Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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nearly 300. Other fields followed, as the canals and then the railways opened

them up. The average British colliery in 1850 employed about 80 workers, above

and underground, but there were many in Scotland, Cumberland, Yorkshire and

South Wales which employed many times that number.

In transport the revolution in scale went furthest of all, and can best be gauged

from the transition from roads through canals to railways. The average turnpike

trust at the peak in 1838 had a mortgage debt (loan capital) of  6,300 and

employed a score of workers; the average capital of 80 canal companies in 1825

was  l65,000, and the labour force averaged several hundred; the average cost of

constructing the 27 railways opened between 1830 and 1853 was nearly two

million pounds, and the average labour force in 1851, excluding construction

workers, was upwards of 2,500.

Moreover, the real unit of production, of

passenger- or ton-miles, increased from the two-man coach or waggon, to the

fleet of boats, and finally, since the train could not operate as an independent

unit, to the whole railway company, or even, after the rolling-stock clearing

house system of 1844, the whole railway network.

The banking system, as a system, was created by the Industrial Revolution. The

handful of country banks of 1750 grew to 940 by 1814 (before declining again to

311 in 1842), and the handful of joint-stock banks grew after the 1826 Act to

121, with nearly 1,800 branches, in 1875.

More important, they were welded,

with the London merchant banks, into an elaborate and highly sophisticated

system of national and international payment and credit, and with the Bank of

England as the central reserve bank and the arbiter of interest rates and the

volume of credit and currency at their head. Insurance, shipping, gas, water, and

many other companies experienced a similar growth, and the whole revolution in

scale, chiefly outside manufacturing industry, was belatedly and inadequately

recognized by the rise of joint-stock companies, which grew from 947 in 1844 to

9,344 (excluding chartered and parliamentary companies) ‘believed to be

carrying on business’ in 1885.

Even agriculture was not untouched by the rise in scale. In spite if the ancient

and persistent trend towards larger farms, the average holding remained small—

only 111 acres in 1851— and the number of hired hands per farmer grew very

slowly, from if in 1688 to 2½ in 1831, although the number of workers per farm,

including family members, in 1851 was nearer 6.

But the capital investment per

farm steadily increased, with improved methods, equipment, livestock, manuring

and drainage of the agricultural revolution. The four-course rotation required a

2,010,637 out of 2,540,789 workers in U.K.—P.P., 1872 [c. 602], XVI. 37, Reports of

Inspectors of Factories for Year ending 30 April 1872, pp. 82–4.

Clapham, Economic History, I. 185–6, 433–4.

S. and B.Webb, Story of the King’s Highway (1913), p. 224; Q.R., 1825, XXXII. 170–1;

H.Pollins, ‘A Note on Railway Constructional Costs, 1825–50’, Ecmomica, 1952, XIX.

407.

94 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

50 per cent increase in seed and other inputs, and facilitated a still larger increase

in livestock.

Enclosure was estimated in the late eighteenth century by the Board

of Agriculture to cost about 28s. per acre in legal expenses, officials’ fees, and

fencing, while mid-Victorian deep drainage cost as much as  5 per acre.

A large

part of the steep rise in land values between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth

centuries represented a real rise in capital investment, which enabled a declining

number of moderately increasing units of production to feed the bulk of a

population which trebled between 1751 and 1851.

The increased efficiency of agriculture not only fed the growing population,

but by 1851 had released four out of every five occupied persons for service

elsewhere. This meant chiefly in the towns, whose growth was at once the best

measure of the revolution in organization and the main transmitter of its

reverberations to the non-economic sphere. Four-fifths of the twenty million

people added to the population between 1801 and 1891 went to towns with over

5,000 people, two-thirds to towns over 20,000. In 1801 only a third of the

population lived in a town of any size, only one in six in a town over 20,000, and

most of these, nearly one in ten, in London, the only city over 100,000. By 1851

half the population lived in towns, over a third in towns over 20,000, more than a

fifth in towns over 100,000. By 1891 nearly three-quarters lived in towns over 2,

000, over half in towns over 20,000, and nearly a third in towns over 100,000.

