The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (27 page)

Even in normal times, bacillary dysentery, easily spread by dirty fingers, poor water, or infected food, was endemic throughout eighteenthcentury Europe. Hunger merely accentuated already high mortality rates
among the poor. During food dearths, when standards of personal hygiene deteriorated even further as people deserted their homes, the number of cases exploded. During the long summer droughts of 1740-41,
dust carried dysentery bacteria everywhere.

Thomas Burtt, an English gentleman traveling in Scotland in 1741,
commented on the poor state of young children, "miserable objects indeed and are mostly overrun with that distemper [diarrhea] which some
of the old men are hardly ever freed of from their infancy. I have seen
them come out of their huts early in a cold morning, stark naked, and
squat themselves down (if I might decently use the comparison) like dogs
on a dunghill."25 It did not help that contaminated house middens, sited
close to dwellings, leaked bacteria back into the earth and contaminated
the soil. The middens were a valuable source of field manure.

Under subsistence conditions, tens of thousands would have died from
a general famine in 1740-41, as they did in 1315. This time the killers
were cold, the social conditions of the day, and cold- and hunger-related
diseases. The suffering was mitigated to some degree by a sharp break
from the tyranny of subsistence agriculture.

Every time I visit the National Gallery in London, I pause for a moment
in front of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews, a 1751 portrait by Thomas
Gainsborough. The young squire in a jaunty tricorn hat leans against a
garden bench, flintlock musket in hand, dog at his heels. His wife sits
placidly beside him, her light summer dress flaring over the seat. But my
eyes are always drawn to the ordered countryside in the background:
rolling Suffolk hills, neatly stacked corn stooks in a field that has been carefully planted in neat rows, a wooden gate leading to a green meadow
where fat sheep graze, cattle chewing the cud beside newly constructed
barns. One gazes over an agricultural utopia oddly devoid of the harvesters, shepherds, carters, and dozens of other farm workers who created
this fertile landscape. The Andrews portrait epitomizes the profound
changes in English agriculture during the eighteenth century.26

The Andrewses were comfortable landed gentry, one of the 20,000 or
so families who owned about three-quarters of England's agricultural
land. There were still many smaller farms of less than 40 hectares, but
their numbers dwindled throughout the eighteenth century. The logic of
enclosure, of larger farms and fields, was too strong to be resisted. More
and more open-field landscapes vanished as the English countryside began to assume something of its modern appearance. The medieval farmer
had usually cultivated grain alone, leaving animal husbandry to communities living on natural pasture land. Enclosed farms in the hands of enlightened owners and, increasingly, landlords combined cereals and stockraising and used fodder crops such as clover to keep their beasts fat during
the winter. Books and newsletters like John Houghton's Collection ofLetters for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade, which appeared between
1691 and 1702, helped overcome old prejudices and spread new ideas.
Powerful interests, including the scientific elite of London's Royal Society,
backed efforts to increase food production and large-scale commercial
agriculture.

Commercial farming first took hold in lighter soiled areas like East Anglia and parts of the west, where the open-field system had never flourished and farms were relatively close to urban centers like Bristol, London,
or Norwich. Much of the impetus for change came from the demands of
city markets and from a growing export trade across the North Sea. Corn
and malting barley for brewers flowed to Holland from East Anglian
ports, with clover and turnip seed traveling back in the same ships.

A nucleus of improving landlords spearheaded the revolution. Their
experiments and extensive demonstrations, built on earlier advances, attracted widespread attention. Landowner Jethro Tull earned such a reputation for innovation that he was named "the greatest individual improver." Tull farmed at Howbery near Crowmarsh in Oxfordshire, and
later at Prosperous Farm, by Shalbourne in Berkshire. Defying both his laborers and conservative neighbors, he worked hard to improve his soil,
especially after a visit to observe the methods used by wine growers in
southern France. "The more the iron is given to the roots, the better for
the crops," he wrote in The New Horse Hoeing Husbandry, published in
1731.27 Tull advocated deep plowing, the better to turn and clean the
soil, careful spacing of the seed in laid out rows, and the use of a horsedrawn hoe to weed between the rows of growing crops.

Viscount "Turnip" Townshend was a contemporary of Tull and a
landowner at Raynham in Norfolk. Townshend first became a politician,
found himself in violent disagreement with his brother-in-law, the powerful minister Sir Robert Walpole, and soon left politics for agriculture. He
embraced the ancient Norfolk practice of marling, treating the soil with a
mixture of clay and carbonate of lime. Townshend had a passion for
turnips, which he grew in large fields, rotating them with wheat, barley,
and clover in the famous Norfolk four-course rotation. He sold his wheat
and barley for bread or brewing and fed turnips and clover hay to his animals. His methods made eminent good sense to his neighbors and were
soon copied, especially because they provided ample winter feed for cattle,
thereby eliminating the need to slaughter most of one's stock in the fall.

Many landowners, while of course ignorant of genetics, tried to improve their cattle and sheep breeds, using the hard-won experience of earlier generations. Robert Bakewell of Dishley Grange, Lincolnshire, was
one such experimenter, but one with a taste for self-promotion, who kept
careful records of the genealogies of his beasts and selected individual
breeding animals with the characteristics he wanted to preserve. He bred
sheep with thick fleeces, strong cart horses from Dutch stock, and longhorned cattle that produced excellent beef but little milk. Many farmers
visited his herds and copied his methods.

