way that peasants managed their farms was to enclose their arable land and tear down their cottage gardens and orchards. To Young, peasant agriculture represented a vestigial way of life that jeopardized national prosperity. As late as 1807, well into the agricultural revolution of the early 1800s, Young was still bemoaning that “the Goths and the Vandals of open fields touch the civilization of enclosures.”⁵ A not-very-thinly veiled racial logic overlay the transformation of the English countryside. The peasantry was past, an older, less civilized, less developed way of living on the land that was incapable of contributing to the national economy. The only solution, Young insisted, was to deprive the rural laboring class of their property and let poverty goad them to greater industry. What else but hardship would make them work? In turned out that deprivation did the poor a favor. “Every one but an ideot [sic] knows that…the lower classes must be poor, or they will never be industrious.”⁶

In the early 1800’s, poverty deepened in the most agriculturally productive regions of England’s south and east. War and poor harvests were partly to blame, but the rural poor became harder for people like Young to explain away. As some of England’s farmers and landlords got stupendously rich, how was it that their workers grew ever more destitute? Young’s antipathy began to soften somewhat, and he began to champion “the enchantment of property”: giving cottagers little plots for them to garden in, either by means of rental from landlords or public dispersal of wasteland, would work like economic “magic.”⁷ Gardens would keep rural workers well-fed, able-bodied, and ultimately enhance the labor power employed by capitalist farmers. Curiously, in later years, Young’s involvement in nonconforming religious circles deepened, and he began to treat the topic of the rural poor with something that resembled regret. “I had rather that all the commons of England were sunk in the sea, than that the poor should in future be treated on enclosing as they have been hitherto.”⁸ Quite the about-face for the man who did more than anyone to convince the landed class to boot the peasantry from the countryside in the first place. 

The text I want to take a closer look at comes years before Young’s attitude towards the rural poor began to change. In the late 1760’s, Young embarked on a six-week journey across England and Wales. As Young explained, the aim of his six weeks’ tour was to “gain as complete a knowledge as possible of the present state of the agriculture, manufactures, and population of the several counties through which I shall pass.”⁹ Given Young’s stated intention, it’s all the more bizarre that he begins the Tour not by recording his observation of agricultural method but the “celebrated house” of Holkham Hall in Norfolk (3-24). Although he professes ignorance about architecture, Young records his personal titillation at approaching the house from the south (he had heard this was the best view) and went out of his way to get on the right track. Young gives as detailed a report on the exterior of the house as he can. What follows this is an inventory of the most fetching and opulent rooms inside the mansion: observations about specific styles of decoration and pattern ( walls in“crimson flowered velvet” or “blue damask”; a bas relief on the chimney piece of “white marble finely polished”, p. 11), the dimensions of each notable hallway and room (“the saloon [sic] is 42 feet by 27, a proportion much condemned, but it is by no means displeasing to me” 7). Just before Young reports on the grounds around the house and the agricultural methods that lie beyond, he includes a detailed catalogue of paintings at Holkham that would make most European museums blush: works by a litany of Renaissance masters like Titian’s Venus, Rubens’s Flight into Egypt; paintings by van Dyck, Raphael, and many others (15-21). 

It’s not all praise on Young’s Tour. Occasionally, he will record some hesitation about a detail at Holkham or the other grand estates he gets to see on his journey through England and Wales (Holkham: “when you advance near, you find no entrance to the house; there are no stairs up to the portico, and this circumstance…becomes a disappointment, and a fault in the building” (6)). Still, the rather obvious point of these exercises is to observe, itemize, and survey the estate’s domestic interiors, not just the condition of the out-of-doors husbandry on which the wealth and opulence of the estate itself depend. Stylistically, Young’s Tour mimes the observational habits of Daniel Defoe’s Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain [1724] or the actuarial tabulation of data in Robinson Crusoe [1719]. What’s perhaps different here is that the lists of data operate like a hermeneutic frame to the social world encircling the estate. To understand what happens in the field, the quantity of labor hours, the pounds of marl and manure, the types of turnip and the stupendous yields, one must first encounter the wealth those commodities and methods make possible. The opulence of the domestic interior is essential to comprehending what happens in the fields and pastures outside of it. The house is, quite literally, the accumulation of surplus wealth extracted from the land and its laborers. 

Perhaps it’s no coincidence, then, that Young’s tour of English husbandry begins on the (bizarrely stairless–I agree with Young) entry of a mansion that belonged to one the great capitalist “improvers” of the 18th century, a man named Thomas William Coke, who was (incorrectly) believed to have invented the “Norfolk four-course system,” a “local variation” on crop rotations that made Coke very rich.¹⁰ Coke was one of the big “bullfrog” landowners whom William Cobbett railed against incessantly in his own Rural Rides through the English countryside. From his seat at Holkham, Coke owned approximately 13,00 acres of arable land in the Norfolk region. After inheriting 30,000 acres from his family, Coke went around buying up strips of open field and enclosing them. Young reports that around 8-9,000 arable acres are rented to other farmers, with individual holdings from a little over 1,000 to 3,000 acres. Afterwards, Young tells us what the land looked like before Coke and his predecessors got started, and what difference Coke has wrought on the landscape: 

“All the country from Holkam to Houghton was a wild sheep-walk before the spirit of improvement seized the inhabitants; and this glorious spirit has wrought amazing effects; for instead of boundless wilds, and uncultivated wastes, inhabited by scarce anything but sheep; the country is all cut into inclosures [sic], cultivated in a most husband-like manner, richly manured, well peopled, and yielding an hundred times the produce that it did in its former state. What has wrought these vast improvements is the marling; for under the whole country run veins of a very rich soapy kind, which they dig up, and spread upon the old sheep-walks, and then by means of inclosing they throw their farms in a regular course of crops, and gain immensely by the improvement.” (21-22). 

