The Map That Changed the World Read Online Free Page B

1808 in an iron coffin).
    Iron production was on the way to doubling every twenty years when Smith was born, and coal was too; and—in what would prove of the utmost significance to William Smith by the time he was a grown man—the mania for canal building, to provide a means of transporting all the coal and iron and finished goods, was teetering at its beginnings.
    If there were hints of a coming change in the long-held systems of belief; if the industrial world was accelerating out of all imagination; then so also, and as an obvious corollary, social change was underway as well. And when William Smith was born, the rate and scale of alteration to society was such that even those in so small and isolated a settlement as Churchill, Oxfordshire, would be bound to notice.
    Parliament, for example, was in the last decades of the eighteenth century passing enclosure acts at the rate of one a week. The formerly common-held land was now gradually being fenced and hedged, and farmed in a way—with the use of new machines and according to the principles of crop rotation—that led to the creation of the English countryside that we still see today, mannered, orderly, and inordinately pretty.
    The village of Churchill itself was still unenclosed in 1769. The local farmers worked the fields as most of England had for centuries, taking for themselves alternating strips of the common-held land and on each strip growing crops, or setting each to pasture, or leaving each fallow, as individual mood and season suggested. The method was woefully inefficient, the landscape it created plain and uninteresting.
    But then in 1787, under the usual pressure from the local squirearchy and the more powerful farmers, an enclosure act was passed for both the village and its surrounding countryside. Gone, within a year, were the ragged strips of new-plowed land and the mean acres of wood. The gently dipping fields and meadows that are still to be seen today were all hedged and ditched and ha-ha’d into existence when Smith was still a youngster. It was a development that had profound importance for the English farmer and the English countryside. It was also to be of profound importance for the beginning of career and inspiration for the young William Smith.
    There was more to the farming revolution than the fashioning of a handsome landscape. To add luster to the newly made meadows there came new breeds of cattle and sheep—Hereford cows, Southdown sheep among them—that started to be introduced in the late eighteenth century, with the animals at last approximating in appearance (fatter, sturdier, and healthier than their bony and goatlike forebears) the look of the breeds to be seen today. Well-to-do farmers were so proud of their new beasts that they had paintings of them commissioned, and by doing so founded an entirely new artistic school of domestic animal portraiture.
    Farming methods improved at a staggering rate, and in consequence the output of grain and potatoes and meat rose hugely. White bread became a commonplace in the diet of rich and poor. Cheese became hugely popular. An abundance of cattle feed all year round meant that at long last the winter ritual of eating only salted beef—the cattle hitherto had all died in the first cold snap for want of feed—could now be ended: A joint of roast beef promptly became a central feature of the national dinner table, part of England’s national mystique (and, of course, the Englishman’s French nickname, Le Rosbif ).
    And this all led to something else. In fact it was during the late eighteenth century—most probably for the first time—thatsociety suddenly seemed to realize it had become a vastly complicated entity, its characteristics linking and interconnecting with one another in wholly unexpected ways. Such domino effects first became apparent when it was revealed, at the turn of the century, that Britain could no longer feed itself.
    The consumption of white bread and roast beef, for