Agricultural History Review Volume 8
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:ibl II L ,! Book Reviews PETER MATHIAS, The Brewing Industry in cereals, has exercised a far wider dominion England, z7oo-z83o. Cambridge Uni- over the textbooks of farming history than versity Press, 1959. xxviii+596 pp. 85s. she has ever enjoyed in the fields." In the The Industrial Revolution has been present- early eighteenth century the national output ed for the most part in terms of changes in of barley, which, unlike wheat, could be the mining, metallurgical, and textile in- grown profitably in every county in England dustries. Now we have for the first time a de- and Wales, was almost certainly greater in tailed and scholarly account of the 'revolu- bulk than that of wheat. (An unfortunate tion' in an industry of the food and drink error in line 18 on page 39 ° , where 'bushels' group, and one which was wholly dependent should read 'quarters', makes nonsense of for its raw materials, barley and hops, on Charles Smith's estimate of 1766 for English native agriculture. By the end of the seven- oat, rye, and wheat production.) Mr Mathias's teenth century the terms 'ale' (originally a chapters on national and regional barley farm- sweetish, unhopped malt liquor) and the ing, malting, and the hop industry and its newer 'beer' (a bitter, hopped malt liquor) markets are in themselves a first-class con- had come to describe more or less identical tribution to the history of English agriculture. products following the victory of the latter This scholarly book is, however, packed drink. Beer brewing was already to a great ex- throughout with well-digested information, tent a factory industry in London and the drawn very largely from hitherto unquarried larger towns. There was even a certain business archives, and it is difficult to see how amount of automation, based on horse-driven it can ever be superseded. pumps and gravity feed, and there existed a W. H. CHALONER mass retail market for beer similar to that served by the flour miller and baker. But ex- B. H. SLICHERVAN BATH, De agrarische ge- pansion in the larger breweries was limited by schiedenis van West Europa (5oo-z85o). the cost of transport and the risk of deteriora- 416 pp. Aula-Boeken, Het Spectrum N.Y. tion in the finished product. Then in or Utrecht: Antwerp, 196o. f. 3.5 ° (about 7s.). about I72~ came the invention of porter and Paper back. the subsequent growth of porter brewing, Ever since I read Andr6 ~. Bourde, The In- particularly in London; in fact Mr Mathias's fluence of England on the French Agronomes, book deals mainly with the period during 75o- 7s9, I have been convinced that one of which fhe cheaper and hardier porter reigned the most neglected factors in the history of supreme. "The appearance of the new beer the development of farming is the relation should be seen.., as an event of the first im- with each other between the various systems portance, or as an invention exactly equiva- practised in the different countries of western lent in its own industry to coke-smelted iron, Europe, and at a later date those of the world. mule-spun muslin in textiles, or 'pressed- My studies for the last two volumes of the ware' in pottery." After the application of the History of Technology underlined, at least in rotative steam engine to the trade from 1784 my own mind, this conviction. The most onwards it became possible to speak of familiar nexus amongst all of these is that be- 'power-loom brewers', and in 1796 Samuel tween Flanders and this country which I have Whitbread brewed "for the first time in any discussed in a minor way in an essay 'Low brewery in the world, over 2oo,ooo barrels of Countries Influence on English Farming' porter in a single season." The basis of this (English Historical Review, Oct., 1959). There industry was 'John Barleycorn'. As Mr are many others: the persistence of the classi- Mathias remarks, wheat, "the queen of cal tradition along the Mediterranean littoral, 116 :ii il;i BOOK REVIEWS 117 the influence of the Arabs in Spain and glances at Scandinavia and occasional refer- Sicily, the development of a four-course ro- ences to Spain and Italy, is provided. The tation in Piedmont and the Moselle highlands, progress in land reclamation, the change in the relation between Denmark, Schleswig, the relation of landlord and tenant, the effects Friesland, and north-west Germany, both in of economic, demographic, and industrial cattle-breeding and crop rotation. development are not neglected, and instruc- Such studies as those of Dr Bourde and tive statistical tables, when the material allows, my own only sketch the fringes of the subject. are provided. The development of new tech- Now comes