Millennium

by Ian Mortimer

  Ordinary people noticed the difference in the quality of the roads too. In the sixteenth century it could take as much as a week to travel the 215 miles from Plymouth to London. In the early nineteenth century rival coach companies were advertising in the local papers that they could get you there in 32 hours: an average speed of 6.7 m.p.h. – not far short of the 7.3 m.p.h. that Lieutenant Lapenotiere achieved.3 That stagecoach journey also cost a lot less than it had done a hundred years earlier. A yeoman travelling from Plymouth to London before 1750 had to pay for his own accommodation and subsistence, as well as stabling and fodder for his horses. For a week’s travel, this amounted to a hefty sum. Over the next fifty years costs went down, comfort went up and speeds increased. The stagecoach companies that whisked travellers to London in 1800 advertised their ‘extraordinary cheapness’. Coach design also improved – especially after the introduction of John Besant’s patent mail coach in 1787. The coaches travelled non-stop, so there was no need for a chamber at an inn every night, and the cost of the horses was shared between the multiple occupants of the vehicle.

  In France, travel was similarly transformed. The engineer Pierre-Marie-Jérôme Trésaguet developed a method of building a concave self-draining road covered in small chippings that hugely improved the quality of coach travel. The progressive French government minister Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot reorganised the state mail coach service in 1775, slashing the time it took to pass information around the country. In 1765 it took twelve days to send a message from Paris to Marseilles and fifteen to reach Toulouse; in 1780 both places could be contacted within eight days.4 This was a crucial improvement for the administration of a large country like France. If it took eight days for news of a problem to reach the capital it would also take eight days to send an order back directing what was to be done. Halving the time to Toulouse in each direction meant the remedy was supplied more than two weeks sooner.

  The spread of information was facilitated by another eighteenth-century development – the newspaper. Occasional newsletters had been circulated in the previous century but few had gone on to appear regularly. The French Gazette de France was first published in 1631; the Spanish La Gazeta in 1661; the Italian Gazetta di Mantova in 1664; and the English London Gazette (formerly the Oxford Gazette) in 1665; but these were all formal weekly publications. The first British provincial paper, The Norwich Post, appeared in 1701, and the first daily newspaper, The Daily Courant, hit the London newsstands the following year. The numbers of papers then grew quickly on both sides of the Atlantic. The Boston News-Letter, the first regularly published paper in the New World, appeared from 1704. By 1775 42 newspapers were being sold in the American colonies. Several of these – including the New York Journal and the Philadelphia Evening Post – took a highly partisan line against the British in the struggle for independence: a French visitor to the States commented that ‘without newspapers the American Revolution would never have succeeded’. By 1800 there were 178 weekly publications and 24 daily newspapers in the United States. The press proved even more important in the French Revolution: in the last six months of 1789 more than 250 newspapers were established.5 Of course, these newspapers reached their readers via the newly improved road systems. The combination of print and transport meant that the previous centuries’ slow, irregular trickle of news became a rapid flood. It marked the beginning of mass communication between governments and their people, even in the most obscure places. News of Trafalgar, for example, came to Moretonhampstead on 7 November 1805 from Crockernwell, a village through which Lapenotière had passed on 4 November. Lapenotière had reached London in time for the news to be printed in the London Gazette for 6 November – copies of which were delivered to Moreton on the 9th. Within three or four days of a government announcement, therefore, it could reach the whole of the British Isles. That speed of communication was markedly different from earlier centuries, when even the death of the king might not be known in some remote places until weeks after the event.6

