"THE OLD DAYS"
SIR,—Mr. Fairfield is pleased to treat my figures with ribaldry. He should, however, transfer his statistical talent to Hasbach, from whose History of the English Agricultural Labourer (t908), a standard work, I obtained the larger item. On page 386 of English Farming, Past and Present, Lord Ernle wrote: " What with the turning over of arable land to grass (2f million acres between 1872 and 1900) . . . something like a - third of the labouring population left the land in the last quarter of the nineteenth century." From trustworthy records of my own region, I find that between 1876-81 the sheep population of the Chilterns declined by ro5,000, while the yeoman farmers in the same region decreased in forty years up to 1914 from 13o to five. Between 1874 and 1914, 76,000 acres went out of cultivation in Oxfordshire alone. Sir George Stapledon writes in The Land (page 49) that the increase of urban acreage over agricultural between 1901 and 193t was 655,836 acres. The late Christopher Tumor in Yeoman Calling puts the decline of the land- workers from 1921 onwards at 300,000. In 1935, Sir George Stapledon put the entire rural population at 6.6 per cent. of the whole and in the first half of the eighteenth century at 25 per cent• for farmers alone, excluding the figures of rural industries. Whether Hasbach was correct in his estimate I do not know, but these supplementary ones do suggest that he was not far wrong.
Mr. Fairfield forgets that my article was an essay, not a statistical report. When I wrote " no sheep . . . no muck," I did not literally mean that arable sheep were extinct and farmyard manure was an anachronism in England. I meant that the use of both was very much rarer than it was half a century ago, and this is unquestionable.—Yours
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