Free is Cheaper
Table of Contents
Part 1. The Problem
Chapter 1.
Economic stalemate since the Tudors. Reason is Market economy itself. Market economy not a necessary stage in history but cul-de-sac. Plenty always available until capitalism introduced scarcity/poverty. Urge to co-operate freely as old as the human race.
Chapter 2.
Poverty and low protein-intake cause of population increase, not vice-versa, 'pace' Malthus. Modern archeology supports view of economic historians like Thorold Rogers and anthropologists like Marshall Sahlins that earlier societies enjoyed plenty. Artefacts like Stonehenge, Silbury Hill, Offa's Dyke, the cathedrals, point to existence of huge surpluses in pre-bourgeois economic systems.
Chapter 3.
Poverty is a modern phenomenon. Understanding of the problem made difficult by lack of intellectual discipline among the experts. Proliferation of non-productives notes by some thinkers.
Chapter 4.
Nine tenths of working population not producing wealth at all. Division of Labour, Economies of Scale, and Theory of Comparative Advantage are largely chimaeras. Large scale production results in unnecessary movement, lowered quality, stress. Chapters dealing with employment in particular industries, both productive and non-productive are introduced.
2. "According to Professor Phelps Brown:
"those who can stay on the land have seldom been willing, short of starvation to leave if for employment as wage earners; the poorest peasants have been reluctant to commit themselves to work in the factory even though they can earn more there, and in Africa and in Asia many of them still limit their commitment to a term of years. Wage earners who can get hold of land quit their employments - that was the experience of the colonists in America and Australia." ("The Economics of Labour")
3. "For the last century or more, parties of all shades of Left and Right, of interventionism and laissez faire have been appealing for our political support and have always left us feeling that the next time we shall say like the character in Balzac: "I know you my friend, you are as full of promises as a new made king!"
4. "The Thatcher Government came to power aided by a poster showing a queue of unemployed with the caption "Labour isn't working". Pride alone would have prevented the Thatcher Government anticipating that nine years later inflation would be little better and that unemployment would have trebled."
5. "...cancers in our lives have produced a number of Catos warning us of the dangerous drift: Louis Mumford, E.F. Schumacher, Leopold Kohr, warning us of the tendencies and dangers in thinking "big"; Rachel Carson, Kenneth Allsop, Frazer Darling, Barry Commoner, The Green Movement, on the destruction of nature; Rene Dubois, Robert McNamara, Willi Brandt on impending disaster in the Third World; Ralph Nader, Hazel Henderson, The Campaign for Real Ale, on the "shoddy but ingenious" goods we buy (Wendell Berry's dismissive phrase.)"
"...the cause of the majority of these problems arises, as I hope to show, from the Market Economy itself, be it as Free Enterprise as one likes, or as rigidly controlled as Mao's China, Hoxha's Albania, or Stalin's Russia."
9. Chapter 1.
""As a young man I was very interested in how people lived in earlier times; how they got from place to place, lighted their homes, cooked their meals, and so on. So I went to the history books. Well, I could find out all about the kings and presidents; but I could learn nothing of their everyday lives. So I decided that history is bunk." Henry Ford
Five hundred years ago an English building worker could earn the price of a steak or lamb chop, a housebrick or rooftile in as little or even less time at work than he can today. This fact becomes even more surprising when we examine its implications. The position of building workers in the social order does not appear to have altered greatly in the intervening centuries. Meat, bricks, and rooftiles are as central now to a study of comparative wellbeing as they were then. Moreover our English building worker might well have been French or Italian, Dutch or Belgian, such was the mobility of labour at the time, so that he could be seen as a fair sample of fifteenth century European building workers, and by extension, of European society as a whole. By the same token, this data allows a comparison in real standards of living with the present in the countries of European colonisation.