In 1801 London had 865,845, and there were only five other towns with over 50,

000. By 1861 London had 2,803,989, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham

had over 250,000, eight others had over 100,000, and seventeen more—twenty-

nine all told—over 50,000. By 1907 London had 4,536,541, eight other towns

had over 250,000, twenty-four more over 100,000, and another forty-two—

seventy-five in all —over 50,000.

In short, there was a revolutionary rise in the scale of the community in which

most people lived. These new or greatly enlarged communities were not just

larger versions of the old, simple commercial towns—markets, ports, and

organizing centres for domestic industry—of the old society. They were

J.Sykes, The Amalgamation Movement in English Banking, 1825–1924 (1926), pp. ix–x,

1, 98, 113.

B.C.Hunt, The Development of the Joint-Stock Company in England, 1800–67

(Cambridge, Mass., 1936), p. 88; Clapham, Economic History, III. 201.

J.H.Clapham, ‘The Growth of an Agrarian Proletariat, 1688–1832’, Cambridge Hist.J.,

1923, I. 92–5.

Cf. Chambers and Mingay, op. cit., chaps. iii and iv.

Ibid., pp. 85, 163; F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., p. 248.

Ibid., pp. 122, 218–20; cf. Norton, Trist and Gilbert, ‘A Century of Land Values’, Stat

J., 1891, LIV. 528–32; according to M.B.Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics (1899), p. 15,

as corrected by the Rousseaux index of agricultural prices, real agricultural output per

worker, at the average of 1865–85 prices, increased from  51 in 1821 to  66 in 1851 and

 98 in 1881.

REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 95

themselves specialized entities with differentiated functions. The 1851 Census

distinguished between London, that unique combination of administrative,

commercial, residential, tourist resort and every other sort of town, which had

grown by 46.4 per cent in the half-century, and the 99 county towns, which had

grown by 22.1 per cent, the 26 seaports, by 95.6 per cent, the 28 mining and

hardware towns, by 117.3 per cent, the 51 manufacturing towns, by 124.2 per

cent, and the 15 watering places, by 154.1 per cent, of which the eleven coastal

resorts, the most specialized and fastest growing of all, had grown more than

threefold, by 214.1 per cent.

Within each town, too, there was an increasing division of functions between

the inhabitants and segregation of areas for different purposes. The larger the

town and the more specialized its main activity, the more it required full-time

specialists to minister to its needs. Permanent shops and covered markets

replaced casual street trading and open-air markets. Slaughter-houses

supplemented or replaced the home-killing butcher. Water companies and

sewage works eventually replaced wells and cess-pools. Professional police

supplemented and eventually took over from elected constables, and local

government itself, along with much else, gradually became professionalized. The

various functions became localized in different areas, shops and offices in the

centre, factories and poorest working-class housing hard by, artisans’ and poor

clerks’ houses somewhat further out, middle-class homes in the inner suburbs,

merchants’, industrialists’ and higher professional men’s villas in the outer ring

or, when the railways came, in detached satellite suburbs strung along the

railway lines.

This segregation by class was the most important social effect of urbanization,

and its full significance will be explored in the next and subsequent chapters.

Meanwhile, we may just notice that the new class institutions which the very

size, anonymity and segregated character of the towns allowed to come into

existence experienced an exactly similar rise in scale. The small local, sporadic

trade and box clubs of the old society, often frequented by small masters as well

as journeymen, evolved into different sets of large-scale institutions, each meant

to cope with different aspects of the new scale of social life. The first, and much

the larger development, was that of the friendly societies for mutual insurance

against sickness and death, which grew from 9,672 in 1803 with 704,350 members

and funds of about one million pounds to over 32,000 societies in 1872 with over

A.F.Weber, The Growth of Cities in the 19th Century (New York, 1899), pp. 43, 144.