  What the new roads did for travel, the waterways did for goods traffic. In 1600 the easiest way to transport goods safely through France was to use the great rivers of the Loire, Seine, Saône and Rhone. The problem was that at some point, the cargoes had to be transferred from one river to another, and that was not an easy task. The 35-mile Briare Canal, with 40 locks rising 128 feet and then dropping 266 feet, which linked the Seine and the Loire, was finished in 1642. The even more ambitious 150-mile Canal du Midi was built in 1666–81 to connect the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In Germany, the rivers Oder, Elbe and Weser were all linked by canals in the early eighteenth century. In England, the engineer James Brindley oversaw the construction of the Bridgewater Canal, which opened in 1761. It had been commissioned by the duke of Bridgewater, who, inspired by the Canal du Midi, realised the benefits of using waterways to transport his coal from Worsley to Manchester. That success proved the catalyst for a further 4,000 miles of canals to be built in England over the next 50 years. Such cheap means of transporting the fuel necessary for the expanding industries proved vitally important to Europe’s economic development. With the opening of the Canal du Centre in 1784, the river systems of the Seine and Saône – and thus the Rhône – were joined, allowing heavy cargoes to be transported directly from Rouen, Paris and the English Channel to the Mediterranean.

  It might come as a surprise to hear that the origins of aviation also lie in the eighteenth century. For thousands of years people had attempted to fly, and now they finally did it. On 21 November 1783 Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier launched the first manned flight in Paris. The brave men in the basket of that hot-air balloon, which was made of sackcloth and paper, were Pilatre de Rozier and the Marquis d’Arlandes. Ten days later Jacques Charles and Nicolas-Louis Robert pioneered the first manned hydrogen balloon flight in Paris. All those men who had thrown themselves off medieval church towers with strapped-on wings, beating the air furiously as they plummeted to their deaths; all those natural philosophers who, since at least the time of Roger Bacon in the thirteenth century, had designed contraptions so that Man could fly like birds – all of them were finally vindicated in their belief that human flight was possible, albeit not in the ways they had imagined.

  The whole of Europe now went balloon-crazy. The names of courageous aviators spread rapidly across the continent. In Britain, James Tytler made the first flight in Edinburgh in August 1784; Vincenzo Lunardi took to the air in London the following month. In October Jean-Pierre Blanchard travelled 70 miles in a hydrogen balloon across southern England. The editor of The London Magazine who reported these flights was most sceptical about the whole craze and concluded:

  However [much] such exhibitions may gratify the idle and lounging part of society, it is attended with a very serious loss to people in business. It is scarcely to be conceived what a deal of time has been trifled away, from first to last, by the various exhibitions of this bungling and mis-shapen smoke-bag.7

  Shortly afterwards, on 7 January 1785, Blanchard together with an American patron, Dr John Jefferies, flew across the English Channel, reaching a height of 4,500 feet. After two and a half hours, having thrown everything out of the basket except themselves, they flew over Calais. It was an astonishing achievement. When Blanchard arrived in Paris on 11 January, there was no talk of ‘bungling and mis-shapen smoke-bags’. Rather it was reported that

  [Blanchard’s] appearance there had much the appearance of a triumph. Flags were displayed, guns fired, the bells set a ringing, & the magistrates went in procession to meet him and gave him as well as his companion the freedom of the city in a gold box. He was presented soon after at Versailles to the king, who . . . [granted] our hardy adventurer a bounty of 12,000 livres (£525) and an annuity of 1,200 livres (£52 10s.).8

  Hundreds of balloon exhibitions took place in Europe and America. In 1797 André Garnerin pioneered the use of folded silk parachutes for the emergency evacuation of balloons, starting a new craze with which to wow t
he crowds. But that London Magazine editor was not so far from the mark. Balloon flight remained almost entirely a spectator event, a fairground novelty, without any practical application. It is hugely ironic that after so many centuries of dreaming of flight, all mankind could do with this new invention was to stare up at it, and gawp.

  The Agricultural Revolution

  Any reader who has laboured through this book this far will be aware by now that the greatest ongoing challenge facing our ancestors was the unreliable and inadequate supply of food. The eighteenth century did not solve this problem but it did see significant advances in agricultural management that led to higher grain and livestock yields, which went a long way to removing the fear of starvation.

