Price 10s. 6d. UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME. HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH LANDED INTEREST: ITS CUSTOMS, LAWS, AND AGRICULTURE. OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. "Mr. Garnier is fortunate in his subject. Mr. Kenelm Digby has dealt with its legal aspects; the late Professor Rogers, Mr. Ashley, Mr. Seebohm, Mr. Cunningham, and a host of writers have written of it as economists; and the literature of the subject in all its many sides is prodigious. It was a happy thought on the part of Mr. Garnier to focus some of the scattered rays of light. He writes, it is important to note, with a living knowledge of the rural England of to-day. He has read much and widely. He has mastered most of the authorities on the subject."-Times. "His book is one strongly to be recommended to every Agricultural College and every local authority dealing with agricultural education throughout Great Britain."-Field. "The author is a rare and precious combination of practical experience, together with scholarship. He has achieved the difficult task of clothing the dry bones of technical history with the flesh and blood of vivid pictorial descriptions of rural and domestic life."-Journal of Royal Agricultural Society. "This is a really brilliant book. Mr. Garnier discourses pleasantly and profitably, and his readers will look forward to the volume in which he proposes to carry his history of the landed interest down to the present day."-Morning Post. "Mr. Garnier must be congratulated on the courage with which he has entered upon his task. He has been careful not to omit any set of facts that would contribute to the full understanding of his subject."-Pall Mall Gazette. "This is the only work we have come across which shows in the clearest manner the birth of private ownership in land."-Horticultural Times. "A book which epitomises with praiseworthy care and impartiality the researches of students, collects into a compact, continuous form the scattered results of independent enquiry, and presents the whole in a readable shape."Edinburgh Review. LONDON: SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO. PREFACE. THE encouragement which the first part of this work has received from the pens of lenient critics has prompted me to carry my narrative forward to its conclusion. Briefly described, the present volume may be divided into two portions; viz., that belonging to the eighteenth centurya time of germination and growth, and that belonging to the first half of the nineteenth-a time of fruition. The kind of crop which was coming to maturity all through the earlier portion of these two periods may be clearly discerned garnered in those pages of the Statute Book which deal with the legislation of the later. Such a harvest was not unaffected by storms and commotions, and the narrative of these, together with an explanation of their causes and results, has led me forward till I found a convenient halting-place at the Repeal of the Corn Laws. The last four decades of this present century are fraught with interest, and without doubt pregnant with important future changes, but they embrace a subject more fitted for a history of modern British agriculture than for the work which I now offer to the public. Nothing remains for me to do but to express my sincere gratitude to those men of letters who have accorded me so flattering a reception on entering their select circles. RUSSELL M. GARNIER. II. V b |