Census of England and Wales, 1801, 1861, 1901.

Census of England and Wales, 1851, General Report, p. xlix.

Cf. H.B.Rodgers, ‘The Suburban Growth of Victorian Manchester’, Journal of

Manchester Geographical Society, 1962, LVIII. 1f.; T.C.Barker and M.Bobbins, A

History of London Transport, I, The 19th Century (1963), pp. xxv–xxx; Asa Briggs,

Victorian Cities (1963), pp. 12–15, 24–5.

96 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

four million members and funds of nearly twelve million pounds. More

significant was the growth from about 1830 of the great affiliated orders, with

their headquarters and branch organization, like the Manchester Unity of

Oddfellows, which grew from 2,039 lodges with 248,000 members in 1845 to 3,

074 lodges with 497,000 in 1875, or the later rise of the national unitary societies

like the Hearts of Oak (1841) which grew from 33,000 members in 1872 to 239,

000 in 1899.

The second and overlapping development was that of the trade unions, which

clearly separated from the first only after the repeal of the Combination Acts in

1824–5. That the emancipating force was urbanization rather than industrialism

alone is shown by the fact that traditional crafts were as much affected by it as

new factory occupations. The General Union of Carpenters and Joiners, 1827,

preceded the more famous Grand General Union of Cotton Spinners of 1829, as

did the Operative Builders Union, 1833, and the Miners Association of Great

Britain, 1841, the more famous Amalgamated Society of Engineers of 1851. Of

the five leading ‘New Model’ Unions, with their professional officials, high

subscriptions, and headquarters and branch organization, three, the carpenters,

bricklayers and ladies’ shoemakers, belonged to traditional crafts, and only two,

the engineers and ironfounders, to new industries. Ignoring the abortive

gigantism of the Grand National Consolidated Union of 1834, the movement

grew from perhaps 100,000 members in 1842 to 1,200,000 in 1874, and

meanwhile managed to grope its way to a measure of unity in the Trade Union

Congress of 1868.

At the same time it provoked into existence a series of

employers’ associations whose nineteenth-century numbers are more fugitive, but

amounted in 1900 to forty-three federations and national associations with 810

local associations.

There was also a remarkably similar evolution from the local clubs and guilds

of professional men, like the Society of Gentlemen Practisers (in the law courts)

or the Company of Surgeons, into the nationwide, monopolistic professional

institutions of modern times. The local clubs of solicitors were drawn together in

the Law Society in 1825, the medical profession struggled into unity through the

Apothecaries Act, 1815, the evolution of the British Medical Association in 1856

from the Provincial Medical and Surgical Association of 1834, and the Medical

Registration Act, 1858, and the pharmacists and veterinary surgeons set up their

own bodies in 1841 and 1844. Meanwhile, other professions created or greatly

enlarged by the Industrial Revolution and the rise in scale sprang into

institutional existence: the Civil Engineers (1818), Architects (1848), Ships’

Masters and Navigators (1857), Naval Architects (1860), Gas Engineers (1866),

P.H.J.H.Gosden, The Friendly Societies in England, 1815–75 (Manchester, 1961), pp. 5,

14, 33–4.

S. and B.Webb, History of Trade Unionism (1920), pp. 110, 116–17, 124–31, 181, 211–

14, 233, 748–9; H.Pelling, History of British Trade Unionism (1963) p. 79.

REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 97

Chartered Surveyors (1868), Electrical Engineers (1871), Municipal Engineers

(1873), Chemists (1877), Librarians (1877), Teachers (1878) and Chartered

Accountants (1880). More important, they began to exercise greater control over

the recruitment, competence and conduct of their professions, instituting

examinations and seeking parliamentary recognition and registration, like the

doctors in 1858, ships’ officers under the Acts of 1850 and 1854, and mine

managers under those of 1872 and 1877.

