What Were the Changes in Farming Between 1750 and 1850?
Agriculture changed in many different ways from 1750 to 1850, including the crops, techniques and machinery. These changes led to influences on numerous other factors like health, population, economy and culture. By 1850, the country had completely changed from 1750, when it was similar to England in the Middle Ages.
In 1750, the farming techniques were still similar to those in the Middle Ages, with very few changes. Most of the villages were alike, and they all included open or common fields, which were the main sources of jobs as well as food. A few of the wealthier residents would own their own land; however most of the land was divided up into narrow strips, which landowners would rent out to the poorer farmers. The tenant farmers could then grow whatever crops they liked on their land, and they could sell anything they could, however what they grew was usually only enough to feed themselves. The same crops were grown as in the Middle Ages, which were wheat, barley, oats and peas. One of the negatives about the strips of land was that they were too narrow to use machinery on, which meant most of the farming had to be done by hand. This caused each process to take a long time, and everything would be done very inefficiently. Each year, one of the strips had to be left fallow (no crops were allowed to be grown on it for the whole year) in order to replenish the soil. The fallow strip would change every year, so that every part of the soil could restore its nutrients. This was bad for the tenant farmers, as it meant they could not grow any crops for a year, unless they were renting another strip of land at the time. However, if they only owned one strip of land, they would have had to find another job while their land was replenishing, which would have been very difficult, as most of the jobs came from agriculture. Another feature to the villages was common land, which was used for animals to graze on. Common land was only supposed to be used by villagers with ‘common rights, however it is likely that other villagers used the land even though they had no legal right to. The common land was usually used for cows, but some of the larger landowners grazed their sheep on the land too. In villages where the soil quality was low, the common land would have probably been very large, possibly even larger than the land used to grow crops, as the soil needs to be nutritious enough to grow enough grass to feed all of the animals. In the common land, it was very easy for diseases to spread among the animals, even between species, as the conditions were poor, and the animals had to live very close to each other. Many poor people kept geese on the part of the common land near their houses, and also on the village pond. Pigs and chickens would have been kept in the farm yards and the cottage gardens.
The main type of housing in the villages in the 1750 was cottages, as most of the villagers would live in them. They would be made out