Thinking About the Land 3 i: The Farmer as a New Role in the 18th-Century

Farming goes back millennia, right? At least to the ‘agricultural revolution?’

Well, only if we use the word ‘farming’ loosely as we often do today to mean cultivating the land to grow food crops.

If we use farmers in its original sense–someone who rents land to farm for profit–then farmers and farming did not appear until the middle of the eighteenth century. They were one sign of the transformation of agriculture to the modern, commercial enterprise familiar today.

Although I don’t want to obsess about the meaning of words such as farming and farmer, the original eighteenth-century meaning is important to understand if we want to understand why twentieth century British farmers were so unmoved by the early organic movement.

So in this post I talk about the economics of this new way of producing food and other agricultural products. Then I will turn to the practice and to the culture of farmers, and finally back to the organic movement.

[As an aside, it’s only because English usage became so widespread that we anachronistically talk about the individuals who cultivated in the land between the Tigris and the Euphrates the “first farmers” or read about the difference between “farming and foraging.”

It’s also why I wince when someone who grows vegetables on one or two acres is referred to a “a farmer.”]

What is a farmer?

The word ‘farmer’ does not appear in the English language until the mid-seventeenth-century. In the mid-15c., farm appears as “to rent (land),” from Anglo-French fermer, from ferme “a rent, lease” (see farm (n.)). Then in 1719 there’s the first recorded use of farm as an agricultural operation. The original sense is retained in to farm out. Associated words such as farming meaning cultivating land, farmhouse as the dwelling of the farmer, farmhand as hired farm labor, also date to the 17^th to 18^th century. 

It reflects the fact that from the mid seventeenth century on, British land was cultivated by large tenant farmers who rented land from the aristocracy and farmed it for profit.

To put some flesh on this bare bones statement, take the example of my family. They farmed in Wiltshire, one of the larger southern counties of England. The story I heard growing up began in the early twentieth century when my paternal grandfather, James, had a tenancy in the Wylye (pronounced Wiley) Valley on the estate of the Earl of Pembroke. I suspect it goes back much further.

James was one of perhaps thirty tenants on the estate which, although much reduced from its largest extent, still sprawled over thousands of acres of down land land interspersed by the five rivers that converged on the small market town of Salisbury.

Shortly after World War I, James had amassed enough money to retire to a substantial house in Salisbury. It was not a success. He found town life boring.

So when his brother Bert left the tenancy of the 1000-acre down land farm on the opposite side of the Wylye, James took it over. He appears to survived the Depression well. He employed thirty farm workers. He and his wife Helen, the daughter of the village baker, had two daughters and three sons. All, like other farmers’ children, were sent to private schools and my father went on to Cambridge. The oldest daughter married a man in the colonial service, not a popular choice because a farmer would have been preferred. The second married a farmer, my grandfather (I think) helping them rent a farm in the Avon Valley.

With three sons still to set up, in World War II my grandfather bought a run down 260-acre farm in the next valley, the Nadder Valley. It took until 1949 to get occupancy. He installed my father as farmer, put his youngest son in charge of the dairy, while the middle son stayed on in the Wylye Valley.  As time went on, the three brothers became partners in the farm enterprise.

This story was, I think, fairly typical of farmers in the better lands of England and Scotland from the mid 18th century to the mid twentieth century when I left for the United States and when Britain came under the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union.

The economics of farming (1760-1973)

The aristocracy, the Crown, the Church of England, and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges owned about 90% of the land in England until the end of the nineteenth century, as I mentioned in my last post. In spite of periodic government efforts to change this over the past hundred years, these groups still own a very large proportion.

The aristocracy and gentry lived (as they still largely do) off the rents paid by tenants who did the farming. When the classical economists talked about rents, this was the primary sense of rent. 

Farming was and is a low margin, risky business. Many economists put the yields on investment at around 2%. This meant that to have a secure source of income the aristocracy had to have large estates.

In the eighteenth century, many of the aristocracy realized that the land could be made to yield more grain, more meat, more building materials, more fuel, and all the other products of land.

The former methods of cultivation had already supported them for centuries.

In the Middle Ages in Britain land had been cultivated communally by low ranking commoners ( churls) or peasants or some who had rights to small pieces of land (husbandmen).

