Agricultural History Review, Volume 53 Part 2 (2005), pp. 158–191

The published 1851 census contains a series of tables documenting, for every British county, the distribution of farm sizes and the employment levels for adult males. Hitherto these data have largely been ignored on the grounds that they were unreliable. This paper shows that the data are in fact reliable and can be used to document the geography of farm size and employment patterns at county level. These data in turn are used to investigate the relative importance of agrarian capitalism and family farming and its geography in England. Agrarian capitalism was more important than family farming everywhere. Large-scale agrarian capitalism was dominant in the south and east of the country. A substantial family farm sector survived only in the far south-west and north of England by 1851. 

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