About Annals of Agriculture

Annals of Agriculture

The Annals of Agriculture and Other Useful Arts was a British agricultural periodical collected and published by Arthur Young at Bury St Edmunds from 1784. It ran to 45 volumes, printed for the editor by J. Rackham, and it became the principal vehicle for Young's lifelong campaign for agricultural improvement. Its contributors included King George III, writing under the pseudonym Ralph Robinson, and its readers included George Washington, whose library held thirty-one volumes of the periodical.

Young wrote many of the articles himself. A bookseller's description of a long run of the work, drawing on the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, called it a labour of love that exhibited his belief in the importance of agriculture and the benefits of pursuing improvements, and noted that it was intended, among other things, to put before the public the views and experience of the foremost agriculturists — but that Young was bitterly disappointed in its sales.

Arthur Young before the Annals

Arthur Young (11 September 1741 – 12 April 1820) was born at Whitehall, London, the second son of the rector of Bradfield Combust in Suffolk. After school at Lavenham he was placed in 1758 with a mercantile house in King's Lynn. His father died in 1759, and in 1762, in London, Young started an earlier magazine, The Universal Museum, which ran to five numbers before being sold to a consortium of booksellers. From 1763 to 1766 he concentrated on farming the family estate at Bradfield Hall, a small property encumbered with debt.

Young contributed eleven articles to the Museum Rusticum in 1764–65. In 1767 he took a farm at Sampford Hall in Essex, and in 1768 moved to Bradmore Farm, North Mymms, in Hertfordshire, where he carried out the experiments described in A Course of Experimental Agriculture (1770). Those experiments were generally unsuccessful, but they gave him a working knowledge of agriculture. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1774, acted as parliamentary reporter for the London Morning Post from 1773, and built his reputation chiefly as a publicist and observer rather than as a successful practical farmer.

Foundation and form

Young began publication of the Annals in 1784. The full title — Annals of Agriculture, and Other Useful Arts — announced the scope: farming first, but with room for the wider useful arts that surrounded rural improvement. The imprint tells the local story: Bury St Edmunds, printed for the editor by J. Rackham. Young was both editor and publisher in substance, collecting contributions, corresponding with improvers at home and abroad, and filling many pages from his own pen and notebooks.

The work appeared in volumes rather than as a popular weekly, and it was aimed at landowners, improving farmers and public men rather than at labourers. Its authority rested on correspondence and reported experience — the views and experience of the foremost agriculturists — which Young assembled through one of the widest agricultural correspondence networks of the period, extending across England, France and the United States.

The King as contributor: Ralph Robinson

The most famous contributor was the King himself. George III wrote for the Annals under the pseudonym Ralph Robinson. The King's interest in farming was genuine and public — he was known as Farmer George — but the pseudonym allowed his contributions to appear as those of a working agriculturist among others. Robert Andrews, the Suffolk landowner whom Young took as a model farmer and whose portrait with his wife was painted by Thomas Gainsborough, was another named contributor whose practice Young held up for imitation.

Royal participation gave the periodical a standing no ordinary farming journal could claim. It also fitted Young's method: improvement was to be led by example from the top of society, recorded in print, and copied by readers who could see that experiment and record-keeping were the habits of kings and model landowners alike.

George Washington and the Annals

The American connection is documented in unusual detail. Young admired Washington's retirement from command to agriculture, and in his first letter, dated 7 January 1786 from Bradfield Hall near Bury, he wrote to Washington as a brother farmer, sent him the first four volumes of the Annals, and promised the rest as they were published. Washington's library at Mount Vernon came to contain thirty-one volumes of the periodical, ranging from 1784 to 1798.

The correspondence that followed dealt in practical things — men, cattle, tools and seeds. Washington ordered English ploughs and seeds through Young, tried the ploughs and reported that they answered the description Young had given, despite their great weight. Young repeatedly asked permission to print all or part of Washington's letters in the Annals; Washington repeatedly demurred, saying in one instance that he wished to glide silently and unnoticed through the remainder of his life. Young accepted the refusal during Washington's lifetime, and published Letters from His Excellency General Washington, to Arthur Young in 1801, after Washington's death. In 1797 Washington was made an honorary member of the English Board of Agriculture, of which Young was secretary.