to hand Professor Slicher van niques in farming is discussed. A glance at Bath's elaborate and careful study. It is a ma- the bibliography shows a remarkable acquain- jor work in a minor dress, covering more than tance with the vast literature of the subject. a thousand years in time, and an equally wide This is a book that has long been wanted, is areain space. By the year 50o A.D. the economy most admirably designed, and should be of the Pax Romana had collapsed; by 185o the translated into English without delay. modern period of mechanical industrial pro- G. E. FUSSELL duction was well established, and new trans- port facilities had made the importation of J. A. SYMON, Scottish Farming Past and Pre- overseas foodstuffs possible. Times had chang- sent. Oliver and Boyd, I959. 476 pp. 42s. ed. This is not to say, of course, that industry As Mr Symon puts it at the beginning of had not been developed, and that the exchange Chapter xviII: "From the agricultural stand- of manufactured goods for foodstuffs did not point Scotland is not one but several coun- exist before that date; but the recovery of a tries, each with varying conditions of soil and money economy had been slow in appearing. climate determining its system of farming." It took nearly a thousand years. This is what gives rise to the difficulty of writ- Professor van Bath has described in detail ing, in one volume, a comprehensive and satis- the so-called natural economy of western factory account of Scottish agriculture from Europe between the collapse of the Roman earliest times tiU the present day, even when in Empire and the Middle Ages. He describes this case the writer is one who has upwards of the slow emergence of feudality, and he fifty years of experience behind him as a prac- brings to our notice many documents of the tical farmer, a lecturer on agriculture, and a early middle ages that are not, I suspect, too representative of the Government concerned well known to agricultural historians in this with agricultural education and research. This country. He has compiled convincing figures difficulty becomes evident from those chap- showing area yield and kinds of grain cultiva- ters of the book which deal with the eighteenth ted in different districts, and he has discussed century onwards. the feeding habits of people dependent for The first hundred pages bring the story their nutrition on their systems of agriculture through the feudal and monastic periods up to and the crops cultivated. the beginning of the eighteenth-century im- The recovery and increase of population provements. Much valuable material is set be- between the ninth and the thirteenth century fore us, for example on early leases (pp. 67 ft.) is familiar ground, as is the general effect of and teinds (8i ff.). By combing through the the Black Death. From this time onwards Acts of the Parliament of Scotland and such there have been innumerable local-period works as the Rental Book of tke Cistercian Ab- studies, and the general outline of the progress bey of Coupar-Angus, Mr Symon has amass- of western Europe is perhaps better known. ed a deal of useful statistical information It would be supererogatory to re-sketch it about exports of cattle, sheep, hides, and wool, here. It is enough to say that a comprehensive exports and imports of grain, the value offish- description of what happened from the limits ery products, the numbers of animals and hens, of east Germany to the Atlantic, with some and the quantities of produce rendered as rent 118 THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW in kind (from which an idea of the agricultural Machairs, incorrectly described on p. I 19 as output for some parts of the country may be "peat-covered lands," are properly tracts of gained). bent-covered sandy soil. In a book of this size The first two chapters are illustrated by and scope one would expect a better source seven Figures, the sources of only twol being than John Gunn's Orkney Book (i9o9) for in- given. The sickle plough on p. 7 looks like a formation on the complicated story of udal poor copy of the one shown in Maclean's land tenure in Orkney. The great part played History of Mull, I9z5, n, p. II2, or in J. Mac- by the beefindust_u¢ in the Western and North- donald's General View of the Agriculture of the ern Islands, and its considerable influence on Hebrides, 181 I, p. 156, and the caschrom is too agriculture, is not mentioned. It is also worth awkwardly shaped to be workable (caschromis remembering that the clearances, which turn- invariably spelt wrongly throughout the book ed much cultivable land into sheep-runs, gave with a grave accent above the a). The "cup- a considerable boost to the herring industry pled house" on p.