A Short History of English Agriculture

APPENDIX IV

Gregory King, at the end of the seventeenth century, estimated the acreage of England and Wales at 39,000,000—not at all a bad estimate, the area, excluding water, according to the Board of Agriculture Returns of 1907, being 37,130,344. The different estimates by Grew, Templeman, Petty, Young, Halley, Middleton, and others varied between 31,648,000 and 46,916,000 acres. The last, that of Arthur Young, was actually adopted by Pitt for his estimate of the income-tax.[760]

Caird in 1850[761] estimated the cultivated lands of England at 27,000,000 acres (in 1907 they were 24,585,455 acres), cultivated thus:—

the latter being divided as follows:—

Davenant, at the end of the seventeenth century, made the following estimate showing the importance of wool in English trade[762]:—

Thus the rents of land formed nearly one-fourth the total income of the country, and wool paid one-fifth of the rents.[763]

In the eighteenth century a great quantity of wool was smuggled out of England in defiance of the law; in the space of four months in 1754, 4,000 tods was 'run' into Boulogne.[764]

In 1816 there were said to be 589,374 occupiers of land in Great Britain[767]—

In 1907 there were 510,954 occupiers of one acre and more.

The average annual cost of living of an agricultural family of five was in 1823 £31, in 1883, £37.

Thus wheat in 1804-10 had risen 233 per cent. since the sixteenth century.

The following table, published by Mr. Barton in 1817,[768] shows the depreciation of the labourer's wages in purchasing power between 1742 and 1808:—

In answer to inquiries sent by the Poor Law Commissioners in 1834 to 900 parishes in England the average weekly wages of labourers were—

Here is the weekly budget of a labourer with an average family in 1800:—[769]

There is no fresh meat, and it is hard to say where any economy could be practised.