George Boswell of Puddletown (1735-1815): progressive farmer and author

摘要

This paper explores the career of an unusual eighteenth-century innovator. George Boswell was not only the author of the first detailed and practical guide to the creation, lay-out and management of water meadows, but is also a good example of a working farmer eager to incorporate new ideas, new crops and improved implements into his farming practice. His advice was sought and his expertise valued by several leading agriculturalists during the late eighteenth century, including Arthur Young and Robert Bakewell. His letters to George Culley provide a great deal of information about farming methods and conditions in Dorset, and his contributions to the Bath and West Agricultural Society give details of his construction of and experiments with ploughs,rakes, drills and threshing machines. George Boswell deserves to be remembered, not just as the author of an informative account of the techniques of watering meadows, but as a remarkable example of a practical farmer eager to embrace the latest farmingadvances, and as the respected correspondent and informant of some of the leading agricultural innovators of the time. His contributions to the early publications of the Bath and West of England Society and his experiments with ploughs, drills, threshing machines, new crops and improved methods make him of national rather than purely local importance. These achievements are the more noteworthy in that he spent his entire life as a hard-working tenant farmer, shopkeeper, land-agent and tithe-collector in the district around Puddletown in south Dorset, and seldom had the leisure or the money to travel far from home.