There was a huge French labour force engaged in the construction of our [Britain's] cathedrals and larger churches. There were many Italian craftsmen engaged in the more exacting decoration. In the Eastern counties Dutchmen were working throughout the late Middle Ages on civil engineering projects. And outside the building industry the weavers from Belgium were bringing in their skills, the bankers from Italy their credit institutions. Our continental cousins provided the help and we can provide them now with the records. Britain is uniquely fortunate in possessing an unbroken series of economics records going back to the Norman Conquest. This is largely due to the fact that 1066 was the last time that this country was occupied by a foreign power. Mainland Europeans have had to endure endless campaigns being fought across their countrysides from Portugal to Russia, from Sicily to Scandinavia. The wonder is that anything is left there at all.
There was, then, a European market in building labour. There still is, but now the market has taken in a bigger area: Turkish workers in Germany, North African workers in France, Spanish workers in Belgium; West Indian, Pakistani and Indian workers in Britain; huge popullations swilling about to the demands of the labour market, with all the attendant social problems.
No Help From The Historians
If there has been no significant improvement in the material well being of working people since the end of the Middle Ages, where has the money gone? What has happened to the enormous increases in wealth which - according to the historians - have been piling up as a consequence of the revolutions in Agriculture and Industry since the sixteenth century? What of Coke, and of Turnip Townsend, Jethro Tull, John Kay (flying shuttle) Hargreaves (spinning jenny), Arkwright (water frame), Crompton (mule)? What, to go further back, of the huge increase in wealth allegedly created by robbing the peasantry of Common Land and of the Glebe Lands; of the enclosures and engrossments from the Statute of Merton in 1236 onwards? The period has been called by Professor Hoskins "The Age of Plunder". Perhaps the increase in wealth refers to the plunderers only. Certainly, the conversaion of millions of acres from arable to the more primitive economy of sheep pasture could only have resulted in a reduction of wealth in absolute terms. But if it were spread among a disproportionately smaller number of people, then, as in Al Capone's bit of Chicago, the benefits to them could be greater.
Similarly with the later, Industrial Revolution. The conspicuous consumption of a tiny minority which had begun with the Tudors continued while the living standards of the people plunged. The nadirs appear to have been around 1600 and again in the time of the Napoleonic Wars. But if the richness of the rich might provide a clue as to where a lot of the wealth produced in earlier centuries had gone to, it is not good enough today. This is not a plea to pity the poor rich. The rich have never had any difficulty either themselves, or through their apologists, in guarding their interests, and need no help from me.
But we have had enough of confusion and false trails from the historians and economists. If you start off with the premiss (as most of them do) that the world is flat and square, and your reasoning is sound, then you will end up with the manifestly stupid conclusions they offer us: that the answer to surpluses is higher productivity, that wage cuts lead to greater prosperity, that war preparation leads to peace, that more regulations lead to freedom.
13. How We Got In This Mess.
Of the three pillars of the Market economy, two were created by driving the peasants off the common land; that is, capital in the form of privately owned land, and wage labour, in the form of the dispossessed peasantry. The third, production of goods for sale, Commodity Production, was ushered in by combining the first two.
The first of the Acts robbing the peasants of their land, the Statute of Merton was a s early as 1236 and the last, the Great Enclosure in 1845. If anyone objects that the peasants' title to the land was defective, one can reply that it was better than anybody else's. It no more belonged to the Lord of the Manor[9] than it belonged to the King, title in their case being only a symbolic one. For the rest, the peasants had not only occupied their strips and grazing for more than the twelve years 'nec clam, nec per vi, nec per consilio', as the Common Law required, but had done so since the dawn of time.
14. "People who had, since the beginning of time, been accustomed to shifting for themselves: ploughing, seed-time, and harvest, were deprived of the means to fend for themselves and their families. Many were killed resisting the pillage. Many starved to death. Others were driven into exile. The remainder sought employment from the people who had robbed them and were now completely at their mercy.
The graph illustrates how, steby by step, the yeomen of England were degraded. It also gives the lie to the sedulously peddled propaganda of the apologists that however hard times have been since the Tudors, they were worse before.
