ABSTRACT
Innovations in cropping took place on a wide, though not a universal, front and independently of any great expansion of demand, which was to stimulate the extension of improved methods during the classic agricultural revolution of the late eighteenth century. The most rapid survey of published sources alone shows that the introduction of plants as field crops came earlier and over a much wider area of England than was once thought. The insertion of grass leys into farming routines, which has been acclaimed as a major advance during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, was most unlikely to produce a comparable effect on total output. The true transformation of crop rotations was accomplished with the adoption on a significant scale in latter half of the seventeenth century of the innovations in fodder cropping. Within agricultural production, systems were being regrouped, however much subsequent periods of high grain prices might rejuvenate clay-land arable farming and thus, temporarily, put the clock back.
