Welsh Journals

English version of Tolstoy's War and Peace appeared in New York in 1642 (p. 202 n.3)! J. GWYNN WILLIAMS Bangor THE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION. By Eric Kerridge. Allen and Unwin, 1967. Pp. 428. 84s. The claims which are made on behalf of Dr. Kerridge's book on the flap of its dust-jacket seem uncompromising in the extreme: 'He disproves the mythical agricultural revolution previous writers have located in the years between 1750 and 1850. This startling result has been achieved by the simple and effective means of setting aside secondary works on the subject and seeking the truth in original and ancient literary evidence he has succeeded in overthrowing the relevant arguments of virtually all previous books on agriculture and economic history.' The historian who deliberately sets aside all secondary works regardless of their merit is a fool. Dr. Kerridge is no fool and his bibliography and footnotes show that he is familiar not only with printed works but with the most recent postgraduate research on early modern agriculture. However, in his use of these secondary works he is selective to a degree that seems deliberately designed to mislead the general reader. On his first page he writes: 'The original conception of the agricultural revolution has hardly been changed. Adherence is still given to the view that the agricultural revolution, or the opening stages of it, coincided by a fortunate chance, with the industrial revolution, which itself commenced with the accession of George III and was more or less complete in time for the Great Reform Bill of 1832. The current statement of this standpoint asserts that by 1760 "in no part of Britain-not even in Norfolk itself- were the innova- tions adopted on such a scale as to make it possible to speak of an agricultural, or even an agrarian revolution" Dr. Kerridge's own assertion is, of course, nonsense and it is significant that the only works which he quotes as giving this 'current statement' are Lord Ernie's English Farming Past and Present, published in 1927, and T. S. Ashton's Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830, published in 1948. Dr. Kerridge knows quite well that no respectable historian still believes that agricultural change began with the accession of George III. In recent years the work of Chambers, Fussell, Havinden, Jones, Mingay and others, not least among them Dr. Kerridge himself, has completely transformed our ideas about English agriculture in the early modern period. It is now generally accepted that in the two centuries or so before 1750 very far- reaching agricultural changes occurred and, in consequence, the picture of the classical agricultural- revolution has been modified. To that extent Dr. Kerridge's book is less novel than he would have us believe. There is, however, a great deal of individuality in this book, and Dr. Kerridge challenges, often implicitly rather than explicitly, many of