The revoluTion in agriCulTure^95were developments in farming infrastructure, with new forms of building;
significant levels of mechanization, including the use of steam engines for
threshing and, to a more limited extent, ploughing; and new systems of
field drainage using earthenware pipes rather than trenches filled with
stones or organic materials. Ceramic land drains had been sporadically
used in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, either in the form
of semi-circular tiles laid on flat ‘soles’, or as hand-made pipes, but pipe
drainage was given a major boost by the development of a machine –
patented by one Thomas Scraggs in 1842 – which could produce cylindrical
clay pipes.^16 Fiscal changes in 1826 exempted drainage pipes from a
tax levied on tiles and bricks, and a government loan scheme, allowing
estates to borrow substantial sums for drainage and other improvements,
were further encouragements.^17 Between 1847 and 1899, just under £5.5
million was advanced by the Land Improvement Companies responsible
for administering the loans, but many large estates simply funded drainage
programmes and other improvements from their own capital.^18 The
practice of agriculture was thus revolutionized in two, overlapping but
arguably distinct, phases. Both, not surprisingly, had major impacts on the
environment.
reclaiming the ‘wastes’: downs,
moors and heaths
The most important environmental effect of the agricultural revolution
was unquestionably the enclosure, and the destruction or modification, of
most of the great areas of common ‘waste’ that had previously existed in
England. This process was already under way in the middle decades of the
eighteenth century, with the ploughing up of many areas of grass heath and
chalk downland in the south and east of England. As agricultural prices
rose towards the end of the century, and reached dizzying heights during the
French Wars, the assault intensified, but at the same time attention turned
to the more challenging areas of ‘waste’, the high moors and the poorer,
more acid heaths: a development fuelled as much, perhaps, by fashionable
interest in ‘improvement’ on the part of landowners as by a careful attention
to profit and loss.^19 A reduction in the number of small farms in England as
agriculture became more commercialized made enclosure easier, for it reduced
the number of people who had to agree to the change. The development of
enclosure by parliamentary act further facilitated the removal of commons
and open fields. The two-third majority required for an enclosure under this
system was assessed, not on the basis of individual owners, but on the value
of the acres they owned (Figure 19).
The declining importance of commons as a fuel source made them ripe
for enclosure, while in many arable areas, as I have noted, the new rotations