At a further remove from industry itself, in education there was a notable rise

in scale. The very notion of a school changed from that of a single master with a

score or so of pupils to a large multi-class institution with a number of specialist

teachers under a non-teaching headmaster. The average eighteenth-century

charity school had 18 pupils; the average voluntary school in 1851 had 91, in

1870 125, and by 1900 163, when the average Board School would have no less

than 430.

Ancient grammar schools and public schools were reformed and

reorganized on a larger scale, and new ones founded.

Even the two ancient

universities were reformed, and doubled and re-doubled in size, from 1,128

undergraduates in 1800 to 2,550 in 1850 and to 5,313 in 1900, by which time a

further dozen university institutions, beginning with University College, London,

in 1826 and Durham University in 1833, had come into existence, and a far

wider range of subjects taught and examined.

Hospitals similarly grew in number, size and specialization. The eighteenth

century added fifty-seven to the five royal hospitals it inherited, most of them

founded since 1750. The nineteenth not only founded between seven and eight

hundred more, but developed specialized wards and institutions for maternity,

fevers, tuberculosis, mental treatment, convalescence, and so on. In London for

example there were only seven hospitals in 1807 with 1,831 beds, an average of

262 per hospital, and in 1843 still only eleven, with 2,884 beds, and the same

average. By 1891 there would be seventeen voluntary general hospitals, with 5,

272 beds, an average of 310, sixty specialist hospitals with 3,616, an average of

60, and twenty-seven Poor Law infirmaries in what the Webbs called the

‘splendid hospital system’ run by the Metropolitan Asylums Board and open

since 1884 to the general public, with 13,747 beds, an average of 509, plus eight

fever and convalescent hospitals with 3,693 beds, an average of 462, and fifteen

dispensaries treating over a million outpatients a year.

Meanwhile, the range of

treatments and the scale of the equipment had also been transformed, so that the

D.C.Marsh, The Changing Social Structure of England and Wales, 1871–1951 (1958),

p. 172.

A.M.Carr-Saunders and P.A.Wilson, The Professions (Oxford, 1933), pp. 45–7, 75–83,

127, 133, 146, 151; G.Millerson, The Qualifying Professions (1964), pp. 121, 126; cf. also

R.Robson, The Attorney in 18th-Century England (Cambridge, 1959); C.Newman, The

Evolution of Medical Education in the 19th Century (1957); W.J.Reader, Professional

Men (1966).

98 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

idea of a hospital had changed from a last, dangerous refuge for the sick poor to

a highly sophisticated fortress in the war against disease.

Even religion responded to the rising scale of community organization.

Between 1801 and 1873 were built 4,210 new Anglican churches, an increase of

about a third, and about 20,000 non-Anglican chapels, a nearly ten-fold increase.

As the towns grew, the churches and still more the chapels increased in size. As

early as 1811 a Methodist minister wrote to Rev. Jabez Bunting:

I hear great things of your amphitheatre in Liverpool. A man will need

strong lungs to blow his words from one end of it to the other. In Bradford

and in Keighley they are building chapels nearly as large as Carver Street

Chapel, in Sheffield. To what will Methodism come in a few years?

To cope with the sheer size and paganism of the towns the churches were forced

to set up special missionary organizations, like the Nonconformist Home

Missionary Society of 1819 or the Anglican London City Mission of 1835, or were

overtaken by new mass organizations like the Salvation Army (founded as the

‘Christian Mission to the Heathen of our Own Country’ in 1865), and had to

reorganize themselves by means of new dioceses like Manchester, 1847, or the

new Congregational Union of 1832.

Charity, religious and secular, expanded

likewise. In 1860 Sampson Low junior estimated that there were in London

alone 640 charitable bodies, with an annual income of nearly two and a half

million pounds. Two hundred and seventy-nine of these had been founded since

1801, 144 of them since 1850.

In 1869 the Charity Organization Society was

founded to try to weld them into a system, and was imitated in many other cities.

Although it failed, it could at least claim to have inaugurated professional

casework and the modern theory and practice of social administration.

