MOTIVES FOR AND RESULTS OF ENCLOSURE 561 
agricultural distress, which caused very widespread disaster; AD Lay 
the capitalists may have held out longer than the small ’ 
farmers, but many of them were forced to succumb? 
The small farmers who continued to devote themselves yada tioy. 
bo cattle-breeding and dairy farming, also found themselves produce 
in serious difficulties. The price of these products did not 
rise correspondingly with the price of corn; indeed there 
was a relative fall of price, as the labouring population which 
was forced to pay more for bread, found it necessary to 
economise in other articles of diet?., The business of the 
small farmer became less and less remunerative during the 
last decade of the eighteenth century and the beginning of 
the nineteenth, while there was an eager demand for every 
rood of land that could be utilised for the growth of corn, 
Some of the yeomen were doubtless bought out, and some 
were crowded out, but in the changed conditions they could 
not maintain themselves by their traditional husbandry. 
Some of the other changes of the times were specially and were 
burdensome to the small farmers, as compared with their aed y 
wealthier neighbours. They were heavily charged for the ¥ 
maintenance of the poor, especially at the close of the 
eighteenth century after the adoption of the Speenhamland 
policy? of granting allowances out of rates in addition to 
wages. The small holder was a rate-payer and had to 
make increased contributions; since the labourers were not 
maintained by the wages paid by their employers, but partly 
subsisted on poor-relief, it followed that the small holders 
were taxed for the benefit of the large farmerst, All the 
circumstances of the day combined to render the position 
of the small farmer untenable. «Perhaps it may not be an ex- 
travagant conjecture to ventureb, if one were to affirm that if 
the small farmers should remain under a pressure of poor’s 
i About the year 1782 a number of country banks had been formed ; this was 
2 sign of the increased facilities for saving money and for applying capital to land 
(Tooke, 1. 198) ; but in 1792, when prices were low, a considerable proportion of 
these country banks appear to have got into difficulties: there were a large 
number of failures in that and the following year, so that the whole credit system 
nf the country (75. 195) was seriously affected. 
2 Levy, op. cit. 17, 58. 
8 That this policy was practically in operation for some years before is shown 
oy David Davies, Case of Labourers in Husbandry (1795), p. 25. 
1 Annals of Agr. xxxvm. 106. 109. 5 7h 100