For all the interest in innovation, change came slowly, especially in areas where the soils were heavier. Capital to pay the weighty expenses of
enclosure was short, farmers were conservative people, and even large estates were isolated from nearby markets. Nor could methods used successfully in one place necessarily be copied even a few kilometers away,
where soil conditions were different. Nevertheless, the new methods
gradually spread, thanks in large part to Arthur Young, one of the greatest
English farming writers of the day.28 Not a farmer himself, Young trav eled widely and recorded his observations in a series of much-consulted
books. While the French nobility had little concern with their landholdings except as a source of revenue, many of their British equivalents had a
profound interest in farming. Young aimed his books at these gentlemen,
arguing that additional food supplies required land enclosure to ensure
the productive use of currently unused woodland, heath, and hill country
as well as open fields and commons. He harshly criticized small farmers
for their conservatism and ignorance, and for their neglect of land that
could yield ample profits. Self-sufficient rural communities with their
"lazy, thieving sort of people"-that is, subsistence farmers-were irrelevant in the new agricultural economy.

Inevitably, many small farmers were swallowed up in accelerating enclosure, this time not by mutual agreement but by private Acts of Parliament submitted by large landowners who had acquired the agreement of
at least some of those living on the hectares to be enclosed.29 Between
1700 and 1760, 137,000 hectares were enclosed by parliamentary action,
most of it after 1730, with even more being enclosed later in the century.
The commons, unenclosed and unimproved pastureland, shrank rapidly
in the face of a world where the feudal lord of the manor had long vanished and landowners and tenant farmers hired laborers to work their
land. By the time enclosure was restrained by legislation in 1865, only
about 4 percent of Britain's land was in common ownership.

The social cost of enclosure was enormous. The commons had once
supported tens of thousands of rural poor in small villages, where they
kept swine and cattle, "starved, tod-bellied runts neither fit for the dairy
nor the yoke."30 Arthur Young quoted an example from Blofield, Norfolk, where 30 families of squatters maintained 23 cows, 18 horses, and
sundry other animals on 16 hectares of a 280-hectare commons. Now
that the commons had vanished, such people were forced to choose between living in extreme poverty in their home villages or migrating to the
cities in search of manufacturing work. Thousands of descendants of subsistence farmers merely exchanged one form of precarious existence for
another at the hands of wage-paying landlords and tenant farmers. Many
landowners favored a high rate of unemployment because it ensured low
agricultural wages. The rural poor became almost a separate form of human being: "the lower orders." When proposals came forward to allocate at least minimal land to agricultural laborers, the idea was considered too
generous to the poor. In many parts of Britain, farm laborers' wages were
at or below starvation level, even when wages in kind and free housing
were factored in, and when other members of the household worked at
crafts or gathered firewood for money. Few landlords took steps to replace
their tenants' unhealthy hovels, which were devoid "of every improvement for economizing labour, food, and manure."31

By 1780, in Britain, unlike Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, or postrevolutionary France, few agricultural workers owned any land. Ninety percent
of it was farmed by tenants, the main employers of casual labor. Farm laborers lived in extraordinary squalor. The journalist and reformer
William Cobbett wrote in his Rural Rides (1830): "I never saw human
wretchedness equal to this; no, not even among the free negroes of America."32 The living standard of the average English farm laborer in 1800
was worse than that of many modern-day Third World subsistence farmers. Filthy, clad in rags, barely surviving on a diet of bread, cheese, and
water, the rural worker of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain was
a far cry from the attractive, apple-cheeked villager so beloved of artists
and greeting card companies. Writes Robert Trow-Smith: "What laughter
and neatness and health there was in the countryside at this time were a
triumph of suffering mankind over its circumstances." 33 Employment
was at best seasonal, at planting and harvest time, and even that was
much reduced with the development of the threshing machine.

By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain was no longer a rigidly hierarchical society with rights based on birth, but one where property ownership was all important. Society was more fluid, with intermarriage between landed gentry and urban money commonplace and upward
mobility unremarkable. Landowners ceased to be a closed caste. This
contrasted sharply with France, where a noble who engaged in commercial enterprises could lose aristocratic privileges, except when the activity
was deemed in the national interest. In Britain, legal definitions of rank
below the peerage were vanishing fast, and divisions between country and
town becoming blurred. Still over half the population consisted of "the
poor"-small shopkeepers, artisans, mechanics, laborers, soldiers and seamen, vagrants and beggars-who had inadequate cushions against the
ravages of poor harvests or old age. They had to rely on charity or theft to stay alive and represented the most serious threat to law and order government faced.34

Intricate and still little understood feedback loops connected the diverse strands of the new agricultural economy, the deteriorating climate
of the height of the Little Ice Age, and the economic and social conditions that preadapted Britain for the Industrial Revolution. Some connections are obvious, but there were also more subtle consequences. Back
in 1664, a Somerset clergyman named Richard Eburne had advocated
mass emigration of 16,000 people a year to the colonies as a solution to
the growing number of surplus poor. A century later, Britain's population
was far larger, land hunger was widespread and unemployment a growing
problem. Increasing numbers of artisans and farm workers chose emigration as a way to a new life, a trickle that became a flood in the nineteenth
century as the steamship and railroad provided mass transportation for
the first time. Tens of thousands of farm workers emigrated to North
America, to Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand during the nineteenth century, where hard work and land for the taking would make
them farmers in their own right. The massive land clearance that resulted
had a significant effect on the carbon dioxide levels of the atmosphere
and was a major factor in the global warming that began in the late-nineteenth century.