The Old English Farming Books: 1861-1900

Book excerpt: This last volume of The Old English Farming Books brings the series up to 1900, and was completed shortly before the author's death this year. It covers the period of intensive farming in the late nineteenth century, and the spread of agricultural education and textbooks. Science and technology are finally beginning to replace the old methods with new practices, and the improving farmers formed a ready market for books offering the new knowledge. The completion of G. E. Fussell's Old English Farming Books in five volumes provides a complete bibliographical guide to the literature on English farming over five centuries, from 1523 to 1900, and is a fitting memorial to the work of the author, one of the great figures in the study of the history of farming.