As most cash bequests would have only allowed the recipient to buy a few acres, the average price per acre for smallholdings is perhaps more relevant.
They rented or bought smallholdings, exploited common rights, or set up as traders and craftsmen.
These households often combined their smallholding with proto-industrial activities and other sources of income, such as incidental wage labour, gleaning, begging and charity.
However, as proved through proposition 5, it is precisely that situation which makes it difficult for smallholding farmers to adopt land management technologies.
Most of these respondents had lived most of their lives on farms or smallholdings.
An important proportion of this wage income is spent on agricultural inputs on the smallholding thereby allowing their survival as semi-proletarians.
Parallelling this change is a significant increase in smallholdings, from 13 percent in 1967 to 33.2 percent of the cultivated land in 2001.
There were twelve farmers of fifty acres or more in 1754, while fifty-two others had decent smallholdings or small farms.
