As for his food, Eden tells us[372] that the diet of Bedford workhouse in 1730 was much better than that of the most industrious labourer in his own home, and this was the diet:  bread and cheese or broth for breakfast, boiled beef hot or cold, sometimes with suet pudding for dinner, and bread and cheese or broth for supper.  This must have been sufficiently monotonous, and we may be sure the labourer at home very seldom had boiled beef for dinner; but in the north he was much cleverer than his southern brother in cooking cereal foods such as oatmeal porridge, crowdie (also of oatmeal), frumenty or barley milk, barley broth, &c.[373]

The village of the first half of the eighteenth century contained a much better graded society than the village of to-day.  It had few gaps, so that there was a ladder from the lowest to the highest ranks, owing to the existence of many small holders of various degree, soon to be diminished by enclosure and consolidation.[374]

There was a great increase in the number of live stock owing to the spread, gradual though it was, of roots and clover, which increased the winter food; ‘of late years,’ it was said in 1739, ’there have been improvements made in the breed of sheep by changing of rams, and sowing of turnips, grass seeds, &c.’[375] Crops, too, were improving; and enclosed lands about 1726 were said to produce over 20 bushels of wheat to the acre.[376]

Though the number of Enclosure Acts at the beginning of the century was nothing like the number at the end, the process was steadily going on, often by non-parliamentary enclosure, and was approved by nearly every one.  Some, however, were opposed to it.  John Cowper, who wrote an essay on ‘Enclosing Commons’ in 1732, said, a common was often the chief support of forty or fifty poor families, and even though their rights were bought out they were under the necessity of leaving their old homes, for their occupation was gone; but he says nothing of the well-known increased demand for labour on the enclosed lands.  The force of his arguments may be gauged from his answer to Lawrence’s statement that enclosure is the greatest benefit to good husbandry, and a remedy for idleness.  On the contrary, says he, who among the country people live lazier lives than the grazier and the dairyman?  All the dairyman has to do is to call his cows together to be milked!

Worlidge in 1669 had lamented that turnips were so little grown by English farmers in the field, and that it was a plant ’usually nourished in gardens’,[377] and in a letter to Houghton in 1684, he is the first to mention the feeding of turnips to sheep.[378] However, in 1726 it was said that nothing of late years had turned to greater profit to the farmer, who now found it one of his chief treasures; and there were then three sorts:  the round which was most common, the yellow, and the long.[379] For winter use they were to be sown from the beginning of June to the middle of August, on fallow which had been brought