Hints to gentlemen of landed property

Picturesque Landscaping and Estate Management: Uvedale Price at Foxley, 1770–1829

“…14 Table 3 of farms should be over £100 in value, while the figure for Foxley is 41% in both 1770 and 1774. He considered that as the small farmer 'has no great space to superintend, it lies under his eye at all times, and seasons; he seizes all minute advantages; cultivates every obscure corner'.…”

“…17 He states in his Hints that cottagers should have from half to one acre so that they could keep a cow. 17 He states in his Hints that cottagers should have from half to one acre so that they could keep a cow.…”

“…56 In his General View of Agriculture of Norfolk (1794), Kent found that where landlords provided cottages, a patch of land and some livestock, labourers were 'so far from being prompt to riot that their attachment to their masters was exemplary'. In principle 'the landlord, tenant and labourer are intimately connected together', declared Kent but, in fact, he found labourers disconnected, at the mercy of avaricious farmers, and he advised landlords to intervene on their behalf to assume 'the superintendence and regulation of country-business more than they do' without being seen to relish the exercise of power and so lose the 'confidence of the country'.…”

“The enchantment of property”: Arthur Young, enclosure, and the cottage economy in England, 1770–1840

“…135–136, 73–74)Many contemporary commentators denounced a supposed increase in large farms and linked this increase to the difficulties cottagers experienced in getting access to land. Nathaniel Forster, writing in 1767, argued that the decline of small farmers and cottagers at the hands of engrossing farmers meant “we are presented with the horrible picture of a few tyrant planters amidst a crowd of wretched slaves” (Forster, , 115; see also Kent ). A letter to the Times, cites an old farmer, “It was a bad hour for the happiness of Old England, when the Lords of the country took it into their heads to make one farm out of ten … .the poor cottagers wander about the villages with broken hearts, and sorrowfully predict the time when Great Britain … shall have but two sets of inhabitants—the proud wealthy, and the spiritless poor” (Times, 10 August 1787, 2‐3).…”

Sentient Genetics: Breeding the Animal Breeder as Fundamental Other

“…When Nathaniel Kent characterises agricultural labourers as 'these useful people', he does so within a taxonomy that necessitates containment and entrenches an agricultural discourse in which distinctions in language between 'improvement' and 'better regulation' collapse. 36 Not only does Kent encourage an actual architectural containment, with his proposals for improved cottage design and his insistence in linking architecture and behaviour with an outpouring of sentiment for the 'poor family who has only one room', 37 but he also further systemises the utility of labourers as breeders who provide 'the greatest support to the state as being the most prolific cradles of population' 38 and aestheticises the regulated working estate with its 'proper number of inhabitants' 39 as an 'ornament to a country'. 40 Indeed, Kent's regulating impulses are primarily directed to and at gentlemen.…”