Publisher's Synopsis
This is the first major study of English agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to be based on the records of the farmer. Traditionally this was a period of 'agricultural revolution', but generations of historians have found it remarkably difficult to measure its salient characteristics. By bringing together a range of qualitative and quantitative data found in accounts, memoranda books, and diaries, Michael Turner, John Beckett, and Bethanie Afton are able to throw important new light on the way farmers worked, and to produce new estimates of the output of wheat, barley, and other arable crops, and of livestock. The evidence of the farmers' own records has enabled the authors to approach the agricultural history of the period in an entirely different light, and to show conclusively that the agricultural revolution can be located in the first half of the nineteenth century as the English farmer successfully fed a growing, predominantly urban population.