Young, the Board of Agriculture and the county surveys

In 1793 Young was appointed secretary of the newly formed Board of Agriculture, under the presidency of Sir John Sinclair. In that capacity he worked on collecting and preparing the General View of Agriculture county surveys. The Annals and the Board were parallel instruments of the same project: the journal gathered voluntary correspondence and experiment, while the Board attempted systematic description, county by county.

Young's statistical ambitions were also visible in the Annals and his other works. His figures for the total area of England and Wales, and for the total cultivated area, were serious overestimates, corrected in 1799 by Henry Beeke, who produced more reliable figures in a time of wartime and fiscal strain. Later economic historians, including Robert C. Allen and Cormac Ó Gráda, have challenged some of Young's conclusions, while others have presented him as a pioneer of sample surveys and of national income estimation. The Annals thus stands at the beginning of a recognisably modern argument about agricultural data: who collects it, how, and how far it can be trusted.

Sales, disappointment and the winding down

For all its royal contributor and transatlantic readers, the Annals did not sell as Young hoped. The ODNB verdict quoted by booksellers — that Young was bitterly disappointed in its sales — matches the later publishing history. The work began to wind down in 1803, when John Rackham of Bury St Edmunds, who printed it, found copy was lacking and pressed Young, who padded out the pages with old notes.

Richard Phillips took the work on for volume 41 and saw the publication out. The final volume, the forty-fifth, appeared in 1808. Some catalogues and sellers' descriptions give the run as continuing to 1815; that date appears to reflect the periodical's long tail and Young's failing sight — he underwent an unsuccessful operation for a cataract in 1811 that left him blind — rather than the appearance of new volumes, for the bibliographical record of volumes is 45 volumes ending in 1808. The discrepancy is noted here because the batch description for this directory gives 1784 to 1815.

Contents and character

A typical Annals article was practical and particular. One early piece, extracted and sold separately in modern times, was Young's 1784 experiments on fattening hogs, printed at Bury St Edmunds — twenty-two pages on a single feeding question. That specificity was the journal's strength and its commercial weakness: it offered tested (or at least reported) practice on crops, livestock, implements and farm management, rather than entertainment, and it expected readers to keep volumes for reference, as Washington did.

The collected volumes reflect that reference character. A consecutive run of volumes 1 to 39, from 1784 to 1803, survived in the library of the Royal Agricultural Society of England with its bookplate, eventually comprising 45 volumes with numerous engraved plates in a uniform binding — the kind of set an institution, not a casual reader, would preserve.

Young's wider work

The Annals cannot be separated from Young's tours. His journeys through England and Wales produced A Six Weeks' Tour through the Southern Counties, A Six Months' Tour through the North of England and The Farmer's Tour through the East of England, which claimed to contain the only first-hand information on the rentals, produce and stock of England. He toured Ireland in 1776–77 and published his Tour in Ireland in 1780. His travels in France in 1787–89, on the eve and outbreak of the Revolution, produced the Travels in France (1792), the work by which he is now best known as a social and political observer.

Young produced around twenty-five books and pamphlets on agriculture and fifteen on political economy, as well as many articles. He died in Sackville Street, London, on 12 April 1820, aged 78, and was buried at Bradfield Combust church, where his tomb bears an inscription inviting every real patriot to shed a tear for the genius, talent and worth buried there.

Legacy

The Annals of Agriculture was not the first British farming periodical and it was not a commercial triumph, but it was the most personally identified with a single improver, and the most ambitious in its network. A king writing as Ralph Robinson, a model farmer from Suffolk, and the first President of the United States reading thirty-one volumes in Virginia all belonged to the same print community, assembled from Bury St Edmunds by a man who was, by his own record, a better publicist than farmer.

For historians the volumes remain a central source for the language of improvement in late eighteenth-century Britain: experiment, correspondence, statistics and example, bound together in a periodical that Young sustained for a quarter of a century despite disappointing sales — and that only faded when copy, eyesight and energy failed together.