In 1730 Charles, second Viscount Townshend, retired from politics, on his quarrel with his brother-in-law Walpole, who remarked that 'as long as the firm was Townshend and Walpole the utmost harmony prevailed, but it no sooner became Walpole and Townshend than things went wrong'. He devoted himself to the management of his Norfolk estates and set an example to English landlords in wisely and diligently experimenting in farm practice which was soon followed on all sides, the names of Lords Ducie, Peterborough, and Bolingbroke being the best known of his fellow-labourers. A generation afterwards Young wrote, 'half the County of Norfolk within the memory of man yielded nothing but sheep feed, whereas those very tracts of land are now covered with as fine barley and rye as any in the world and great quantities of wheat besides.'[423] There can be no doubt from this statement, made by an eyewitness of exceptional capacity, that he commenced the work so nobly carried on by Coke. The same authority tells us that when Townshend began his improvements near Norwich much of the land was an extensive heath without either tree or shrub, only a sheepwalk to another farm; so many carriages crossed it that they would sometimes be a mile abreast of each other in pursuit of the best track. By 1760 there was an excellent turnpike road, enclosed on each side with a good quickset hedge, and all the land let out in enclosures and cultivated on the Norfolk system in superior style; the whole being let at 15s. an acre, or ten times its original value. Townshend's two special hobbies were the field cultivation of turnips, and improvement in the rotation of crops. Pope says his conversation was largely of turnips, and he was so zealous in advocating them that he was nicknamed 'Turnip Townsend'.[424] He initiated the Norfolk or four-course system of cropping, in which roots, grasses, and cereals were wisely blended, viz. turnips, barley, clover and rye grass, wheat. He also reintroduced marling to the light lands of Norfolk, and followed Tull's system of drilling and horse-hoeing turnips, with the result that the poor land of which his estate was largely composed was converted into good corn and cattle-growing farms. Like all the progressive agriculturists of the day, he was an advocate of enclosures, and he had no small share in the growth of the movement by which, in the reigns of Anne and the first two Georges, 244 enclosure Acts were passed and 338,177 acres enclosed. The progress of enclosure was alleged as a proof that England was never more prosperous than under Walpole; the number of private gentlemen in Britain of ample estates was said to exceed that of any country in the world proportionately, and was far greater than in the reign of Charles II. The value of land at twenty-six or twenty-seven years' purchase was a conclusive proof of the wealth of England.[425]