Before giving an account of the Tullian system as it was to be interpreted by Duhamel, it seems necessary to say a word on the old French agricultural system before 1750, and the ‘ancienne manière’. This old rural economy based on the open-field system has been well pictured by Lord Ernle and, on the whole, his description can be applied to France. But certain technical and social conditions can be met with in French agricultural writings of the pre-Tullian period which give an original position to the French agrarian problems. Modern historians, too, have indeed given excellent accounts of it, and we shall therefore picture this situation in broad terms only; attempting nevertheless to set in full light the defects of an organization against which the agronomes were later to struggle. However limited, the picture seems a necessary background to the work of Duhamel and to its full understanding.

The old French agricultural system rested on two foundations. First, the primary importance of the cultivation of cereals— secondly, the agrarian distribution of the land between the cultivators, which rendered the fallow practically unavoidable. These two facts, in turn, explain the nature of the cultivated plants and also the peculiar structure of the rural society; finally they give the key to the cattle situation and to the quality of agricultural implements. The importance given in early agricultural treatises such as Liger's Nouvelle maison rustique to the mechanical problems of ploughing, manuring, to the cultivation of corn and, to a lesser extent, to the question of cattle helps us to understand country life in old France. The question arises whether French husbandry as it is expounded in such works was the same throughout the provinces. It was undoubtedly not entirely so. Indeed, regional differences existed owing in some instances to a greater development in the techniques, to a different partition of the soil, or to geographical peculiarities; essentially in Flanders, in certain districts of Lorraine and Alsace, in the vineyards of the South, in the large mountainous areas of the Centre, the Alps or the Pyrenees. But on the whole and for the greatest part of the territory it is possible to speak of the ‘ancienne agriculture’, of the ‘ancienne manière’ which was to be opposed by the ‘nouveau systeme’.