At that point, the term “Enclosure” became more and more popular. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, most people in Britain lived in open field villages. They relied on subsistence farming which produced just enough food for peasants or tenants of the land and hardly did they get any extra. Peasants at that time were given a number of long narrow strips to plant their crops. However, from the 16th century onwards, landowners started turning open fields into enclosed paddocks that were assigned to a single farmer. The landowners wanted to bring their lands under tighter control and make them more productive.
Figure 1. Land in England without common or common fields at the end of the seventeenth century. Reprinted from Atlas of
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British Agriculture 1700-1800 Figure 2. British Agriculture innovations from 1700 to 1800. Reprinted from The Routledge Atlas of British History (5th ed.) (p. 74), by M. Gilbert, 2011, London: Routledge. Copyright 2011 by Martin Gilbert. Reprinted with permission.
+ The seed drill could drill a hole, drop a seed in and cover the soil within one action, which protected seeds from being eaten by birds, or being blown away by wind. Moreover, it allowed the farmers sew three rows of seed at a time, which save them much time. This seed drill dramatically improved the production so greatly that later Britain was labeled as the “Granary of Europe”.
+ In 1730 the Rotherham plough was applied in agriculture. With an iron tip and a curved moldboard, it was lighter and easier to use. It required two horses rather than four and one plough. It benefited by cutting labor cost and saving time.
+ Dutch four crop rotation system was also introduced. It rotated wheat, turnip, barley, cloves, for examples, through four fields. Some cloves helped nourish the soil with nutrients which in turn would produce better wheat and barley crops the following years. In winter months, turnips were used to feed livestock, meaning that farmers were no longer too worried about food