instead of the medieval open fields cultivated in strips by peasants; secondly, arable farming increased in this period, over heaths and commons and there was widespread adoption of intensive livestock husbandry; thirdly, there was a transformation of the village community of mostly self-subsistent peasants into a community of agricultural labourers whose basic standards of living relied more on national and international market conditions rather than the state of the weather; and finally, there was a large increase in agricultural productivity, ie. in the volume of output produced per unit of the full-time labour force.
             These characteristics of Britains agriculture developed gradually over a long period of time and developed differently in different regions of the country. Within Britain, there existed fairly well-defined farming regions, which still exist today in a modified form. To the north and the west pastures were abundant, with a mixed grain and sheep economy and cattle predominantly further west. The great alternation of different types of landscape and soil in Britain caused this vast agricultural diversity. The proximity of different farming types enabled low transport costs, where-as in much of Europe, distances were greater so transport costs much higher, thus restricting agricultural specialisation and hindering development in the form of an active market economy.
             In the early eighteenth century, new techniques of production , for example, the 'enclosure' system enabled other innovations to develop, such as the new crops, in the spread of new improved rotations and cheaper iron facilitated the greater use of iron ploughs. Farming generally remained unmechanised although threshing machines were being introduced in the early nineteenth century. All these advances contributed to a slow but definite improvement in the productivity of the key inputs into farming and although in the mid-eighteenth century a...