Living standards plunged from the time of Henry VIIIs' Accession, through his first attack on the currency in 1542 to the nadir from 1597 onward. The later part of that century was during the reign of Elizabeth I, Gloriana herself, so syphylitic, according to D.H. Lawrence, that she had lost all her hair and her teeth by the time she was thirty. This had come, with compliments from her father, Good King Hal himself.
The style of the ruling clique in those terrible years for the people was as splendid as unlimited wealth could make it. It can be said in their favour that they were not parochial in their ambitions. They plundered the Spanish abroad as they plundered their countrymen at home, and since the Spaniards had stolen the swag from the Indians in America they were not in a position to complain.
The apologists for the Market system from Hobbes onward have argued for its historical necessity. Some of them, e.g. Adam Smith and David Richardo: "could not see that the bourgeois system had a beginning and a middle, because that required that it had an end. So with fearless honesty and great perception they rationalized the existence of the status quo."[11. Michael Harrington: The Twilight of Capitalism; same point made in Lafargue's 'Evolution of Property']
15. "...the Market system, call it what you will is not an essential pre-condition of a free-society, of a world where people co-operate freely to produce all they need and then help themselves to the proceeds, be they porridge oats or Porsche cars. Marx's theory argues that the Market economy was a necessary stage to provide the machinery-for-abundance which could be used fully once the ownership of land and everything on it and under it was restored to the people. [12. "It is now questionable whether the road to the carefree society runs through the market economy, dominated as it is by piecemeal choices exercised by individuals in response to their immediate situation. Unfortunately, individual liberation does not make liberating for all individuals together." Fred Hirsh: Social Limits to Growth, p26 (Routledge & Kegan Paul.)]
But there never was a problem of machinery, either mechanical or social. The human race has been discovering needs and simultaneously satisfying them since time began, from the eyed needle to the flint arrow-head, from printing to the water-mill. To the charge that the Middle Ages didn't develop steam power, we can reply that the nineteenth century did not develop electronics and we ourselves have not developed who knows what?
The Market economy is a cul-de-sac leading nowhere. Much of that produced during the past five centuries, structures both physical and social, will be an enormous burden of garbage needing to be removed. Little of it could be used or adapted for a society producing only use-values.
Worthless Developments
The megapolis: London, Paris, New York, for example, cannot be utilised by a society organized on a basis of free-cooperation, organised from the bottom up rather than the top down. The first call will be for the bulldozers to level the commercial districts, spread topsoill, seed, and plant trees. The villages and small towns swallowed up in the miasma of London during recent centuries will re-discover their indentities. Camden Town will become a town again, with gardens and woods separating it from Highbury and Holborn.
More Correctives for the Historians.
The tendency of administrative centres and capital cities to develop tremendous centripetal forces is a feature of the Market economy wherever it develops, and is an important factor in the cancer-like growth which burdens the economy and simultaneously destroys it. But the phenomenon is not restricted to bourgeois society. Ancient Rome sucked the life blood, first out of Latium, then of Italy and finally out of the Empire, before the whole edifice collapsed in a cloud of dust when the Germanic "barbarians" blew on it. What was particularly barbarous about these latter people was that they exacted in taxes only a fraction of what the Roman state had been screwing out of the peasant farmers.
