244 Agricultural Revolutions and Change
dampen the enthusiasm for livestock products, the prices for which held up. The
terms of trade between arable and pastoral products (wheat relative to butter, milk,
beef and mutton in Table 11.1) did not move against pastoral products by 1790
(except butter), nor by 1806 and 1812 (again except for butter). Scholars’ interpre-
tations of the price inflation of this, the French wars period, had been mixed until
Hueckel (1976) constructed a series of terms of trade indexes between arable and
pastoral products. These more or less confirm the surge of demand for pastoral
products that we also identify and to which we return below.
Transformations responding to domestic forces
Adjustments in the land use mix were not always in the gift of individuals in com-
munally shared resources such as encountered in open-field agriculture. Instead,
local courts of administration, the manor courts, circumscribed by ancient mano-
rial procedures, still operated in the 18th century. According to Tate such control
of the open fields and associated commons was never formally transferred from the
manor and its courts to other local courts, though an act of 1773 devolved powers
to manage the common fields to a three quarters majority in favour of the land-
owners. There are examples below which post-date 1773 and which suggest that
the ceding of power away from the manorial courts was not everywhere recognized
(Tate, 1969, pp258–267). Yet regardless of such niceties, it remained the case that
the community in some shape or form had to decide on changes it wished to
implement, and to accept the risks involved. If, for example, it agreed to abandon
all or part of the mixed farming of the common fields in favour of permanent
pasture, it had also to recognize the consequences on the ecological balance, the
economic rewards, and the equity of resource use.
Agricultural communities across the Midlands responded to the economic
considerations of the period post-1650 by a series of improvements. We are talking
here about constant annual management rather than revolutionary change –
changes that were ‘unambitious and quite small in scale’. These consisted of the
regulation of commons, partial enclosures, consolidation of scattered holdings,
intakes of waste, and conversion of old arable land to grass and the breaking-up
and improvement of ancient pastures (Mingay, 1984, p122).
The first adjustment within the open fields involved creating new grass or
preserving existing grass resources. In the demographic conditions before the third
quarter of the 18th century, with the economic or market attractiveness of pastoral
products relative to grain products, there was mounting pressure put on grazing
resources. This led to overgrazing of stock, which threatened to degrade the com-
munal resources, the commons and the cow pastures. In compensation, parcels of
land were laid down in temporary grass leys. Such convertible husbandry was
already well established by the 16th century and by the 17th century the division
of fields into arable and ley or grass-ground had become common (Beresford,
1949, p92; Hunt, 1957, p270; Hall, 1995, pp20–29, 157–164). It involved inter-
mixing grass leys with the cropped lands or strips in the open fields. On farms