This paper examines the practice of letting plots of land to the agricultural laborers in the early nineteenth-century England. It criticizes the most influential works on this subject, and suggests ways to reconcile the disagreements among them. Most...
This paper examines the practice of letting plots of land to the agricultural laborers in the early nineteenth-century England. It criticizes the most influential works on this subject, and suggests ways to reconcile the disagreements among them. Most significantly, it distinguishes between allotments proper and potato grounds and emphasizes that this distinction brings a fundamental change to the existing interpretations of the level of allotment rents and the geographical distribution of allotments. These differences have important implication on the living-standard and poor relief of the laboring population, and on the respective social strategies of farmers and agricultural laborers.