"The upshot of your wonderful "agricultural revolution" was the conversion of thousands of small holdings into much bigger, "efficient" ones which did away with crop rotation and made way for big machinery and which had the horrible consequence of depopulating the countryside, a phenomenon from which it has never recovered." - Steve Shaw

More ill-informed twaddle Shaw. When do you think the agrarian revolution happened Shaw? In England, depending upon who you read, it took place in three phases:

Phase 1 - 1550 to 1650
Phase 2 - 1650 to 1750
Phase 3 - 1750 to 1880

So according to the omniscient Steve Shaw the Agricultural revolution did away with crop rotation. Utter bullshit of course it not only retained crop rotation but introduced new beneficial crops to improve the land (Clover and Turnips are the two that immediately spring to mind).

What big machinery are you prattling on about in the period 1550 to 1880 Shaw? Who built it and how did the manufacturers deliver it round the country? How was it powered?

Any idea what impact the Black Death and the subsequent plagues had on the countryside Shaw? I'll give you a hint:

"Plague was present somewhere in Europe in every year between 1346 and 1671. The Second Pandemic was particularly widespread in the following years: 1360–1363; 1374; 1400; 1438–1439; 1456–1457; 1464–1466; 1481–1485; 1500–1503; 1518–1531; 1544–1548; 1563–1566; 1573–1588; 1596–1599; 1602–1611; 1623–1640; 1644–1654; and 1664–1667. Subsequent outbreaks, though severe, marked the retreat from most of Europe (18th century) and northern Africa (19th century). According to Geoffrey Parker, "France alone lost almost a million people to the plague in the epidemic of 1628–31."

In England, in the absence of census figures, historians propose a range of preincident population figures from as high as 7 million to as low as 4 million in 1300, and a post-incident population figure as low as 2 million. By the end of 1350, the Black Death subsided, but it never really died out in England. Over the next few hundred years, further outbreaks occurred in 1361–1362, 1369, 1379–1383, 1389–1393, and throughout the first half of the 15th century. An outbreak in 1471 took as much as 10–15% of the population, while the death rate of the plague of 1479–1480 could have been as high as 20%. The most general outbreaks in Tudor and Stuart England seem to have begun in 1498, 1535, 1543, 1563, 1589, 1603, 1625, and 1636, and ended with the Great Plague of London in 1665.

Now as it wasn't just the "townies" that died Shaw what do you think happened to the land that had previously been farmed and now had no-one left farming it? No-one left to "inherit" it. Depopulation of rural areas started long before you seem to think it did. Plentiful coal, water, mineral ores, the arrival of Dutch influence in the late 1600s all combined with a population explosion during the 18th century that allowed the industrial revolution fuelled by the agrarian revolution and the establishment of the British Empire - none of it would have happened had it not been for the departure of the Stuarts and the arrival of William of Orange. The rest as they say is "history".