"
William Marshall, the agricultural expert and writer to whom we owe the
establishment of the Board of Agriculture was baptised at Sinnington on
28th July 1745. He was in his own words "born a farmer" and used to say
that he could trace his blood through the veins of agriculturists for
upwards of four hundred years. After fourteen years in the West Indies, he
undertook, at the age of twenty-nine, the management of a farm near
Croydon in Surrey. It was there, in 1778, that he wrote his first book. He
showed the manuscript to Dr Johnson who objected to certain passages
sanctioning work on Sundays in harvest time, so Marshall omitted them. His
greatest work was "A General Survey, from personal experience, observation
and enquiry, of the Rural Economy of England."
The country was divided into six agricultural divisions, the northern one
being represented by Yorkshire in two volumes. In the first of these, the
preface is dated from Pickering, December 21st, 1787, and the second
chapter is devoted to an exceedingly interesting account of the broad
valley to which Marshall gives the title "The Vale of Pickering." When he
died in 1818 he was raising a building at Pickering for a College of
Agriculture on the lines he had laid down in a book published in 1799.
His proposal for the establishment of a "Board of Agriculture, or more
generally of Rural Affairs" was carried out by Parliament in 1793, and so
valuable were his books considered that in 1803 most of them were
translated into French and published in Paris under the title of "La
Maison rustique anglaise.
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