Hop growing in 1729, according to Richard Bradley, paid well; he says, ’ground never esteemed before worth a shilling an acre per annum, is rendered worth forty, fifty, or sometimes more pounds a year by planting hops judiciously.  An acre of hops shall bring to the owner clear profit about L30 yearly; but I have known hop grounds that have cleared above L50 yearly per acre.’  At this date 12,000 acres in England were planted with hops.

The great market for hops was Stourbridge Fair, once the greatest mart in England and still preserving much of its former importance:  ’there is scarce any price fixed for hops in England till they know how they sell in Stourbridge Fair.’[397] Thither they came from Chelmsford, Canterbury, Maidstone, and Farnham, where the bulk of the hops in England were then grown, though some were to be found at Wilton near Salisbury, in Herefordshire, and Worcestershire.  Round Canterbury Defoe says there were 6,000 acres of hops, all planted within living memory[398]; but the Maidstone district was called ’the mother of hop grounds’, and with the country round Feversham was famous for apples and cherries.

The finest wool still, it seems, came from near Leominster, where the sheep in Markham’s time were described as small-boned and black-faced, with a light fleece, and apparently they still had the same appearance at the beginning of the eighteenth century[399]; and large-boned sheep with coarser wool were to be found in the counties of Warwick, Leicester, Buckingham, Northampton, and Nottingham; in the north of England too were big-boned sheep with inferior wool, the largest with coarse wool being found in the marshes of Lincolnshire.

About this time wool had fallen much in price:  ‘Has nobody told you,’ writes a west country farmer to his absentee landlord in 1737, ’that wool has fallen to near half its price, and that we cannot find purchasers for a great part of it at any price whatsoever.  When most of our estates (farms) were taken wool was generally 7d., 8d., or more by the pound; the same is now 4d. and still falling.’[400] But the latter price was exceptionally low; Smith[401] gives the following average prices per tod of 28 lb.: 

1706 17s. 6d. 1717-8 23s. to 27s. 1737-42 11s. to 14s. 1743 20s. 1743-53 24s.

After 1753 it fell again, largely owing to the great plague among cattle, which brought about a ’prodigious increase of sheep’[402]; and about 1770 Young[403] favoured corn rather than wool, for there was always a market for the former, but the foreign demand for cloth was diminishing, especially in the case of France, besides prohibition of export kept down the price.[404] Yet although wool was being deserted for corn it had in Young’s time ’been so long supposed the staple and foundation of all our wealth, that it is somewhat dangerous to hazard an opinion not consonant to its encouragement’.