ABSTRACT
The rural life of England between the close of the great war and the Poor Law reform of 1834 was markedly different from that of either the preceding or the succeeding ages. The common lands had gone; except in the neighbourhood of the new industrial centres, the commoners were now wage-labourers on the land, dependent upon the small share that fell to them of artificially high prices, or upon parish doles. The yeoman-farmers were disappearing under the triple pressure of rent, rates and taxes, and violent fluctuations in the value of their crops. To the superficial observer, the immanence of an agrarian crisis was not evident. The country was cultivated as it had never been before. The great estates of the aristocracy and the lesser demesnes of the business gentry stretched far and wide, with new barns, trim hedges, clean ditches, fat herds at pasture, root-crops that the irrepressible Cobbett, riding by, hailed as parables of political Radicalism, 1 and waving grain as to which the only doubt was whether there would be a ruinous abundance.
