British Agricultural Revolution & Enclosure Movement (AP Euro)

[Music] know what you're thinking hey Richie what are you doing with that hoe uh people used to ask me that in high school all the time uh really just uh just kidding because uh girls wouldn't touch me with a 10- foot pole in high school but uh this is fitting because today we're going to talk about hoes and plenty of other things we're going be talking about the Agricultural Revolution all right thank you Keegan all right so let's go ahead and get started with the British Agricultural Revolution the British Agricultural Revolution is a product of

scientific innovation and keep in mind that where this revolution starts is in Britain and also in the low countries that's the Netherlands Belgium that area and this is where farming takes one of the biggest steps that it's taken really maybe since the start of farming or something like that and we're going to be all set okay so keep in mind I've got a little acronym for you all set science entrepreneurship and technology these are our three buzzwords for the Agricultural Revolution science entrepreneurship and technology so first of all let's talk about agricultural Innovations the farmer

as scientist and this is the old way of doing crop rotation three field crop rotation where in one field you would have wheat in one field you would have oats and one field you would let lie fallow and you would rotate these fields from year to year uh so going from one the wheat field would be the oats field and then you would let uh one field rest every three years so you rotate every three years the problem here though is that in any given year onethird of your fields are being unused and this is

kind of bordering on unacceptable the whole point of having fields is to use them to grow stuff on them and that sort of thing and so what you see in the Scientific Revolution is a four field crop rotation um so out with the old in with the new uh in one field we're growing wheat and another field we're growing oats and in the other two Fields we'll grow stuff that uh while wheat exhausts the soil Clover and turnips they replenish the soil so we'll grow things that make the soil healthy and then we rotate those

so that every fourth year something will be a wheat field or the oats field or the Clover or turnip field and this way all of our fields are being grown upon or however we would say that they're all being used and more Fields equals more food this way we can feed more people than we were able to do previously and as far as as breeding animals there has got to be a better way than this okay just throwing them all in one place and just letting whatever happen happen uh that's not very scientific let's think

about a more scientific approach and that is selective breeding this is applying these scientific principles that what would happen if I breed this animal with desirable characteristics with this animal with desirable characteristics and enter science all this kind of stuff that I don't understand ask your biology teacher uh or something like that but uh woo science all right it's cool it's awesome it lets us eat more an example of this would be this Belgian Blue Cow which uh what happens here is there's some kind of genetic defect which the selective breeding makes even more so

uh kind of like some sort of hapsburg cow or something and uh this uh this cow gets bigger because of this genetic defect and we can eat more uh because of this now note Belgium in the Low Country so the Belgian Blue Cow Big cow what does a Belgian Blue Cow say that's right just like any other cow it says moo so much better now we've got more food we've got better stuff all thanks to science and Innovation okay so let's talk about this innovation the farmer as entrepreneur the farmer not just as some guy

growing crops but the farmer as a businessman okay so here is traditional agriculture we can see all of these people there now note what they're doing they if you look at it I mean you think about you see some people there working every once in a while but really most of these people are taking a break uh you just see all these peasants work in this common field that really doesn't belong to anyone in particular that's traditional agriculture as it was practiced in the Middle Ages and the new agriculture is typified by enclosures okay so

instead of having this common pasture that we see here where everybody's animals go and here's everybody's fields and we all throw our stuff here now with the enclosure system you see that people are marking their individual fields and enclosing them uh with uh with fences unlike this other common system so we start to see market economics private property and all of that now as far as the downside this did hurt poor Farmers they lost their traditional grazing rights they could no longer Place their cattle on the common land now the upside again more food all

right agricultural production as a whole is becoming more efficient and more Market oriented so while some of these folks are are upset about losing their traditional rights uh this is still resulting in more food which is really kind of the whole point of Agriculture and there were people that were negatively affected and a lot of them would go to these poor houses uh the English passed poor laws to try to uh accommodate some of these people who were displaced these small farmers who were displaced and so uh this is a workhouse that provided shelter and

