ABSTRACT
It is one of the commonplaces of the economic, social and literary history of Britain that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a period of transition from senile mediaevalism to a vigorous and adolescent modernity. This was true equally for agrarian methods and materials as it was for religious and polito-economic thought, for the English language, for English maritime expansion, and for the English landscape. On the land, the change from subsistence farming to a commercial agriculture was a result of many and complex factors, which have been fully stated and analysed by the economic historian. In the field of livestock husbandry, the motivating force was singular and simple: the demand made for meat and other livestock products by a rising population of townsmen who had neither the desire nor the opportunity to grow them for themselves. The coincidence of this great urban mouth with the accelerating breakdown of the feudal structure of land tenure, with the release of monastic land by the dissolution of the religious houses, with the consolidation of a rural class of yeomen which had been long in the making, and with the retirement to the countryside of the businessmen-turned-farmers who brought a new spirit of commercial exploitation to an old calling—this coincidence transformed both the cultivation of the soil and the management of the domestic animals of the farm from peasant arts into just one more aspect of the industrialism which was settling, firmly and irrevocably, upon the face of Britain.