G.M.Jones, The Charity School Movement in the 18th Century (1938), p. 24; E.Baines,

Education best Promoted by Perfect Freedom (1854), pp. 42–3; Porter, op. cit., (1912), p.

141.

P.P., 1867–8 [3966], XXVIII. Pt. I. 1, Report of Schools Enquiry [Taunton]

Commission, esp. chap. ii.

A.Mansbridge, The Older Universities of England (1923), p. xxn.; Armytage, Civic

Universities, chaps, viii–x.

J.C.Steele, ‘Charitable Aspects of Medical Relief, Stat.J., 1891, LIV. 265–7, 278, 281,

294; S. and B.Webb, English Poor Law Policy (1910), p. 123.

Cf. Newman, op. cit., chap, vi; B.Abel-Smith, The Hospitals, 1800–1948 (1964). esp.

chap. viii.

P.P., 1852–3, LXXVIII. 164, Returns relating to Dissenters’ Places of Worship, p. 156;

Census of England and Wales, 1851, Religious Worship, p. xl; H.S.Skeats, ‘Statistics

relating to Religious Institutions in England and Wales’, Stat.J., 1876, XXXIX. 332–3.

T.P.Bunting, Life of Jabez Bunting (1887), p. 338; E.P.Thompson, The Making of the

English Working Class (1963), p. 351.

REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 99

Finally, if somewhat tardily and reluctantly, the revolution in organization

transformed the State itself. To cope with the manifold problems of the growing

towns, local government was reorganized and changed from a largely amateur to

a professional basis. This was only partly due to the Municipal Corporations Act,

1835, and much more to two other developments of greater significance. One

was the series of private Acts beginning in the eighteenth century by which some

three hundred towns and cities, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham,

took powers to police, light, pave and drain the streets, and sometimes to provide

water, gas, burial grounds, and even to clear slums and rebuild whole areas.

The

other was the series of public Acts, including the new Poor Law of 1834, the

Police Acts of 1839 and 1856, the Public Health Acts of 1848, 1866, 1872 and

1875, the Local Boards Act of 1858, the Food and Drugs Acts of 1860 and 1872,

and the Education Act of 1870, which either set up competing local authorities

such as the Poor Law Guardians and the School Boards, or loaded the existing

ones with additional responsibilities. The resulting rise in scale can be measured

by the increase in local government expenditure in England and Wales, from  5.

3 million in 1803, to  66.8 million in 1893, and by the increase in the number of

officials and other employees, from under 11,000, plus 16,400 police, at the first

full occupational Census in 1851 to about 51,000, plus 32,000 police, in 1881.

The revolution in central government was still more striking. The 15,884

‘persons in public offices’ in Great Britain in 1797, of whom most were Customs

and Excise and Post Office officials and only about 1,500 central government

clerks, grew to 108,000, in 1869, of whom about 16,700 were central department

officers and clerks.

Meanwhile, government expenditure, net of debt interest and

redemption, grew from  7.7 million in 1792, the last peacetime year of the

eighteenth century, to  45.6 million in 1867–8, and to  77.9 million in 1897–8,

the last peacetime year of the nineteenth. Altogether, public expenditure, local

and national, grew in the course of a century from about  12 million in 1792 to

about  179 million in 1897–8.

This fifteen-fold increase in peacetime

expenditure—more than fifteen-fold at fixed prices—is the best measure we have

of the rise in the scale of government which resulted from the general revolution

in organization produced by industrialism.

K.S.Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (1963), pp. 6, 14,

178.

S.Low, jr., The Charities of London in 1861 (1862), pp. vii–xi; K.Woodroofe, From

Charity to Social Work (1962), p. 23.

Ibid., chap. ii; C.L.Mowat, The Charity Organisation Society, 1869–1913 (1961),

passim.

Cf. S. and B.Webb, Statutory Authorities, chap. iv.

