In 1811 the whole of July and part of August were wet and cold; and in August, 1812, wheat averaged 155s., the finest Dantzic selling at Mark Lane for 180s., and oats reached 84s.  As our imports of corn then chiefly came from the north-west of Europe, which has a climate very similar to our own, crops there were often deficient from bad seasons in the same years as our own, and the price consequently high.  On the other hand, it is a proof that produce will find the best market regardless of hindrances, that much of our corn at this time came from France.  Corn in 1813 was seized on with such avidity that there was no need to show samples.  As high prices had now prevailed for some time and were still rising, landlords and farmers jumped to the conclusion that they would be permanent; so that this is the period when rents experienced their greatest increase, in some cases having increased fivefold since 1790, and speculations in land were most general.  Land sold for forty years’ purchase, many men of spirit and adventure very different from farmers ’were tempted to risk their property in agricultural speculations’,[534] and large sums were sunk in lands and improvements in the spirit of mercantile enterprise.  The land was considered as a kind of manufacturing establishment, and ’such powers of capital and labour were applied as forced almost sterility itself to become fertile.’  Even good pastures were ploughed up to grow wheat at a guinea a bushel, and much worthless land was sown with corn.  Manure was procured from the most remote quarters, and we are told a new science rose up, agricultural chemistry, which, ’with much frivolity and many refinements remote from common sense, was not without great operation on the productive powers of land.’

Land jobbing and speculation became general, and credit came to the aid of capital.  The larger farmers, as we have seen, were before the war inclined to an extravagance that amazed their older contemporaries; now we are told, some insisted on being called esquire, and some kept liveried servants.[535]

It is somewhat curious to learn that one of the drawbacks from which farmers suffered at this time was the ravages of pigeons, which seem to have been as numerous as in the Middle Ages, when the lord’s dovecote was the scourge of the villein’s crops.  In 1813 there was said to be 20,000 pigeon houses in England and Wales, each on an average containing 100 pairs of old pigeons.[536]

Another pest was the large number of ‘vermin’, whose destruction had long before been considered important enough to demand the attention of the legislature.[537] Some parishes devoted large portions of their funds to this object; in 1786 East Budleigh in Devonshire, out of a total receipt of L20 1s. 8-1/2d., voted L5 10s. for vermin killing.  That now sacred animal the fox was then treated with scant respect, farmers and landlords paying for his destruction as ’vermin’[538]; the parish accounts of Ashburton in Devonshire, for instance, from 1761-1820 include payments for killing 18 foxes and 4 vixens, with no less than 153 badgers.