ll value.[443]

The place subsequently taken by the Board of Agriculture, and in our
time by the Royal Agricultural Society, was then occupied by the
Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce,
which offered premiums for such objects as the cultivation of carrots
in the field for stock, then little practised; for gathering the
different sorts of grass seeds and keeping them clean and free from
all mixture with other grasses, a very rare thing at that time; for
experiments in the comparative merits of the old and new husbandry;
for the growth of madder; L20 for a turnip-slicing machine, then
apparently unknown, and for experiments whether rolling or harrowing
grass land was better, 'at present one of the most disputed points of
husbandry.'

In spite of this progress, many crops introduced years before were
unknown to many farmers. Sainfoin, cabbages, potatoes, carrots, were
not common crops in every part of England, though every one of them
was well known in some part or other; not more than half, or at most
two-thirds, of the nation cultivated clover. Many, however, of the
nobility and gentry in the north had grown cabbages with amazing
success, lately, 30 guineas an acre being sometimes the value of the
crop.

Half the cultivated lands, in spite of the progress of enclosure for
centuries, were still farmed on the old common-field system. When
anything out of the common was to be done on common farms, all common
work came to a standstill. 'To carry out corn stops the ploughs,
perhaps at a critical season; the fallows are frequently seen overrun
with weeds because it is seed time; in a word, some business is ever
neglected.'[444] As for the outcry against enclosing commons and
wastes, people forgot that the farmers as well as the poor had a right
of common and took special care by their large number of stock to
starve every animal the poor put on the common.[445]

About the same time that Young wrote these words there appeared a
pamphlet written by 'A Country Gentleman' on the advantages and
disadvantages of enclosing waste lands and common fields, which puts
the arguments against enclosure very forcibly.[446] The writer's
opinion was that it was clearly to the landowner's gain to promote
enclosures, but that the impropriator of tithes reaped most benefit
and the small freeholder least, because his expenses increased
inversely to the smallness of his allotment. As to diminution of
employment,