234 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
Nevertheless, the late 20th-century agricultural revolution in industrialized
countries suggests a quantum leap in modern agricultural change. Thus Wes Jackson
(1980, pp2–3) pointed to the enormity of the process of post-1945 change: ‘So
destructive has the agricultural revolution been that, geologically speaking, it surely
stands as the most significant and explosive event to appear on the face of the
earth...’ Yet there is no doubt that in the past there was real ecological stress caused
by farming practised in particular contexts. All societies have had to adapt to forces
over which they have had little or no control (Mannion, 1995, pp83–84; Evans,
1998, pp57–61). By looking at some specific historical features in the context of
the modern debate over sustainability, we may be able to offer some new perspec-
tives on agriculture. The purpose of this paper is to examine the issue of agricul-
tural sustainability specifically in the historical context of open-field farming in the
English midland counties. While there is a tradition in agrarian history to address
some of the issues that we raise in the paper, we do not think that a concerted
attempt has been made to place agricultural or indeed rural history into the holis-
tic framework that we explore here. Standard historical assessments of the past did
not have the benefits of modern thinking on sustainability, yet all of them contain
elements that might be reconfigured in its language (Tawney, 1912; Hoskins,
1949b; Broad, 1980; Butlin, 1982; Havinden, 1961).
But we believe that this could be a two-way street. While our fellow historians
might benefit from the language of the present we wonder whether present envir-
onmental concerns about soil, and more widely, resource degradation, and the
solutions offered, might reflect that these concerns had been confronted in the past
in England. Many local solutions were found by trial and error in the English open
fields that in modern parlance (see Wendell Berry’s Foreword in Jackson, 1996)
might be termed resource management schemes.
The Geographical and Chronological Context
Our focus of attention in this paper is specific. We concentrate on the open-field
farming system that prevailed over much of England until its final dissolution in
the 80 or so years after 1750. This was a system that was based on communally
administered agricultural organization and production, and it persisted, sometimes
without any major adjustments, for several centuries. It was part of the northern
European system of communal agriculture, though most historians would recog-
nize significant regional variations even within the confines of the British Isles
(Baker and Butlin, 1973). The study of the system has relatively recently under-
gone renewed attention under the gaze of New Institutional Economics. This
relates to collective action and land rights, by which route it has modern applica-
tions in quite diverse societies and contexts (see for example Hardin, 1968; Ostrom,
1990; Baland and Platteau, 1998). While open-field farming in communally
organized ways prevailed to a greater or lesser degree over nearly all of England, it
was most prevalent and survived longest in a narrower geographical region. This