Coke and the farmers who leased his land were people who profited immensely from convertible husbandry and the ecological and social conditions that made it possible. It’s difficult to imagine the size of Coke’s estate without a very large labor force and very large amounts of capital on hand. Young was quite clear that small and middling farmers shouldn’t bother with convertible husbandry; it was best left to the big ones: “how in the name of common sense were such improvements to be wrought by little or even moderate farmers! Can such inclose wastes at a vast expense–cover them with an hundred loads an acre of marle–or six or eight hundred bushels of lime–keep sufficient flocks of sheep for folding[…] No. It is to GREAT FARMERS you owe these. Without GREAT FARMS you never would have seen these improvements.”¹¹

Still, the trouble with Young’s picture of the Norfolk countryside–a landscape “saved” from barbaric obscurity by large, capitalist improvers–is that it rests on multiple distortions. For one, marl had been used in this part of the world as a soil amendment since the prehistoric era.¹² The four-crop system, so lauded by Young, had been around for at least a hundred years prior to Coke’s employment of it. It’s not clear that Coke himself invented anything. He seems to have been one particularly wealthy exponent of the system. And then there is enclosure itself, the civilizing miracle of the countryside. In Norfolk, the practice was much older than Young suggests. The very earliest enclosures in Norfolk took place in the 12th century and then again in the 15th century. About a hundred years later, Kett’s Rebellion (1549), in which approximately 16,000 smallholders and laborers tore down hedges and fences put up by the rich in a massive spate of enclosure, began about forty miles south of Holkham–just outside Norwich. 

Perhaps the best way to put the situation is this: Young’s fixation on domestic and agricultural detail obscures the real condition of capitalist prosperity, which was the propertylessness of the laboring poor in Coke’s employ. They almost never make an appearance in Young’s letters. Labor will show up in the speculative ledgers Young draws up when he wants to figure out just how profitable these stupendously large farms are (e.g., “Harvest, on a medium, 4 s[hillings]. an acre” (28)). And we see them for a split second as Young’s eye roves the landscape and notices its “well-peopled” (21) villages. But laborers and small farmers otherwise do not make much of an appearance. If their farms and gardens haven’t been enclosed, they are the “slovenly” neighbors who justify the big bullfrog farmers’ gobbling up of the landscape.

Young’s icon of rural prosperity reminds me of a poem from a very different era (early 1600s) and a very different author (Ben Johnson), written in the middle of an earlier but no less feverish burst of rural enclosure. It is an example of the country house poem, a poem that praises the elegance of a rural seat belonging to this or that nobleman. In “To Penshurst,” Ben Jonson begins by celebrating the restrained beauty of the house itself (no “polished pillars, or roof of gold”) and suggests that this architectural modesty is a fitting emblem of the lord’s quiet dominion over the landscape surrounding him: “Thou joy’st in better marks, of soil, of air,/Of wood, of water; therein thou art fair.” The mansion does not browbeat the natural world surrounding it. The lord’s enclosing hand is firm and controlling, but the lord does not glory in his own surplus. In response, nature gives herself up freely to the lord’s expropriation: “The painted partridge lies in every field,/ And for thy mess is willing to be killed”; “Fat aged carps [...] run into thy net”; and the eels “leap on land/Before the fisher, or into his hand.” Property yields itself willingly to the proprietor who does not force things. The same is true of the people who live and work on the lord’s estate: 

And though thy walls be of the country stone,

They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan;

There’s none that dwell about them wish them down;

But all come in, the farmer and the clown,

And no one empty-handed, to salute

Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit.¹³

Jonson’s poem is of a very different time–almost a different world, one is tempted to say, than Young’s description of Holkham and its farms. And yet there is a way of seeing both obfuscations of labor as bound up in the same process of economic and ecological myth-making: rural people yield their labor to the lord’s grasp as willingly as the pike in the stream or the plum in the tree, and they are not the worse for it. Indeed, for Young, no less than for Jonson, exploitation is good for them: how else would people or places learn to be productive if not for the firm hand of their lordly masters? 

***

In the next longform post on the Bell Farm Miscellany, I will take up a question I’ve been pondering for a long time: how was the ideology of improvement received in the Americas? Stay tuned for more. 

1. Jim Handy, “The Enchantment of Property: Arthur Young, Enclosure, and the Cottage Economy in England, 1770-1840,” Journal of Agrarian Change 19 (2019): 711-728.

2. “The Enchantment of Property,” 712.

3. “The Enchantment of Property,” 717-725. See also Handy, Apostles of Inequality: Rural Poverty, Political Economy, and The Economist, 1760-1860 (Toronto University Press, 2022), part one.

4. Political Arithmetic (1967), I:199. Quoted in “The Enchantment of Property,” 718.

5. General view of the agriculture of Oxfordshire (1813), p. 35, 36; also in “The Enchantment of Property,” 718.

6. Young, A Farmer’s Tour through the east of England (1771), p. 361; also in “The Enchantment of Property,” 719.

7. Young, quoted in “The Enchantment of Property,” 721.

8. in Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford University Press, 1973), 67.

9. https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-six-weeks-tour-throug_young-arthur-frs_1768/page/28/mode/2up

10. in Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Hill and Wang, 2002), 59.

11. Stoll, 58.

12. Robert A. Dodgshon, "Land Improvement in Scottish Farming: Marl and Lime in Roxburghshire and Berwickshire in the Eighteenth Century," The Agricultural History Review, 26 (1) [1978]: 1–14.

13. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50674/to-penshurst