  The Agricultural Revolution is traditionally said to have originated in England with a handful of clever innovators. There was Jethro Tull, an inventor of farm machinery such as the seed drill, first outlined in his book Horse-hoeing Husbandry in 1733. There was his contemporary, Lord Townshend, the pioneer of the ‘Norfolk Rotation’ system, which involved planting turnips, clover, wheat and barley on the land in succession – hence his nickname, ‘Turnip Townshend’. And then there was Robert Bakewell and the brothers Charles and Robert Collings, who advocated the selective breeding of livestock. It all seems to add up to a pretty picture of progressive landowners pioneering improvements – too pretty, in fact, for today’s academic historians. According to one of them, it is all a ‘grossly misleading caricature’. Bakewell is dismissed because one variety of his livestock has subsequently died out, and Lord Townshend because he clearly did not personally introduce the use of turnips for enriching the soil. The same historian disregards another famous agricultural reformer, Thomas Coke, earl of Leicester, for being just a ‘great publicist (especially of his own achievements)’.9

  The agricultural reformers have perhaps been over-praised in the past but they deserve more credit than these revisionist historians now give them. For a start, ‘great publicists’ were exactly what was needed for a nationwide change in long-established agricultural practices. And while Jethro Tull’s book did not cause farmers to rush out and commission machines for sowing crops – the editors admitted as much in their preface to the fourth edition in 1762 – it did make people aware that mechanical improvement was possible. ‘Turnip’ Townshend may well have been stretching the truth in claiming that he introduced turnips to Norfolk but the fact that a peer of the realm became identified with such a humble way of improving land was excellent publicity that helped to spread the practice among the landowning classes and tenant farmers alike. In short, the Agricultural Revolution only came about because a whole series of reformers changed perceptions of how profitable farming could be. If you consider Robert Bakewell’s prize sheep and the Collingses’ prize cattle in this light, it does not matter that one of their breeds died out. It was not so much their particular advances in breeding that made the difference but that farmers began to realise that animals did not have to remain the same size and shape as they had been since Noah’s Ark struck dry land. Why rear scrawny sheep with little meat when you could produce large, fat ones, which sold for a lot more? When Bakewell started charging 80 guineas (£84) or more for the hire of his prize ram, the entire farming community talked about it. What marvellous publicity for the improvement of agricultural methods was that!

  Like the explorers of the sixteenth century and the natural philosophers of the seventeenth, the agricultural reformers shared their discoveries with others. Indeed, they boasted of them. Why did they reveal their trade secrets? Many of them saw themselves as scientists; quite a few were elected as Fellows of the Royal Society. We might suspect that some who had made their money in trade and bought a country estate dedicated themselves to improving farming methods in order to be able to take their place more easily among the landed gentry. One agricultural improver who deserves to be mentioned in this respect is the businessman-turned-landowner John Mortimer (no relation to the author), who bought an estate in Essex and set about improving it. He was elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society in December 1705, five months before Lord Townshend. Mortimer’s two-volume work, The Whole Art of Husbandry or the Way of Managing and Improving Land, appeared in 1707 and went into a fourth edition in 1716. Among his many observations on how to improve farming he mentions the benefits of turnips as a winter crop for cattle, and clover for the soil, as well as the general efficiency of mixed husbandry.10 He recommends potatoes as an easy crop to grow, and especially promotes them for rearing pigs. He goes into great detail about the best way of improving the land in each county with dung, clover and ray-grass. It was systematic, scientifically minded landowners like Mortimer who helped bring about the Agricultural Revolution – by communicating their personal breakthroughs to large numbers of other landowners and lesser farmers.