"A number of recent archeological publications provide evidence of a socio-economic transition that occured in the Roman Empire as it declined and fell ... As many as 40% of the bones in the early fifth century midden and 65% in the later fifth century midden are from pigs. The traditional balanced blend of meat consumption and stock rearing on rural lines seems to have been abandoned in favour of the short-term fast production of pork ... The major cities, in other words, were booming and attracting the rural poor, the recipients of the pork dole,[13] leaving agrideserti in the provinces, as Whittaker notes."[14]
17. "Tiberius Gracchus proposed in his Land Act of 133 B. C. that the urban citizens of Rome be settled on the common land, the 'ager publicus':
"The wild beasts of Italy have dens and holes to hide in; but when the wars are over and the brave men who have spilt their blood for her come home again, they find nothing that is theirs but the daylight and the air. Hearthless and homeless, they must take their wives and families and tramp the roads like beggars ... They fight and fall to sserve no other end but to multiply the possessions and comforts of the rich. We call them Masters of the World and not a man among them all has a square foot of ground that he can call his own."[17. C.E. Robinson: History of Roman Republic, p.235 (Methuen 1947)]
Fifteen hundred years later the unfrocked priest John Ball argued the same thing in his sermon at Blackheath during the Peasants Revolt: "Matters will not go well in England until all things are held in common."[18. Froissart's Chronicles] Thomas More also proposed the ending of servile labour in his Utopia, as did the Diggers during the English Civil War. "The Diggers agreed with the Levellers that wage labourers were unfree; but they drew the conclusion that wage-labour should be abolished."[19. Christopher Hill: The Century of Revolution, p. 132 (Nelson 1967)]
Marxists characterissed all these movements as Utopian Socialism[20] because they were not rooted in the potential plenty[21] that they thought Capitalism had made possible. But they were suffering from a lack of information regarding the economic well-being of earlier societies as they suffered from a lack of information regarding the social organisation of primitive peoples until it was made good by the work of Henry Lewis Morganin his "Ancient Society".
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22. "Barring periods of actual starvation - extremely rare in the Western World, and equally rare in the Third World before the chaos wrought by Imperialism - there has always been enough cheap carbohydrate to fill stomachs with. But the fact that small stature and poverty tend to go together, demonstrates that many people have not reached and still are not reaching their physical potential. Pre-war British working class children averaged two or three inches less in height than their public school counterparts. And American-born descendants of Chinese and Japanese in California are frequently over six feet in height, as are overseas Chinese and Japanese in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Pacific. But if body size and weight is unquestionably a function of protein intake, there is another aspect which appears to be ignored."
23. "In the 1950's the great Brazilian biologist and first head of the F.A.O., Josue de Castro[2] exposed the canard of poor people's lust and pointed out what should not have needed pointing out, i.e. that fertility is closely connected to nutrition, that poor people have lots of children if their protein intake is low. The fact is well enough known to farmers. Only a fruit can be encouraged to do so by ring-barking, so reducing the amount of food they take up. Dennis Carter, a stockfarmer in the Vale of Gloucester tells me that if he has trouble getting a cow in calf he "put her down in the bottom field. There isn't much feed there and it usually works after three or four weeks." And so with people.
Archeology Debunks History.
Historians have parroted the information for centuries that our ancestors were dwarfs, died young, and in the winter ate rotten meat because they could not afford to buy expensive imported spices to preserve it and disguise its flavour. The originator of this nonsense, Thomas Hobbes, was writing during the English Civil War, which explains his concern with "continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."[3] Archeology which tends to deal more with facts and less with opinions has recently been producing evidence which does not support these public relations officers of the status quo. Numerous skeletons have been exhumed from half a millenium to half a million years old, which appear quite generously proportioned. A few miles from where I write, more than four hundred Romano-British skeletons were dug up in the 1970's at Cirencester.[4. McWhirr, Viner, Welff: Romano-British Cemeteries at Cirencester (Cirencester Excavation Cttee. 1982] The mean height of the males was five feet six and a half inches and for females five foot two. Bearing in mind that these were Ancient Britons i.e. the ancestors of the present day Welsh and Cornish and Bretons, their descendants don't seem to have increased in stature overmuch. And if the tallest of the Italo-Celts did not exceed six feet, the north of this country of Cloucestershire yielded the bones of a seven foot Saxon warrior in the decade before.
One does not have to invoke an arcadian paradise in earlier societies to counter Hobbes' judgement. He was writing during the Civil War, a turncoat, in fear of his life, and life could not have been much more nasty, brutish, and short, than it was for him in the 17th century."
