Industrial Revolution 2

1. Agriculture throughout Europe during the 1700s was very methodical. Men and women plowed the field, sowed seed, reaped harvest, and stored grain. The land usually paid off farming equipment. Farmer was rich in the Po Valley in northern Italy, with France a little less rich. Well-watered areas were also good, as in the land formerly in ancient Greece. Throughout Europe in the 1500s and 1600s, harvests were poor, or even failed, every eight or nine years. Most of the population could survive the bad harvest by eating less and their reserves. When coupled with bad weather, grain prices soared and people were forced to eat famine foods like chestnuts, stripped bark, dandelions, and grass. Sometimes cannibalism occurred. Often times, kings were not generous but cruel, and would not give food out to their starving people. The absence of crop rotation and over farming could have led to the bad harvests every eight or nine years.

2. In the open-field system, land is divided to be cultivated by the peasants of a village into large fields, where it was then cut up into long, narrow strips. The fields were open, and the strips were not en-closed. An individual peasant family, the nobility, clergy, and wealthy townspeople held a number of strips that were scattered throughout the fields. Peasants farmed each field as a community, each family following the same pattern of plowing, sowing, and harvesting under tradition and the village leaders. However, the soil became exhausted with the nitrogen in the soil becoming depleted. The solution was to leave land idle for the next year or, with the advent of three-year rotations, once every three years. There were also open meadows for hay and natural pasture that were common lands. Draft horses and oxen, as well as cows and pigs, lived there. Men and women would pasture their animals on the wheat or rye stubble. In some areas, poor women gleaned through the fields looking for few single grains that had fallen to the ground during the harvest.

3. Most of the time, peasants of eastern Europe were worst off politically, as they were serfs bound to their lords hereditarily and harshly and oppressively. There were few limitations on the amount of forced labor the lord could require, and peasants often went unpaid for five or six days. Individual serfs and families were regularly sold. Peasants in western Europe were generally free from serfdom. In France, western Germany, and the Low Countries, they owned land and could pass it on to their children. Village life was hard, and poverty existed for many people. In the Beauvais region of France in the early 1700s, only 10% of the peasants were safe from poverty. Peasants in the west had to pay heavy royal taxes, the church’s tithe, and dues to the lords, with the money needed to seed for the next season. Peasants had to work for others and seek work for wages. A possible way for European peasants to improve their position was to take land from those who owned but did not labor. Only with the French Revolution were peasants, mostly in France, able to improve their position by means of radical mass action. The great technological need was for new farming methods that would enable Europeans to produce and eat more, mostly associated with eliminating the idle fallow fields. This gradual elimination became associated with an agricultural revolution. The key to this was crop rotation.

4. Grain crops exhaust the soil, requiring fallowing to rejuvenate them. This could be eliminated by al-ternating grain with certain nitrogen-storing crops such as peas, beans, turnips, potatoes, clovers, and grasses. As the 1700s progressed, the number of crops rotated grew to include new patterns of organization. The new crops made ideal feed for animals. With more fodder, there could be more animals. The animals’ waste was used as manure, which improved the land, creative a positive feed-back loop. Experimental scientists, some government officials, and a few big landowners advocated the new rotations but believed that it was not very practical because someone who wanted to expe-riment with new methods would have to get all the landholders in a village to agree. This would be difficult if not impossible, due to peasant caution and tradition. The advocates believed that these agriculturists needed to enclose and consolidate their scattered holdings into compact, fenced-in fields and their pastures to farm more effectively. Scientists wanted better food-growing techniques, government officials wanted to break up peasants’ unity, and big landowners wanted to get a higher profit. This new kind of farming had strong disapproval among small landholders, the village poor, and noble landowners, with only powerful social and political pressures able to overcome this oppo-sition.

5. The Low Countries had enclosed fields, continuous rotation, heavy manuring, and a wide variety of crops by the mid-1700s. Agriculture was specialized and commercialized. Cattle produced excellent milk and cheeses. This was caused by two human-induced reasons. First, the Low Countries had been by the end of the Middle Ages one of the most densely populated areas. The high number of people to feed and employ forced the Dutch to seek maximum yields from their land and to increase the cultivated area through the draining of marshes and swamps. Second, with the growth of the urban population, Dutch peasants had good markets for all they could produce and allowed each region to specialize in what it did best. The English learned about drainage and water control, and were able to drain their fens. Viscount Charles Townsend used his knowledge of turnips and clover to plant these crops of his large estates in Norfolk in eastern England. With extensive draining, heavy manuring, and utilizing crop rotation, the farmers who leased Townsend’s lands produced larger crops and thus earned themselves and Townsend higher incomes. Jethro Tull advocating horses, rather than the slow oxen, for plowing as well as sowing seed with drilling equipment rather than by scattering it by hand. This distributed seed in an even manner and at the proper depth. He also called for selective breeding.

6. Most historians praise the initiative and enterprise of the big English landowners at the expense of the conservatism of continental landowners. They also claim that the open fields were enclosed fair-ly, with all landowners receiving their far share after the strips had been surveyed and consolidated. Other historians question the fairness. They believe that since the large landowners controlled Par-liament, they forced the enclosures. Since enclosures were heavy in legal and surveying costs, pea-sants who had small holdings had to sell out to pay their share of the expenses. Landless cottagers also lost their traditional access to the common pasture without any compensation. The women of landless families could no longer raise animals for the market and earn an income. By 1700, there was a distinctive pattern of landownership and production in England. There were few large lan-downers, a large mass of landless cottagers who could only afford a pig or cow on the village com-mon, the group of small, independent peasant farmers who owned their own land, and the strong, prosperous tenant farmers who rented land from the big landowners, hired wage laborers, and sold their output on a cash market. I believe that forcing enclosures was a bad thing to do since it put the economic power into those wealthy enough to enclose their fields (which was only the richest of landowner) and forced those not wealthy enough to become landless. Due to the voting rights at that time, England became a plutocracy where only the wealthy landowners had power.