connexion with this, and with the fact that his improvements made a constant demand for labour, we are not surprised to learn that the workhouse was pulled down as useless, for it was always empty, and this at a time when the working-classes of England were pauperized to an alarming degree.  The year 1818 was one of terrible distress all over England in country and town, yet at his sheep-shearing of that year Coke was enabled to say he had trebled the population of his estate and not a single person was out of employment, though everywhere else farmers were turning off hands and cutting down wages.  Principally through his agency, between 1804 and 1821, no less than 153 enclosures took place in Norfolk, while between 1790 and 1810, 2,000,000 acres of waste land in England were brought under cultivation largely by his efforts.  He is said, indeed, to have transformed agriculture throughout England, and, but for that, the country would not have been able to grow enough food for its support during the war with Napoleon, and must have succumbed.

FOOTNOTES: 

[440] Northern Tour, i. 9.  For an interesting account of Young, see R.A.S.E.  Journal (3rd Series), iv. 1.

[441] In 1726 Bradley had urged the use of liquorice, madder, woad, and caraway as improvers of the land in the Preface to the Country Gentleman.

[442] Rural Economy (1771), pp. 173-5.  Trusler, who wrote in 1780, mentions ’the general rage for farming throughout the kingdom.’—­Practical Husbandry, p.  I.

[443] In 1780 Sir Thomas Bernard, travelling through Northumberland, saw ’luxuriant plantations, neat hedges, rich crops of corn, comfortable farmhouses’ in a county whereof the greater part was barren moor dearly rented at 1s. 6d. an acre thirty years before, and he said the county had increased in annual value fourfold, (Contemporary MS., unpublished.)

[444] Rural Economy, p. 26.

[445] Farmer’s Letters (3rd ed.), p. 89.

[446] Slater, English Peasantry and Enclosure, p. 95.

[447] Ibid. p. 101.

[448] Young, Northern Tour, iv. 340, about 1770 estimates the cultivated land of England to be half pasture and half arable, and, in the absence of reliable statistics, his opinion on this point is certainly the best available.  The conversion of a large portion of the richer land from arable to grass in the eighteenth century was compensated for, according to Young, by the conversion, on enclosure, of poor sandy soils and heaths or moors into corn land.  Hasbach, op. cit. pp. 370-1.

[449] Young, Northern Tour, i. 222.

[450] Rural Economy, p. 252.

[451] Ibid. p. 271.

[452] Cf. above, p. 180.

[453] Farmer’s Letters (3rd ed), p. 372.

[454] Northern Tour, iv. 167.

[455] Ibid. iv. 186.