262 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
regulate ‘the imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to
see them as they are’. Johnson toured Scotland with James Boswell in 1773, Wales
in 1774 and made many other short tours that covered most of England (Johnson,
1775; Boswell, 1785; Curley, 1976).
But, despite their attention to reporting, neither Johnson nor Boswell were
farmers. Farmers began to tour the country to observe and learn from other prac-
titioners, and to record the practices and experiments they found. The principal
objective of the rural investigation, as Arthur Young put it, was ‘to display to one
part of the kingdom the practice of the other ... and to draw forth ... spirited
examples of good husbandry from obscurity’ (Young, 1769).
The most renowned touring farmers were Young and William Cobbett. Young
toured first as an individual interested in the activities of other farmers, and later
as an official of the Board of Agriculture. Cobbett began his ‘Rural Rides’ the year
after Young died. Both established durable reputations on the basis of the knowl-
edge gathered on these tours. But they were not alone as touring farmers: the well
documented include Robert Bakewell who toured for 2–3 months every year
(Pawson, 1957); George Cully, who also often noted in his letters that his neigh-
bours were away on tour to observe agricultural practice (Culley, 1790; MacDon-
ald, 1977); Boys and Ellman, two Kentish farmers, who travelled 1100km in 27
days in eastern England observing livestock management and cropping practice
(Boys and Ellman, 1793); the de La Rochefoucauld brothers who made short tours
in Suffolk and Norfolk and longer ones in the Midlands and North (Scarfe, 1988),
and Richardson, Redhead and Laing who toured Scotland and western England
studying sheep (Richardson, 1793; Redhead and Laing, 1793).
As tours became more common attention turned to the approach used for
touring, so as to improve learning. Tourers were sensitive to local conditions and
the farmers themselves and cautious over claiming too much from their findings.
Though Young travelled some 9700km in his first three tours, his concern over
possible sampling biases made him cautious about the representativeness of his
findings (Young, 1768, 1769, 1771). One condition of reading his reports was
that the reader ‘pardon the incorrectness of hasty letters; written from inns, farm-
houses and cottages, with accuracy in nothing but the matter of my inquiries ...
You must not expect the authority of such a journey as mine to be equivalent to a
general and comprehensive view of the whole island’ (Young, 1769).
However, Young has been criticized for adopting conversational methods of
research (Kerridge, in Overton, 1984a) and relying on ‘mere opinion of the preju-
diced’ and the ‘bare assertions of guarded, or perchance designing men’ (Marshall,
1808, quoted in Allen and O’Grada, 1988). William Marshall asserted that the
tourer gained only a transient view of rural life, understanding ‘a few particulars of
practice that may happen to be going on at the time of his tour’ (his emphasis)
(Marshall, 1818). Tourers were ‘raw observers’ unless they had a depth of practical
knowledge of the area to be surveyed. He believed it was best to live with a well-
informed farmer for at least a year, so as to ‘minutely observe the living practice
which surrounds him [the farmer]’ (Marshall, 1818).