LITMIR.BIZ

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the longer boundaries. These then had to be re-fenced and re-hedged at their owners’ expense. In many instances this was to prove too much so they sold out to their larger neighbours.¹⁹

      In the English Midlands parliamentary enclosure must be considered successful, but that cannot be said for everywhere, even in England. In upland areas of northern England, for example, parliamentary enclosure often ignored topography and was sometimes frankly irrational. If anything, it made efficient farming more difficult.²⁰

      In Scotland enclosure was by agreement, or latterly by imposition of powerful landowners. In the Lowlands the process was well under way in the 1760s and 1770s and in the Highlands towards the end of the century, where they became known as the Highland Clearances; these enclosures often involved the clearance of entire rural populations to make way for sheep pasture and later for moorland game reserves. The Clearances continued late into the nineteenth century when huge numbers of people were either removed to new settlements often within the landowners’ estates along the coastal plain, or were sent abroad, principally to Canada. To give an idea of the scale of the Clearances, some 40,000 people were removed from the Isle of Skye between 1840 and 1880.²¹

      I think it would be a big mistake simply to think of the earlier post-medieval period in terms of big all-transforming movements, such as enclosure. Many poorer rural people lived outside the world of what one might term legalised land tenure. Theirs was an existence where possession was nine-tenths of the law and nowhere was this more evident than in the less prosperous parts of upland, non-Anglicised Wales. Because these holdings were, at best, quasi-legal, they have left little by way of a paper trail. So to track them down, my old friend Bob Sylvester (who initially made his name by sorting out the medieval archaeology of the Norfolk Fens) has had to turn to archaeology.²²

      According to Bob, the traditional archaeological view of Wales was ‘a single undifferentiated upland landmass, appended to the western side of England’.²³ Unfortunately, such attitudes made no allowances for the distinctive landscapes of Wales which often arose through the action of people and communities that were very different from those further east. One such distinctive feature has been termed ‘encroachment’.²⁴ As the population of Wales began to grow from the later seventeenth century, and most particularly in the eighteenth and early nineteenth, impoverished landless people built themselves small houses and laid out smallholdings on the common land of the uplands, usually without the landowner (often the Crown) being aware. These people were often given moral and practical support by local parish councils who did not like seeing perfectly good land being left to stand idle. Sometimes landowners themselves encouraged such encroachment, especially if they were looking for labour to exploit coal and other mineral resources in these otherwise under-populated upland regions.

      Informal settlements of this kind are fairly distinctive on the ground. They consist of a seemingly random scatter of small single-family households, within a couple of acres of land. Sometimes the more successful homesteads acquired the additional outbuildings of an upland farm and the various houses are usually served by a single, meandering lane. Encroachments are by no means confined to the uplands and can be found in valley floors, especially on land that was once poorly drained and uncontrolled, such as many of the tributary valleys of the Severn along the border country of Montgomeryshire and Shropshire.²⁵

      Despite local difficulties of the sort we have just discussed, the rationalisation of the rural landscape brought about by enclosure of all types meant that farmers and landowners were now able to take practical measures to improve their land. In most cases this involved under-drainage, which was particularly effective in the clay lands of East Anglia, where huge areas were drained in the first half of the nineteenth century. Under-drainage involved the cutting, by hand, of a series of parallel, deep, narrow trenches containing brushwood, gravel, stone or clay pipes, these then emptied into ditches along the field’s edges, which in turn had to be deepened and improved. The work was often paid for by landowners.²⁶ The other major innovation which has left a distinct mark in the landscape, mostly of western Britain (although it was tried without the same success in drier East Anglia, too), was the extensive ‘floating’ of land through the construction of artificial water meadows in the years between 1600 and 1900.²⁷

      These projects involved the digging of numerous channels to carry water from a main cut, usually alongside a natural river, and from there into a series of subsidiary streams carefully positioned to distribute it evenly across the meadow. These flooded meadows could be extensive, covering many acres, and their construction also involved the erection of numerous sluice gates which had to be opened and closed in a specific order, depending on what was needed. In fact the actual business of operating and maintaining water meadows required labour, plus considerable skill and experience, which might help explain why they failed to thrive after the opulent period known as Victorian high farming (which I’ll explain later) was brought to an end by the great agricultural depression of the 1870s.²⁸

      Ultimately water meadows were intended to extend the initial flush of spring and early summer grass, both through simple watering and by the laying down of a very thin layer of flood-clay (alluvium) which provided early season nourishment to the growing grass. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and well into the nineteenth, water meadows made the keeping of sheep and the growing of corn on the chalk downlands of Wessex and southern England such a profitable business. This is because the rather thin grass cover of the chalk downs doesn’t really start growing in earnest until May, so the new water meadows on the richer soils of the valley bottoms meant that abundant grazing was now available in March and April, when stocks of hay were nearly exhausted. Almost as important, it also meant that the arable parts of the farm now had an even more plentiful supply of ²⁹ manure.

      There is now a general consensus that the concept of a short-lived and as such truly revolutionary period of agricultural ‘improvement’ is mistaken and instead we should be thinking of a more extended era of ‘improvement’, from, say, 1500 to 1850. And many, myself included, would reckon that such a length of time – some 350 years – was more evolutionary than revolutionary.³⁰ It’s roughly the same length of time that separates the present from the execution of King Charles I. With all of this in mind, I prefer to refer to the period as the era of agricultural development – because it could be argued that, with hindsight, some of the so-called ‘improvements’ were actually nothing of the sort.³¹

      Whatever one’s definition of the period, the changes I have just been discussing are generally seen to have been the result of pioneering work carried out by enlightened, reform-minded, high-profile individuals, who are usually lumped together under the general heading of agricultural ‘Improvers’. Jethro Tull, largely I suspect because of the 1970s rock band named after him, is the best known of these ‘Improvers’. I remember being taught at school that he invented the seed drill, whereas in reality he urged its adoption and was a great believer in it. He didn’t actually invent it. Other important ‘Improvers’ were the 1st Earl of Leicester, Thomas William Coke (1754–1842) of Holkham Hall, Norfolk (known at the time as ‘Coke of Norfolk’), and the Whig Cabinet Minister Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend (1674–1738) who helped to promote the Norfolk four-course rotation. We must not forget that the period also saw the introduction of important new breeds of livestock through the researches of men like Robert Bakewell (1725–95), of Dishley Grange, who farmed the heavy clay lands of Leicestershire.³²

      When one reads the correspondence of the different

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