Man as Machine XI
by Tarquin O’Flaherty.
It wasn’t just Tull, not by a long shot. Charles ‘Turnip’ Townshend, (1674-1738) Viscount Townshend, Secretary of State to George the First, member of the Royal Society etc, spent a lot of his political life in the Low Countries. From there he took back to his Norfolk estates the turnip and the four crop rotation. Turnips feed sheep in the winter, and ‘rotation’ of crops from field to field, year after year cuts down substantially the possibility of disease build-up. This is the best possible way to both maintain the health of your soil and keep diseases at bay.
It rains a lot in Europe. Before enclosure, cattle could wander freely. Enclose these same animals and they very quickly turn wet ground into a swamp. The new system of farming solved this problem by keeping animals off the land in winter. To do this, farm ‘improvers’ created cowsheds and yards where animals were housed and hand fed through the worst and wettest part of the year. Straw bedding was provided and constantly replenished, until, by Springtime, the stacked up straw, enriched with urine and animal manure, was quietly steaming, breaking down into a rich compost, ready to be spread on the land. In Spring the animals were allowed back on the lush new grass.
‘Turnip’ Townshend was barely dead when Coke of Norfolk was born. Thomas William Coke, (1752-1842) First Earl of Leicester, was MP for Norfolk for 50 years. In his lifetime he, together with his contemporary, Robert Bakewell of Leicester (1725-1795) revolutionized the art of sheep and cattle breeding, increasing both the cut of wool and the meat per animal by astonishing amounts.
In the meantime the British Empire was at war with both America and Napoleon. This meant that the war machine needed wheat. Enclosure, which had been proceeding in fits and starts, now desperately needed to throw off the restrictions of the old feudal system, and get down to the serious business of ‘improved’ production. Wheat prices were soaring and ‘improving’ farmers were beginning to make huge profits. To cut a long story short, a succession of Enclosure Acts passed rapidly through Parliament which provided improvers with thousands of acres of new land. If the peasantry were to remain, the new Acts demanded of them that they drain and fence the land they occupied. Hardly a soul could afford to have this work done so they were either unceremoniously dispossessed or pitifully compensated. People like Arthur Young, who wrote and toiled endlessly on behalf of the agricultural labourer, demanded, unsuccessfully that every Enclosure Act contain a clause guaranteeing suitable compensation to those disadvantaged by it. Young’s demands were almost universally ignored. The price of wheat skyrocketed, wages doubled and vast fortunes were made. The value of improved farms went through the roof and people got rich.
In 1815 the Duke of Wellington (an Irishman, naturally) defeated Napoleon by a hairsbreadth. According to the Duke it was ‘…the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life…’
When peace was fully restored in 1815, (the American war had finished in 1812) though wages fell like a stone, prices did not follow. Jobs, already scarce, became scarcer. The people of the little towns and villages flocked to the factories, to Blake’s ‘…dark, satanic mills…’ to work for Wedgewood, or Abraham Darby, the shipyards, the mines, the linen or cotton factories, anywhere there was heat, backbreaking work and 16 hour days. There was so much competition for jobs, exploitation became an art form. Starvation wages were paid to children as young as eight and people worked themselves to death because they had little alternative.
And it wasn’t the aristocracy who were to blame, not this time; this time we were doing it to ourselves.