The controversy of horses versus oxen for working purposes was still raging, and Young favoured the use of oxen; for the food of horses cost more, so did their harness and their shoeing, they are much more liable to disease, and oxen when done with could be sold for beef.  One stout lad, moreover, could attend to 8 or 10 oxen, for all he had to do was to put their fodder in the racks and clean the shed; no rubbing, no currying or dressing being necessary.  No beasts fattened better than oxen that had been worked.  A yoke of oxen would plough as much as a pair of horses and carry a deeper and truer furrow, while they were just as handy as horses in wagons, carts, rollers, &c.  William Marshall, the other great agricultural writer of the end of the eighteenth century, agreed with Young, yet in spite of all these advantages horses were continually supplanting oxen.

Among the improvements in agriculture was the introduction of broad-wheeled wagons; narrow-wheeled ones were usual, and these on the turnpikes were only allowed to be drawn by 4 horses so that the load was small, but broad-wheeled wagons might use 8 horses.  The cost of the latter was L50 against L25 for the former.[462]

Young’s opinion of the labouring man, like Tull’s, was not a high one.  ‘I never yet knew’, he says, ’one instance of any poor man’s working diligently while young and in health to escape coming to the parish when ill or old.’  This is doubtless too sweeping.  There must have been others like George Barwell, whom Marshall tells of in his Rural Economy of the Midlands, who had brought up a family of five or six sons and daughters on a wage of 5s. to 7s. a week, and after they were out in the world saved enough to support him in his old age.  The majority, however, long before the crushing times of the French War, seem to have been thoroughly demoralized by indiscriminate parish relief, and habitually looked to the parish to maintain them in sickness and old age.  Cullum[463] a few years later, remarks on the poor demanding assistance without the scruple and delicacy they used to have, and says ’the present age seems to aim at abolishing all subordination and dependence and reducing all ranks as near a level as possible.’!  Idleness, drunkenness, and what was then often looked on with disgust and contempt, excessive tea-drinking, were rife.  Tea then was very expensive, 8s. or 10s. a lb. being an ordinary price, so that the poor had to put up with a very much adulterated article, most pernicious to health.  The immoderate use of this was stated to have worse effects than the immoderate use of spirits.  The consumption of it was largely caused by the deficiency of the milk supply, owing to the decrease of small farms; the large farmers did not retail such small commodities as milk and butter, but sent them to the towns so that the poor often went without.[464]

In 1767 Young found wages differing according to the distance from London[465]:—­