ABSTRACT
Such was the gloomy view of Rowland Prothero, Lord Ernie, the foremost agricultural historian of his day, a view which was fully endorsed by the first-hand evidence of contemporaries and the compilers of Parliamentary Blue Books, and which modern writers would wish to qualify, if at all, only in points of detail. The fact that Ernie's forecasts for the future of English farming proved to be wrong does not invalidate his judgement of the past.
