Landscape With Figures

In the opening pages of his Northern Tour Arthur Young presented his credentials to his readers, and explained the method and purpose of his writing: ‘I have been a farmer these many years, and that not in a single field or two, but upon a tract of near three hundred acres, most part of the time; and never less than one hundred…. I have always kept from the first day I began a minute register of my business.’ ¹ His approach, therefore, to the compilation of his tours was that of a practising farmer, and his methods were entirely practical and businesslike. He would advertise his intended journey and after receiving replies send out notes to those who had invited him to visit their farms. ‘Registering minutes on the spot was a new undertaking, having never been executed either in this or any other country of Europe’, he said, and claimed with pride that his books carried ‘proof in every page of the time when they are written: the principal part is executed during the journey, recording intelligence on the spot, and at the moment; or minuting at night the transactions of the day; indeed the method in which these journeys are executed is so very simple, and have so little appearance of author craft, or writing journeys in a garret; or engaging in the expense and absence of journeys for profit’. ² As a result, throughout the pages of his tours Young is continually introducing his readers to farmers and landlords, and describing the ‘judicious and spirited designs’ which they showed him. His England, therefore, is a country of farms and estates, of soil and implements, rent and wages, courses of crops and cost of provisions, with more particular attention to such vital topics as drainage, manure, the growth of turnips and the cultivation of grasses. The real theme of his books was agricultural improvement, the progress of enclosure, the disappearance of the old England of scattered strip-farming into the new land of compact square fields surrounded by post-and-rail fences and newly planted hedgerows. ‘All the country from Holkham to Houghton was a wild sheep-walk before the spirit of improvement seized the inhabitants’, he will write on finding a landscape which really rejoiced his heart, ‘and this spirit has wrought amazing effects; for instead of boundless wilds, and uncultivated wastes, inhabited by scarcely anything but sheep; the country is all cut into enclosures, cultivated in a most husband-like manner, richly manured, well peopled, and yielding an hundred times the produce it did in its former state.’ ¹