ABSTRACT
A number of studies have cast doubt on the extent to which agriculture was revolutionised in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. If an agricultural revolution occurred, then it did so in stark contrast to the Industrial Revolution with very little assistance from mechanisation. Landowners and tenant farmers on arable estates employed a core of reliable, trusted labourers on a more or less permanent basis. Agricultural improvement, both in the arable and the pastoral sectors, was a pronounced feature in the development of a national market for goods. Many accounts of agricultural improvement stress the importance of key individuals, such as Charles Townshend, who gave up a highly successful political career to pursue agricultural experiments on his Norfolk estate in the last years of his life, Thomas Coke and Robert Bakewell. For many years, the most intensively studied aspect of agricultural change in this period was the enclosure movement, particularly enclosures of land, effected by Acts of Parliament.
