indsor market, and in 1800 reached 127s. Wages rose with the
expansion of manufactures, but not in anything like proportion to the
rise in prices.

[Sidenote: _THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION._]

Meanwhile efforts were made to meet the increased demand for food by
improved agriculture. In 1760 about half the parishes in England were
still in open fields; and the primitive two-field and three-field
systems by which land was refreshed by lying fallow were, with some
modifications, still in vogue. A new husbandry, however, had begun, and
soon made rapid progress; it was promoted by many large landowners, such
as Lord Townshend, the Dukes of Bedford and Grafton, and Lord
Rockingham, and the king took a lively and practical interest in the
movement. Its advantages were urged by Arthur Young, who did most
valuable work as its apostle. Its leading feature was the introduction
of a scientific rotation of crops founded on the use of clover and
rye-grass and the more careful cultivation of turnips, which kept the
land at once employed and in good heart, and afforded a supply of
excellent fodder. Farmers, too, began to learn the profit to be derived
from marling, manuring, and subsoil drainage, and to use better
implements which did their work more thoroughly and with less labour of
man and beast. The increased demand for meat caused sheep no longer to
be valued chiefly for their wool, or oxen as beasts of draught.
Improvements in the breeding and rearing of sheep and cattle were
introduced by Bakewell, a Lincolnshire grazier, and carried on by
others. The scraggy animals of earlier days disappeared; the average
weight of beeves sold at Smithfield in 1710 was 370 lbs., in 1795 it was
800 lbs., and that of sheep had risen from 28 lbs. to 80 lbs. Capital
was freely invested in land; open fields were increasingly enclosed, and
commons and wastes along with them, and land until then beyond the
margin of cultivation was taken in and ploughed. From 1760 to 1797 as
many as 1,539 private enclosure acts were passed, and a general act was
passed in 1801.

The new agriculture vastly increased the produce of the land. During the
first half of our period rents were low, and the farmers who carried out
the new system as a rule made enormous profits. Arthur Young tells us of
one Norfolk farmer who, on a farm of 1,500 acres, made enough in thirty
years to buy an estate of L1,700 a year. The improved agriculture,
however, could not be carried out w