Following the drop in population caused by the Black Death and changes in property law, cultivation was in the hands of commoners who controlled their own land (yeomen), perhaps as substantial an amount as 100 acres.

But with the prospect of regular rents and a pool of potential renters that we know very little about, the aristocracy began on a two-hundred year experiment in how to run commercial agriculture. This played out against a rising population, increasing urbanization, a shift in political power from large landlords/aristocracy to those who lived in cities, massive migration, and the opening up of vast areas of agricultural land in the Americas, Australasia, and greater Russia.

This occurred across Europe but I’ll to stick to Britain. Since the very definition of being a gentleman was not having to labor, the aristocrats and gentry had to have some one to run those estates for them. 

Thus large landlords hired a steward, agent or bailiff who took care of leasing out large tracts of land to tenants and collecting the rents from those tenants.

What counted as large varied with time, quality of land, type of crop, and so on but think 50 to 1000 acres.

The proportion of farm takings that farmers paid as rent also varied. In general, it seems to have been about 30%  a fixed sum renegotiated periodically.

The length of the lease also varied but could be as much as ten or twenty years. Tenants who paid the rent regularly and improved the land were valuable and landlords renewed their leases. Members of my family have farmed the same 1000 acres on the Pembroke estate for over a hundred years. As I was writing this post, I ran across an ad featuring another family we knew. “Farming has been in the Dufosee genes for five generations as tenants of the Longleat Estate.”

To attract tenants, landlords built substantial farm houses in the nineteenth century.  The front rooms were suitable for the gentry that many farmers aspired to be, the middle rooms were for the business, cheese making and kitchens for example, the back rooms housed younger workers upstairs and feed stores and stables for the horses for the family downstairs.

Landlords were also responsible for capital improvements on the farm. They erected substantial barns for threshing and storing grain, housing dairy cattle, as well as cottages for the senior farm workers.  They put in the expensive irrigation systems known as water meadows and underwrote drainage of wet areas.

To gain a tenancy, the tenant farmer had to provide the working capital. It was his responsibility to stock the farm with sheep, cattle and with the smaller yard animals. He provided the horses for power. He bought the ploughs and machinery and hand tools. He paid the farm workers who did the physical labor.

I have seen an estimate which I can’t lay my hands on right now that in the eighteenth century this working capital was about 1000 pounds sterling. At the time only 6% of families had above 100 pounds a year income. A family of artisans made about 40 a year, a middling family needed 100, while if you had over 500 a year you counted as rich. 

The tenant farmer was a manager. He planned the stocking and rotations and the daily work of the farm. He learned to keep a farm diary, to have ledgers for incoming and outgoing payments, and keep accounts.

As I’ll explain in my next post, British farming was a complex business, based on rotating pasture and plow land, on multiple year rotations when the land was under the plow, and on heavy used of fertilizers and on other techniques for maintaining and improving the soil. Thus it was very different from the common pattern in the United States where ranching or dairying are separate from row crops.

The ups and downs of farming

 Farming as a business enterprise went through ups and downs. Much depended on how important it was thought to be to national security. 

Grains, particularly wheat and barley the basis of the diet, were the lynchpins of British agriculture.

In the eighteenth and first part of the nineteenth century, the government, like governments across Europe, put heavy tariffs on imported grains, legislation known as the Corn (meaning grain, not maize) Laws.  This protected the interests of the aristocratic landlords and the farmers alke.

A minority of farmers were able to take advantage of the relatively high grain prices to buy their own land. In our area, the Strattons, for example, moved from a tenancy with the Marquess of Bath’s Longleat estate to their own land in the first half of the nineteenth century. They then managed to survive the ups and downs of the farming business and are still doing well.

In 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed to allow the import of foreign grain and relieve the suffering of the poor who struggled with the high price of food.

In response landowners and farmers intensified farming yet further to increase the supply of grain (a period known as High Farming). Until the mid 1870s, Britain remained more or less self sufficient in grain in spite of the growing population.

Then a series of factors—a world wide depression, railroads to get wheat in other parts of the world to ports for export, the low overhead on extensive farming in the white colonies (no landlords, little fertilization, inexpensive land, family labor), the low cost of peasant-grown grain in India for example, and British grain farming collapsed.

This was disastrous for landlords and farmers. Many farmers went out of business, many left for the white colonies.  Landlords had to reduce rents.

