CHAPTER 10

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY

ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL

CHANGE

I he great English landowners did as they pleased in the eigh­
teenth century. More than one gentleman had an entire village demolished
or flooded because it stood in the way of his landscaping plans. Another
wrote, “It is a melancholy thing to stand alone in one’s own country. I look
around, not a single house to be seen but for my own. I am Giant, of Giant’s
Castle, and have ate up all my neighbors.’’ Fences and servants kept ven­
turesome interlopers far away. Some men of great means gambled fantastic
sums on horse races. Sir Robert Walpole’s estate guests drank up £1,500 of
wine a year, the combined annual wages of more than 100 laborers. En­
glish nobles seemed particularly vulnerable to overeating. A certain Parson
Woodforde carefully entered in his diary the day of his death, “Very weak
this morning, scarce able to put on my clothes and with great difficulty get
downstairs with help. Dinner today, roast beef, etc.’’
At about the same time, in Switzerland, a peasant lived a very different and
arguably more productive life. Jakob Gujer, who was called Kleinjogg (Little
Jake) by his friends, inherited an indebted small farm and transformed it into
something of a model enterprise, where he grew vegetables and new crops
and raised cattle. It is said that when the duke of Wurttemberg came to see
the famous peasant, Kleinjogg told him how flattered he was that a prince
should pay a visit to a humble peasant. The prince, teary eyed, replied, “I do
not come down to you, I rise up to you, for you are better than I.’’ To which
Kleinjogg is alleged to have answered with tactful deference, “We are both
good if each of us does what he should. You lords and princes must order us
peasants what to do, for you have the time to decide what is best for the state,
and it is for we peasants to obey you and work with diligence and loyalty.” But
there were few peasants with the means and initiative of Kleinjogg on the
continent. In England, there were relatively few peasants left at all.

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