you would spend your day working if you lived at the poor house but once again while it's unfortunate that some people were poor and uh that sort of thing these bigger Farms create again more food so while we're on the topic of innovation let's talk about the farmer as inventor the farmer who is improving agriculture by making new agricultural tools and improving existing Technologies it's been a while since there's been innovation in fact uh Jesus's parable of the sewer uh where this guy's just walking around just throwing around seed and it gets uh some of

the seed gets stuck in the thorn some of it falls along the path uh you know some of it gets on the rocky soil it looks like most of the seed in this Parable doesn't get where it's supposed to go why because this guy's just throwing it all around like you know seed seed seed there's nothing scientific about just throwing stuff around um so the Scientific Revolution and the mindset here is maybe we can apply some of these scientific principles to farming so instead of just throwing stuff around everywhere then maybe we can come up

with some kind of machine and that's exactly what Jethro toll seed drill does is that it makes little uh indent ions in the soil and you put it all in the box and it puts the seed where it's supposed to go keeps it out of the Thorns keeps it out of uh the rocks and keeps it out of the path and so all of the seed is used well okay so that is Jethro tolls seed drill and then in the United States there are several agricultural Innovations uh Thomas Jefferson um who was a big proponent

of Agriculture uh came up with this mold board plow I'm no farmer I can't tell you how it works I can tell you though that it was a better plow than it existed before that and then there is George Washington who was known as uh first president of the United States but what you may not know is that he built this awesome 16-sided Barn if you go to Mount Vernon you can see a replica and it is awesome okay like it's the coolest thing ever literally product of the Agricultural Revolution that is going even into

the British colony later known as America all right so that's that how many sides on that Barn 16 all right and then you look at other technologies that hadn't improved any you think about the Bible what it says about threshing wheat uh where you know the wheat is being separated from the chaff you hear references to God's threshing floor well even 15600 years later people still knew what it meant to thrat wheat manually to just throw all the wheat on the threshing floor and just hit it with a bunch of like nunchucks or whatever it

is they're using just hitting it all right and there is nothing scientific about just hitting it all right so how can we do this differently how can we apply technology instead of just hitting it and we do that with a portable threshing machine now George Washington Built This 16-sided Barn for the purposes of threshing weed he had horses running around all in if you go to to mount Vern you can see it it's awesome uh hopefully I've made that point uh but this portable threshing machine you just put it in a machine and it threshes

the wheat for you separates the wheat from the chaff um so more Scientific Revolution inventive awesomeness and once again like everything else better tools means what you guessed it more food and then you can see here A bunch of data and this data shows that the crop yields are are increasing okay so if we look before this if you go back to 1600 you know if you've got this uh the seed being planted it might yield about 10 bushels per acre well by the time it's all said and done you look uh to 1800 um

at the end of the 18th century you can see that this is more than doubled and so agricultural production is going up as result to this so while some people are kind of ticked off about the enclosures and that sort of thing um it is producing more food and once again you can see what's going on here with this British Agricultural Revolution whereas from 1300 to 1600 agricultural production was relatively stagnant you can see that agricultural production is steadily increasing during this time now nothing like it will increase during the 20 Century but still much

more than it is increased before that and so you can see that the amount of food has more than doubl whoa this results that was an explosion okay that's what happened to the population it exploded uh that can kind of scare you a little bit but lots of people being born because there's more food and people are like hey we've got more food let's make more babies and so you have a population explosion in Europe as a result of this Agricultural Revolution so through advances in science entrepreneurship and Technology with the farmer as a scientist

a businessman and an inventor we can see that this Agricultural Revolution is producing more food for Europe making it possible for Europeans to advance themselves in a way that they hadn't before if you like what you saw here feel free to subscribe to my channel plenty more instructional videos coming out every week until next time I know what you're thinking Richie what do you do with that Pitchfork well people used to ask me that all the time when I was in high school wait that that didn't work did it I get it