Britain was not alone. Most European grain farming could not compete with imported grain. Britain, though, was more committed to free trade and inexpensive bread for urban populations than, say, France and Germany. Germany and France quickly established tariffs on imported grain.

World War I made British farming profitable once again, only to be followed by the Depression, which hit farmers badly (though not I think as badly as in the United States).   

Like many farmers, Arthur Street who farmed next to my grandfather on the Pembroke Estate, looked around for alternative income. In 1932, he published a memoir, Farmer’s Glory. In it he compared his father’s management of thirty farm workers with his hard labor on a remote farm farm on the Canadian prairies where he had worked for several years after a row with his father over inheritance. It became a best seller and has frequently been re-issued.

Most, but not all, farmers recovered during World War II and did well in the years of fixed prices for grain that followed.

What the transition to farming entailed

Farming replaced a two-tier rural society (landlords and cultivators, whether churls, husbandmen or yeomen) with a three-tier one (landlords, tenants, and farm laborers). This is massively oversimple but will serve for now. In this post I’m not going to talk about the farm workers though sometime I’d like to do some more blogs about labor in farming. Not now though.

Because they could depend on rents, the aristocratic landlord class remained free to run the state, the church and the military, and hence the empire. I always remind myself when I see a historian using the phrase “an increasingly interventionist state” to describe nineteenth-century European governments that that interventionist state and the aristocratic landlord class were one and the same.

Not all aristocrats took on these duties, of course, many preferring the social round.

Because the capital requirements for intensive farming were split between landlords who provided the fixed capital and tenants who provided the working capital, risks may have been reduced and investment encouraged. It certainly led to friction. Tenants frequently challenged landlords to reimburse them for improvements they had made.

Because the agriculture was so capital-intensive, a whole cadre of specialists came into being alongside the farmer-manager. Architects who designed farm buildings. Surveyors for enclosures but also for water meadows, canals, railroad lines, and mines. Estate agents. Auctioneers. Farm equipment manufacturers. Accountants. Seedsmen. Breeders. Authors of how to books and journals on all aspects of farming. This was professional and industrial agriculture.

Because the landowners wanted their estates to look good (as well as to have good hunting, shooting and fishing), some of that investment went into beautification. Hedges and walls had to be nicely constructed and maintained. Buildings had to be kept up. Water keepers tended the rivers. Trees were replaced when they fell. Glossy, healthy stock were prized.

Because both landowners and tenants were in for the long haul, there was a strong and recognized incentive to improve the soil by all means possible. Neither beautification nor improvement always succeeded, of course, but they were values to be taken very seriously.

Because this was an expensive agriculture both in terms of capital invested and the layers of professionals and owners, it kept the price of food relatively high over long periods. At a time when population was soaring, this hurt both the rural and the urban poor in particular.

Because they had to pay their rent in cash, farmers were, from the start, businessmen. They might look for some reduction in rent in hard times, but they could not resort to subsistence as say many Americans did in the Depression. They either found a way to pay the rent or they were out. This meant not only was the farming for the market but it had to be intensive farming.

And that pressure for intensive commercial farming will be one of the reasons that farmers ignored the organic movement. That’s for later though. Next up in this series. What did the farming look like?

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Because the replacement of various kinds of subsistence farming by commercial farming is as important to economic and social history as the French and American Revolutions’ overthrow of monarchies is to political history, the literature on this period of British farming is enormous. What caused it? Was it or was it not a necessary precursor to what is generally called the Industrial Revolution? How did it relate to the growth of cities, to the origins of World War I? Is it a model for economic development elsewhere in the world? Here’s just a small sample that I have found helpful.

Robert C. Allen, Enclosure and the Yeoman. Oxford University Press, 1992. (The study that established the yeoman phase in British agriculture)

Avner Offer, The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation. Oxford University Press, 1989. (Wide ranging analysis of global divisions in agriculture).

Frank Trentman, Free Trade Nation: Commerce, Consumption and Civic Society in Modern Britain, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Richard W. Hoyle, The Farmer in England 1650-1980. Routledge, 2016. (One of the few works to look at farmers themselves).

Peter M. Jones, Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology, and Nature 1750-1840. Oxford University Press, 2016. (A welcome cross-European comparative study of agricultural innovation across the board).

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