[456] This large item is explained by the fact that a bailiff was employed to sell, and no bailiff could find customers ’without feeling the same drought as stage coachmen when they see a sign’.—­Young, Farmer’s Letters, p. 403.

[457] Rural Economy, p. 314.

[458] 1775, pp. x-xiii.

[459] Northern Tour, iv. 192-202.

[460] See Parliamentary Reports Commission (1881), xvi. 260.

[461] Dissertations on Rural Subjects, p. 278.

[462] Farmer’s Letters, p. 433.

[463] History of Hawsted, p. 169.

[464] Hasbach, op. cit. p. 127; Kent, Hints to Gentlemen, p. 152.

[465] Southern Tour, p. 324.  He says nothing of the manufacturing towns, which had not yet began to influence the wages of farm labourers near them as they soon afterwards did.

[466] Some prices at this time were:  bread per lb., 2d.; butter, 5-1/2d. to 8d.; cheese, 3-1/2d. to 4d.; beef, 3d. to 5d.; mutton, 3-1/2d. to 5d.

[467] State of the Poor, i. 562.

[468] According to Walter Harte, though the yeoman in the middle of the seventeenth century ate bread of rye and barley (maslin), in 1766 even the poor cottagers looked upon it with horror and demanded best wheaten bread.  Yet in 1766 the quartern loaf in London was 1s. 6d.—­Tooke, History of Prices, i. 68.

[469] History of Hawsted, p. 184.

[470] Eden, State of the Poor, i. 513.

[471] Rural Economy of Gloucestershire, i. 53.

[472] Eden, op. cit. i. 547.

[473] Farmer’s Letters, i. 300

[474] The pulling down of cottages began to be complained of in the seventeenth century; they harboured the poor, who were a charge upon the parish, and repairs were saved.—­Transactions Royal Historical Society (New Series), xix. 120.

[475] Hasbach, op. cit. 82; Clarke, General View of Herefordshire, p. 29; Marshall, Review of Northern Department, p. 375.

[476] Tooke, History of Prices, i. 50; Hallam, Constitutional History, iii. 302.

[477] Northern Tour, iv. 420.  The increase in population in the first half of the eighteenth century was slow; after the Peace of Paris in 1763, when the commerce and manufactures of the country were extended in an unprecedented degree, it was rapid.

[478] The Way to be Rich and Respectable, London, 1780.

[479] Grose, Olio, pp. 41-4; Lecky, History of England in Eighteenth Century, vi. 169 et. seq.

[480] Cullum, History of Hawsted, p. 219.

[481] Cullum, History of Hawsted, p. 225.

[482] Thoughts on Enclosure, by a Country Farmer (1786), p. 21.

[483] Johnstone, Account of Elkington’s Draining (1797), pp. 8-9.