24. "Richard Hodges of Sheffield University, Colin Renfrew at CAmbridge, are among many in Britain and on the Continent, citing the results from numerous digs which do not square with the prejudices of the majority of historians. Recent excavations at Southampton, York, East Aglia, and the Dorestad by the Dutch State Archeological Service have yielded evidence of levels of consumption that many would envy today:
"...Six Dials site in Southampton ... The rubbish in these pits, like the rubbish buried in Dorestad and Ipswich shows that the community was well fed on livestock, presumably from the surrounding estates. Field surveys in Middle Rhineland and in various parts of Italy have begun to emphasise the modest scale of rural settlement at this time. There is, in fact, much to suggest that peasants had a comparatively high level of nutrition from maintaining mixed farming regimes in this pre-market environment as opposed to producing cash crops of one form or another."[6. Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse: Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe.]
Professor Renfrew protests at the way the subject has been treated: "Dark Ages .. one of their characteristics is a slow development in the study of their archeology hampered both by the tendency among historian to accept as evidence traditional narratives first set down in writing some centuries after the collapse [of Rome?] ... and by focusing on the larger and more obvious central place sites of the vanished state." [7. Colin Renfrew: Systems Collapse as Social Transformation]"
25. "We have been told in earlier societies, most of the animals were killed off in the autumn because of the difficulty of feeding them through the winter. Evidence from the digs shows that many of the beasts were four years old at slaughter - more 'boeuf a la bourgignonne' than lightly grilled. But how did this nonsense ever gain credence anyway? Nonesense, because of the question: what had the human race been doing through all those yawning eons of evolution? It wasn't really necessary to wait for the archeologists to overturn this particular fiction. The Roman poet Horace, writing of the coming of spring says: "The beasts are no longer content in the stalls, nor the ploughman by his fire"[8]. This is nearly a thousand years before the period we are considering, and they were clearly stall-feeding their animals then."
"Down through the ages society seems to have been able to spare people from the work of producing the necessities of life to build monuments, from the Pyramids at Gizeh to the Great Wall of China. It is no answer to say that these things were built by slaves, even if that were true of all of them, which it is not. Somebody had to be producing the food, clothing and shelter for the slaves, as well as guarding them. In any case, slaves are extremely inefficient producers and invoking the use of them only complicates the problem.
No-one has yet provided a satisfactory explanation of how bronze age people - and there could not have been many of them - were able to quarry the "blue stones" and transport them from Prescelly in West Wales 200 miles to Stonehenge, eighty of them, weighing some six tons each. And still in Wiltshire at about the same period:
"The construction of Silbury Hill, which perhaps required as much as twenty million man hours from the builders, makes a convenient, as well as a prominent monument to the end of one era and the beginning of another. A C14 (radioactive carbon) date suggest that it was erected about 2,300 - 2,200 B.C."[9. Keith Branigan: Prehistoric Britain]
Some three thousand years later during the 8th century AD a dyke wasa engineered allegedly at the order of King Offa, one of the bewildering array of petty chieftains in Britain during the Dark Ages, with the apparent aim of keeping the Welsh out. One hundred and twenty miles long, as the crow flies, but nearer two hundred in actuality, sixty feet wide, twenty five feet deep, with an embankment surmounted by a palisade and with towers every few miles. It shows "a mastery of broken terrain" in the words of archeologist Sir Cyril Fox.[10]"
"I asked Peter Grimshaw of Grimshaw, Kinnear, Ltd. Cheltenham, to quote for rebuilding Offa's Dyke. His figure was 70 - 80 pence per cubic metre for excavation and P25 per metre for the security fence; roughly P50 million for the job, with the latest equipment. As for 8th century technology, iron picks, and wooden shovels? Windlasses to haul the wheelbarrows up to the top of the bank? They must have had an awful lot of free time after getting in what they saw as the necessities of life.
