Agricultural History Review, Volume 52 Part 1 (2004), p. 112

incl. p&p from the author, 6 Lower Icknield Way, Aston Clinton, Aylesbury hp22 5js.

In 1748, Pehr Kalm was on his way to North America tostudy its botany but spent five months in England,including three weeks in Little Gaddesden inHertfordshire visiting William Ellis the noted agricultural writer who lived there and from whom he learnt the detail of local farming methods. This is a new translation ofKalm’s diary of that stay with an introduction by Emeritus Professor William (‘Bill’) Mead, who first drew Kalm to the attention of my generation of agricultural historians. Kalm was of Finnish blood but born in Sweden where his parents had fled as the Russian empire expanded. He became a disciple of Carl Linnaeus, the brilliant Swedish naturalist and taxonomist. William Ellis, the object of his visit to Hertfordshire, was an important observer of mid eighteenth-century agrarian society, and Kalm was in little doubt even before he arrived that this district was the most advanced agricultural area of England. Its fame for the practicalities offield husbandry, animal management, and the use ofimplements indicated a place of invention and innovation, and Ellis’s Chiltern and Vale Farming (1733) was widely circulated amongst Swedish estate owners. The commercialization of English life, let alone its agriculture, is a striking feature of Kalm’s travels, observations and record. In describing the journey from Woodford in Essex to Little Gaddesden there is surely a hidden comparison with home: ‘the entire countryside we passed through ... resembled a garden, so that nature as well as art and industry have spared nothing that is required to adorn it’ (p.36). He soon made contact with Ellis who instructed him in local agricultural ways. In consequence there is much to delight agricultural historians in this account, but let me use turnips as illustration. He describes using their leaves as a salad accompaniment to roast beef, a new experience but to be compared with the equivalent use of spinach. There is also a description of turnips as sheep fodder, a cornerstone of the agrarian revolution. In contrast he observes the relative absence of turnips from the open fields of the Vale of Aylesbury. He forms an opinion of Ellis that is instructive. While an important writer, observer, and sometime inventor, Ellis was also too dedicated to the study of agriculture ever to be an able practitioner. Indeed Mead at one stage refers to the ‘charlatan’ nature of Ellis’s local reputation, which in Kalm’s words translated as ‘I have always hated a rural husbandry rooted in words and not deeds’ (p.148). This may be a short book but it is packed with detail of mid-eighteenth-century Chiltern and Vale agriculture by an acute contemporary observer, and Mead is to be thanked for bringing him back to our attention.