IN I884 Arnold Toynbee1 coined the phrase 'the Industrial Revolution' to describe the great changes in the organization, methods and productivity of industry which took place in late eighteenth-century England. Not surprisingly historians soon dubbed the parallel changes in agriculture 'the Agricultural Revolution' (although Toynbee himself had written of the agrarian revolution), and argued that between approximately 1760 and 1820 the farming of this country underwent an equally abrupt and radical change. The spearhead of these improvements was held to be Parliamentary enclosure, which, beginning in the I730s, had by I820 largely eliminated the open fields, and reclaimed much of the waste by I850.2 The elimination of the open fields was thought to be central to the progress of agriculture, for the new methods and new crops, often referred to collectively as the New Husbandry, could not be easily adopted while the holdings of farmers were fragmented, unfenced and subject to common grazing after each harvest. Enclosure, it was argued, led to the introduction of new methods and an increase in crop yields; between I760 and I85o the average wheat yield doubled,3 a rate of increase four times that of any previous period. Enclosure had other consequences. It eliminated the small farmer, and particularly the small occupier owner, and led to the creation of large tenant farms, large estates and a landless proletariat, a tripartite division which characterized much of nineteenth-century England and made it so different from much of Europe. Such a view of the agricultural revolution was created by writers at the beginning of this century, particularly by Lord Ernle, W. Hasbach, H. Levy and the Hammonds.4 But it was a view being undermined even at the time they wrote. A. F. Johnson and H. L. Grays showed, from a study of the Land Tax Returns, that the yeoman or occupier owner had ceased to be of much significance in English farming before the era of Parliamentary enclosure. G. Slater's6 work on the timing and distribution of enclosure acts also challenged the importance of Parliamentary enclosure in the process of agricultural change, for he showed that in eighteenth-century England the surviving open fields were confined largely to an area limited in the east by a line drawn from Lowestoft to the Isle of Wight, and in the west from the Tees to the Severn and then south to Portland Bill. It is true that subsequent work7 upon the open fields has suggested that they had existed outside Slater's Midland England, but his work certainly threw doubt on their central role in eighteenth century improvement. More recent work has further disturbed the traditional view of the agricultural revolution.