"In the space of three centuries, from 1050 to 1350, France quarried millions of tons of stone to build 80 cathedrals, 500 great churches, and tens of thousands of parish churches. France quarried more stone in these three centuries than ancient Egypt in the whole of its history, even though the Great Pyramid alone has a volume of two and a half million metres .... There was during the Middle ages a church for every two hundred inhabitants so the surface covered by the temples of the faith were considerable in relation to the modest dimensions of the cities. We know taht in the cities of Norwich, Lincoln and York, - cities of 5,000 to 10,000 inhabitants, there were respectively 50, 49, and 41 churches."[12. Jean Gimpel: Les Batisseurs de Catedrales]
No Money for Developments.
In the last forty years of the 18th century more than a thousand miles of canal, complete with tunnels and locks, were completed in England. Many more were added in the 19th century together with thousands of miles of railways, with their embankments and cuttings. Yet plans to build a barrage across the Severn have languished for a century or more, and for a tunnel from Dover to Calais, even longer. The failure of the City of London to come up with the capital even for commencing in the latter scheme in early 1987 brought an angry response from the Thatcher government."
28. "Plenty never was a problem. The need for a thing and the means for supplying it arose simultaneously. But plenty is a problem for the Market economy. It threatens the collapse of the market mechanism. It has been justly said that Capitalism is the Organisation of Scarcity. Without a situation of scarcity, the entrepreneur has no reason for getting out of bed. In this way deprivation, poverty, is built into the system. Historical evidence is not lacking. Once the bourgeois system really got under way in the 16th century the poor appeared as a social phenomenon. The "flogging of sturdy beggars", the Poor Law of 1603, were the inevitable outcome of Henry VIII's seizure of glebe lands and the quickening pace of enclosures. For the first time in history, plenty was bad news. Harvest festival became harvest funeral.
There had been poor laws before, as early as 1349, but even the bourgeois apologists do not pay them the attention they are obliged to devote to the catastrophes beginning a couple of centuries later under Henry."
"[In the Original Affluent Society] Professor Sahlins was able to demonstrate that palaeolithic people surviving into our own century in the Australian and Kalahari Deserts, in Papua and New Guinea did not make heavy weather of the work acquiring what they saw as the necessities of life. Two or three hours a day sufficed to collect the berries, shoot the game, dig the roots."
"To question the basis upon which the world since the Tudors has been developing is to invite the condescension that people reserve for brain damaged children. Marx left no doubt about where his sympathies lay. He said that the Bourgeois System had rescued the population of England from the idiocy of rural life. [15. Communist Manifesto] The great critic of bourgeois society ranged himself on the side of the bourgeoisie when it came to considering earlier societies. But this is understandable. The first and arguably, still the greatest work of research into wages and prices from the thirteenth century onwards, that of Professor Thorold Rogers, M.P., was not published until 1884, the year after Marx's death. "Six Centuries of Work and Wages"[16] compressed into one volume much of the material gathered into his seven volume "History of Agriculture and Prices in England" begun twenty years earlier. The conclusions of Professor Rogers were reinforced with the publication of the first volume in 1939 of a series entitled "Prices and Wages in England, from the Twelfth to the Nineteenth Century",[17] by Lord Beveridge and his research team.
In the 1950's Professor Phelps Brown and Miss Sheila Hopkins of the London School of Economics published graphs in the journal "Economica" [1955 p.195 and Economica 1956 p.296] (Fig 1 referred to earlier) accompanied by two articles drawing on these and other researchers which showed that living standards of building workers measured by a "unit of consumables" were no higher at the end of the Nineteenth Century than they were at the end of the Fifteenth Century. The L.S.E. researchers showed commendable academic restraints; it could be argued that they settled for a weakened conclusion. A more rigorous approach might provide even less comfort for those who hold that we have never had it so good. The "unit of consumable" compares potatoes with barley, cod with sheep, tea and sugar with malt, and so transgresses the first rule of statistics: that you can only compare like with like. Which brings us back to housebricks and roof tiles."
