250 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
sustainable. The shift towards specialized and more productive and intensive agri-
culture was outside the scope of a system originally established and developed to
provide the needs of a largely self-sufficient community. It was not sustainable at
the higher levels of productivity that could be reached by farming in severalty. The
three principles in the sustainability model – ecology, economy and equity – some-
times pulled in opposing directions.
Farming in severalty facilitated changes of the sort that open-field agriculture
could only introduce slowly and in piecemeal fashion. It was as if the remedies we
have discussed above were remedial – meeting crises as and when – rather than inclu-
sive of the changes in population and demand that required more decisive action.
That decisive action became enclosure. The open fields were abandoned, not all at a
rush, but over a long period, with definable peaks of activity. Our earlier discussion
of the study area of contiguous counties indicates both the location and the intensity
of enclosure, but it hides the fact that this enclosure took place in two waves of activ-
ity. There was a first intensive enclosure in the third quarter of the 18th century in
which the trends towards more pastoral activity detectable for 100 years or so was
intensified. There was then a lull in activity in the 1780s before a resurgence of enclo-
sure in the 1790s and on to 1815 and a slowdown thereafter. Thus the dismantling
of the open fields had been in full flow up to the 1780s and how long the system
would have taken to disappear entirely we shall never know, because the whole proc-
ess took a new turn in 1793 when Britain entered into what turned out to be more
than 20 years of (almost) uninterrupted conflict with France.
Inevitably, for an island state, the first and most pressing question to arise con-
cerned the security and adequacy of food supplies. This quest tended to compro-
mise environmental stewardship and equitable access to resources. In the 1790s a
conjunction of circumstances including bad harvests and the impact of the war
produced an inflation of prices (Table 11.1) and this exposed the vulnerability of
the national economy. In the years 1771–1793 inclusive, the price of wheat rose
above 50 shillings per quarter in only 7 years, and at its worst reached 54.75 shil-
lings in 1790. (There were eight bushels in a quarter, and a bushel weighs some
25kg.) In four other years it was at or below 40 shillings per quarter. It averaged
46.6 shillings per quarter from 1771 to 1789. But from 1794 to 1821 it was always
above 50 shillings. In the 1790s it was 57.6 shillings, but for the whole duration of
the war it averaged 80.6 shillings per quarter. At its wartime peak the price of
wheat stood at 126.5 shillings per quarter in 1812, falling to 65 shillings in 1815
and 44 shillings in 1822. It was not until 1835 that the price of wheat reduced to
a level (at 39 shillings per quarter) comparable to the level of the distant generation
of the early 1760s (Mitchell and Deane, 1962, pp487–488; Clark, 2004). But this
was not just an inflation of grain prices, because as Table 11.1 indicates the infla-
tion was just as strong for animal-derived products. The conjunction of war and
demography was very potent on price trends but the enclosures and agricultural
improvements that ensued were complicated.
In these circumstances the long-term movement we have described towards
converting arable land to grassland at first sight seems to fall foul of the new