fashion was followed by doctors, lawyers, clergymen, soldiers, sailors, and merchants.  The American and French War of 1775-83 and the great conflict with France from 1793 to 1815 were, however, to divert many of the upper classes from agriculture, for they very properly thought their duty was then to fight for their country; so that we again have numerous complaints of agents and stewards managing estates who knew nothing whatever about their business.  It was not to be wondered at that all this activity brought about considerable progress.  ‘There have been,’ said Young about 1770, ’more experiments, more discoveries, and more general good sense displayed within these ten years than in a hundred preceding ones,’ a statement which perhaps did not attach sufficient importance to the work of Townshend and his contemporaries, and to the ‘new husbandry’ of Tull, which Young did not appreciate at its full 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]