  Another reason for giving the reformers more credit is that they introduced the idea of enterprise to farming. Hitherto land had delivered a stable income but you could not gain great wealth from it; it was rather a means of consolidating wealth earned elsewhere. The reforming landowners now wanted improved returns from their land – and they were prepared to invest to get them. They were not mere dilettantes. Consider the low-lying Romney Marshes in south-east England. For centuries these had been little more than breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and the local people were blighted by malaria. The landlords of the region now started to turn what had been a dank and morbid deathtrap into some of the richest pasture in England. They did not do this to save the local inhabitants from malaria; they did it for profit. The hope of increased yields drove other landowners to try out ‘Turnip’ Townshend’s four-field Norfolk Rotation system. With this method there was no longer any need to leave fields fallow to restore the ground’s depleted nutrients as had been necessary in the past. The clover now added nitrates to the soil and was good for the cattle to eat, and the turnips similarly provided animal feed throughout the winter. The profit motive also drove yeomen farmers to adopt new plough designs at the end of the century.11 Money might not always be the best incentive to do something but in the eighteenth century it had the universally welcome consequence of producing more food.

  For tenant farmers, profit was not just to be reckoned in pounds, shillings and pence but also in terms of security. In this context, the humble potato played an increasingly significant role. It became a staple crop for workers in the north-west of England in the late seventeenth century and spread slowly south until it took off in the late eighteenth. In the fields around Moreton it was used for breaking up the soil and preparing the way for corn to be sown, as well as providing nutrition in its own right. It proved excellent insurance against the failure of a grain harvest. Not only was it cheap and easy to grow, it provided two and a half times as many kilocalories as wheat. When you are living on the breadline and trying to feed a growing family, that is an innovation worth developing.12

  The significance of the reformers’ new methods should not be judged by the reputation of any one reformer but by the agricultural yields subsequently produced. In medieval England, 10.5 million acres had provided 49.5 million bushels of wheat every year; in 1800, 11.5 million acres yielded 140 million bushels.13 In addition, the land sustained 133 per cent more cattle, 33 per cent extra sheep and 50 per cent more pigs. All these animals were far larger than their medieval counterparts. The average cow that had provided just 168 pounds of meat in the Middle Ages now yielded 600 pounds; the average sheep that had provided 22 pounds of meat now gave 70 pounds; and the amount of meat from pigs rose from 64 pounds to 100 pounds.14 Extra wool and leather were by-products, as was the extra dung that was returned to the soil to maintain the agricultural cycle. Selectively bred animals matured more quickly and so produced more meat at a faster rate. Every country fair now awarded prizes for the largest cow, pig and sheep. The paintings that landowners commissioned show how proud they were of their prize animals, the results of their own breeding programmes. The enclosure of common
land further added to the efficiencies of farming when it was taken over by a landlord keen to intensify productivity. The resulting improved supply of food allowed the population of England to rise from 5.21 million to 8.67 million over the course of the century – an increase of about 80 per cent.

  The Agricultural Revolution was not just confined to England. There were reformers across Europe and population growth on a scale that had not previously been witnessed. This was not just due to the fact that more food helped people to survive the harsh winters. Many girls benefited from an improved diet and consequently the age of menarche started to drop, allowing each female to have more children.15 The populations of France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Denmark rose by about a third; in Sweden and Norway they rose by two thirds and in Ireland by almost 90 per cent. The population of the continent as a whole increased by more than 50 per cent, from 125 to 195 million – a far higher total than ever before. This highlights the importance of a shared body of ideas and values that set landlords and tenants on a common path – towards wealth for the former and safety from starvation for the latter.

  Enlightenment liberalism

  Immanuel Kant described the Enlightenment as the ability to think for oneself, free from convention and dogma. Given such a broad definition, it is hardly surprising that it has been treated as an enormously elastic term. It is frequently taken to be a synonym for all the changes that distinguish the breezy, elegant world of Jane Austen’s novels from the dark depths of the witch-burning seventeenth century. It is an intellectual bucket into which scientific concepts and rationalist theories are idly tossed, along with the rise of political economy and the decline of superstition. In that general sense, the Enlightenment started with Francis Bacon and Galileo in the early seventeenth century, incorporated the Scientific Revolution in its entirety, and did not come to an end until after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. This clearly is too vague a definition and too long a time span. For the purposes of this book, therefore, two intellectual changes frequently treated as elements of the Enlightenment are here dealt with separately: liberalism and economic theory.