The Agricultural Revolution was the cause of more change in Britain than almost any other event. Its consequences are still felt today and, although it had many fathers, one of the most influential was Jethro Tull, although his name is probably, I fear, best known today as that of a rock group, rather than that of a great reformer.
Tull was baptised on 30 March 1674, and was the son of Jethro and Dorothy Tull. They owned land on the borders between Berkshire and Oxfordshire, and the young Jethro went to St John’s College, Oxford, in 1691.
After that, he went to the Inns of Court, but he did not practise law, and was intending to become a politician. Instead, because of poor health, he devoted his years to farming the family land, which he claimed he did extremely successfully, even though, as he wrote in the preface to the Second Edition of Horse Hoeing Husbandry, “almost all my life has been a continued sickness”. It was perhaps fortunate that Tull did not follow a political path, for he seemed a very thin-skinned man, who lashed out at critics in later life.
Tull’s private life does not seem to have been especially happy, and he may well have been rather melancholic by nature. He married, in 1699, a lady called Susanna Smith, by whom he had four daughters and a son, John. His son was a severe disappointment, who died in 1764 as a bankrupt in the Fleet Prison, which was the notorious Debtor’s Prison. Tull was clearly aware of his son’s failings as he had bailed him out during his lifetime and left almost all his estate to his daughters, save one shilling, five new pence in modern money, to his son.
In 1709, he moved to a farm near Hungerford named Prosperous, but after two years travelled abroad for his health. This allowed him to study farming methods in both France and Italy, so that when he returned, he copied the approach of pulverising the earth rather than manuring it, which he had seen practised in the vineyards in the Languedoc. He tried it on turnips, potatoes and wheat at Prosperous Farm. This allowed him to grow wheat on the same ground for thirteen years without either manure or fallow periods.