Porter, op. cit., (1912), p. 162; Census of England and Wales, 1851 and 1881.

E.W.Cohen, Growth of the British Civil Service, 1780–1939 (1962), p. 23n.; H.Mann,

‘On the Cost and Organization of the Civil Service’, Stat.J., 1869, XXXII. 49.

100 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

‘PETTY’S LAW’

The revolution in organization naturally required a large-scale redistribution of

people between occupations, industries, regions, and communities. The driving

force behind this redistribution was the well-known tendency with economic

development and the rise in living standards for people to move from lower-paid

occupations, notably in agriculture, to higher-paid ones, first in manufacturing

and then in services such as commerce, transport, the professions and

government. This tendency Colin Clark once christened Petty’s law, after Sir

William Petty, the pioneer of political arithmetic, who first noticed it as early as

the 1670’s:

There is much more to be gained by Manufacture than Husbandry, and by

Merchandise than Manufacture;…. Now here we may take notice that as

Trade and Curious Arts increase; so the Trade of Husbandry will decrease,

or else the wages of Husbandmen must rise and consequently the Rents of

Lands must fall.

The value of this ‘wide, simple and far-reaching generalization’ is that it both

states the trend, which by extension can be held to include the shift of population

from the agricultural to the industrial areas and, ultimately, from the countryside

to the towns, and offers an explanation of the main, though not the only,

mechanism by which it occurs, namely by means of the differential rewards of

the different occupations.

In Petty’s day about two-thirds of all families in Gregory King’s table were

primarily engaged in agriculture, although many of them must have spent part of

their time in domestic manufacture, general labouring, and the like.

By 1760

Joseph Massie’s figures imply that the proportion had shrunk to about a third,

plus a proportion of the time spent in smallholding and harvesting by those in

industry and trade—say, about half the population in all.

At the first Census in

1801 just over a third of the families in Britain (35.9 per cent) were allocated to

agriculture, forestry and fishing. By 1851 the proportion had fallen to just over a

fifth (21.7 per cent), and by 1881 to an eighth (12.6 per cent), not very remote

from the mid-twentieth-century, level of about a twentieth (5 per cent in 1951).

Meanwhile, the proportion in manufacturing and mining increased fairly rapidly,

from well under a third (29.7 per cent) in 1807 to two-fifths (40.8 per cent) in

Porter, op. cit., (1912), pp. 617, 641.

W.Petty, Political Arithmetic (1690), in The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (ed.

C.H.Hull, Cambridge, 1899), pp. 256, 267 (for dating of the Political Arithmetic to 1671–

76 see p. 235); C.Clark, Conditions of Economic Progress (1940), pp. 176–7, and (1951),

pp. 395–6; the 1960 ed. drops the term ‘Petty’s law’ and substitutes ‘a wide, simple and

far-reaching generalization’, p. 492.

REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION 101

1831, and then at a decreasing pace to 43.5 per cent in 1881. The slack was taken

up by the increase in services, notably by trade and transport and by domestic

and personal, both of which remained at an eighth or less up to 1831 and then

began to advance rapidly, the former to more than a fifth (21.3 per cent) in 1881,

the latter to nearly a sixth (15.4 per cent).

The small residuum was occupied by

public and professional services which, because of difficulties of definition,

appeared, against the trend, to be shrinking, but when better figures begin with

the fuller occupational Censuses were undoubtedly and on any definition

expanding faster than population, according to Charles Booth from 3.6 per cent

of the occupied population (of England and Wales) in 1841 to 5.6 per cent in

1881.