"The prices of houses in the Fifteenth Century are available. That is not the problem. John Burnett cities a 1400 square feet house being built in Gloucester "all the wood of oak" in 1483 for [P]14.[19. History of the Price of Living] This was less than two and a half years take home pay for our building tradesmen. Lucky the bricklayer or carpenter who could buy the same today. The house would almost certainly have been a timber frame structure on stone or brick foundations.
46. "The costs of controlling, policing, recording, mediating and otherwise dealing with the system take up the energies of nine tenths of the working population. Only one tenth is producing wealth, and many of those would have their jobs phased out in a rationally ordered economic system. Out of a working population of some 26 million, less than one million produce all of our food, clothing and shelter, and distraction. Add in medical and educational services and the total is less than ten per cent of the whole."
Smith's Law "Adam Smith propounded the doctrine that if everybody adopted the attitude: "Up ladder, I'm inboard", everything would be fine in the long run. "An invisible hand" would see that we were all taken care of. Ken Smith is now propounding the doctrine that where the prevailing mode of production takes the form of commodities, the bad drives out the good and the worse drives out the bad. Thus the nut and bolt is replaced by the spot weld, which is replaced by a self-tapping screw, which is replaced by a dab of adhesive, which is why everything we buy falls to pieces and can't be repaired."
47. Gresham's Law "Gresham argued that bad money, i.e. inferior metal, drives out good. If this law holds good for money, which is a substitute for all commodities, then it holds good for all those commodities."
48. "David Ricardo's Theory of Comparative Advantage is to a great extent the same division of labour extended to nation-states, colonies, geographical and metropolitan areas, and produces ills parallelling those of manual division. These range from the waste involved in the exercise of taking in each other country's washing, to trade wars, monoculture, struggles for control of cash crops, plundering of natural resources instead of husbanding them, Colonialism, Imperialism, War, Tariffs and "Non-Tariff Barriers", as economic gamesmanship is called."
49. "But tracking down the patches of cultivation were difficult and collecting the taxes even more difficult. Three hundred dragoons were sent out from Gloucester along the road to Cheltenham to suppress the cultivations but they were met by six hundred peasants who were armed, if only with makeshift weapons, who had different ideas. The dragoons withdrew, but then began a war of attrition, galloping through the plants at sundry times and places, the peasants went back to cabbages and leeks, and tobacco came from Virginia through Bristol where it was conscientiousy taxed. "
60. "Yields [in the UK] are among the highest in the world; wheat at more than five tons to the acre, for example. This compares with North America where one ton is the norm, curiously enough, not much more than the average yield in Medieval England. But this arises from extensive agriculture of Canada and the U.S. with their limitless plains. Europeans have to squeeze more out of their plots."
"Historically this yield was effected by good husbandry; manuring, marling, liming."
63. Wartime Agriculture. "The agricultural depression was interrupted by World War I when foreign food imports were almost cut off by German U boat attacks. The stimulus to cultivation and stock rearing did not last much longer than the end of the war, however. By the middle 1920's there was less land under the plough in England than there had been in the Domesday Book, nearly 900 years before, when the population was one thirtieth of the size![6. M.M. Postan : The Medieval Economy and Society (Penguin 1975) : "the aggregate acreage represented by the Domesday ploughlands was at least as gret as, and in most Midland counties greater than, the areas under plough during the periods of high farming in the nineteenth century."]
64. "The tendency to import Britain's food and drink requirements rather than rely on home-produced goods had begun early. Large quantities of wine were imported in the Middle Ages but it was not a staple of diet, despite the quantities involved, three million gallons annually in the fifteenth century, one for every man, women and child in the country.[8]
From the eighteenth century on, however, exotics like cane sugar, tea, and coffee were imported to join potatoes as new and important items of diet, to the chagrin of commentators like Cobbett. He felt that tea and potatoes were no substitute for the bread and ale of old England.[9]"