It used to be held that the main driving force behind the movement from

agricultural to industrial occupations was the enclosure movement, which drove

small owners and tenants, especially cottagers dependent on the commons, off

the land to form the new proletariat. There is no denying, of course, that the

enclosure of over six million acres of open field, common pasture and waste

between 1760 and 1844, by some 4,000 Acts of Parliament, most of them

concentrated in two short bursts from 1760 to 1780 and 1793 to 1815, plus

perhaps up to half as much again by agreement,

would have a profound effect

on the organization of village society, and extremely unpleasant consequences for

the majority of countrydwellers who could show no legal or customary rights and

lost their access to the commons. The single-minded concern of landlords and

farmers with rent and profits which over the main period of enclosures from the

1790’s to the 1820’s nearly doubled while real wages for the labourer stagnated

or declined, the physical segregation of the social strata resulting from the removal

of the farmhouses from the village to their consolidated plots and from the

decline of the practice of the hired hands living in, and the general sense of

betrayal of paternal responsibilities by the naked exercise of the power of

property, all contributed to the deterioration in rural social cohesion which

culminated in the East Anglian riots of 1815 and the ‘last labourers’ revolt’ of

1830.

And the enclosures certainly contributed in one way to the formation of a

landless labour force by cutting off—for what it was worth in the new conditions

of rapid population growth—the traditional resort of the younger son, squatting

on the common.

Nevertheless, it is now clear that the enclosures, allied to the agricultural

improvements, were neither necessary nor apt to the creation of the proletariat,

See above, chap. ii, table 1.

Mathias, Ec.H.R., 1957, X. 44–5.

Deane and Cole, op. cit., p. 142.’

C.Booth, Occupations of the People (1886), table B (1); figures not comparable with those

in previous sentence.

Chambers and Mingay, op. cit., pp. 77–8.

102 REVOLUTION IN SOCIAL ORGANIZATION

save to the extent that they produced the food for it. The sheer growth of

population— trebling as it did in the century from 1750 to 1850—was more than

ample to the demand for industrial labour. The agricultural population, in spite of

its relative fall, continued to grow absolutely, from 565,000 families in England

and Wales in 1706 to 660,000 in 1803, according to Massie and Colquhoun, and

from 1.7 million persons in Britain in 1801 to a peak of 2.1 million in 1851

according to the Census, and only thereafter began its modern absolute decline,

to 1.7 million again in 1881.

Except for the, at this period, comparatively rare

enclosure of arable for pasture, enclosure and improved agriculture required

more, not less, labour, not only for hedging and ditching and the construction of

new buildings but for four crops in four years instead of three in two, for labour-

intensive crops like turnips and other roots, and for the larger number of animals

which the new fodder crops supported, while machines, apart from the vastly

unpopular threshing machines which replaced only traditional winter work, were

of little significance before the second half of the nineteenth century. For these

reasons the population of almost all agricultural villages continued to rise until

mid-century, and that of parliamentary enclosed villages more than any save

industrial villages.

Indeed, enclosure, especially that of wasteland, forest, moor and fen, itself

illustrates the process of Petty’s law. As a result of the enclosure of the Forest of

Knaresborough, for example,

the poor cottager and his family exchanged their indolence for active

industry, and obtained extravagant wages; and hundreds were induced to

offer their labour from distant quarters; labourers of every denomination,

carpenters, joiners, smiths and masons, poured in, and met with constant

employment. And though before the allotments were set out, several riots

had happened, the scene was now quite changed; for with all the foreign

assistance, labour kept extravagantly high…. In consequence the product is

increased beyond conception, the rents more than trebled and population

advanced in a very high degree.

Enclosure did not always raise wages, chiefly because, as Arthur Young,

Malthus and many other contemporaries pointed out, the rural labourers

preferred to take the benefit of the increased productivity in the form of earlier

marriage, more children, and a larger number of survivors to share the gain. In the

remoter areas of the south of England, distant from the magnetic pull of the

higher wages of the industrial north and of London or the Cornish mines, and

A.J.Peacock, Bread or Blood: The Agrarian Riots in East Anglia, 1816 (1965); J.L. and

B.Hammond, Village Labourer, II, chap. x.

See above, table 1, pp. 20–1; Mathias, op. cit., Ec.H.R., 1957, X. 45; Deane and Cole,

op. cit., p. 143.

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