These doctrines had a distinct relation to current events. Political and social changes were reacting on political economy. As Godwin and Pitt provoked the essay of 1798, the scarcity of 1799 and 1800 called forth the pamphlet on High Prices (1800). As the latter bears directly on the Poor Law, it will best be considered when the thread of the _Essay on Population_ is taken up again;[477] and the same applies to the letter of Malthus to Whitbread (1807). The distresses of a time when wheat went so high as £6 the quarter instead of its normal 40_s._ or 50_s._, would naturally make the relief of the poor a question of the day. The high prices of corn increased the number of enclosures and Enclosure Bills. More than three millions of acres, or about a twelfth part of the entire area of England and Wales, are said to have been taken from waste into cultivation between 1800 and 1820. The average price of wheat, always the staple food of the people when they could get it, had been 55_s._ 11_d._ for the years preceding, viz. from 1790 to 1799 inclusive; it was 82_s._ 2_d._ from 1800 to 1809 inclusive, and 88_s._ 8_d._ from 1810 to 1819 inclusive, after which it fell (for the next decade) to 58_s._ 5_d._[478] In 1883–4 it was 35_s._ 8_d._ a quarter, which means a four-pound loaf (of medium quality) at 4½_d._ or 5_d._; but at its lowest during the war (in 1803) it was at 57_s._ 1_d._, and the loaf was at 6¾_d._ or 7_d._ Yet agriculture had not been standing still. Arthur Young, whose eccentric energy benefited every one but himself, and fell little short of genius, betted his nineteen volumes of _Annals of Agriculture_ against Sir John Sinclair’s twenty-one volumes of the _Statistical Account of Scotland_, that the Government of Pitt would not establish a Board of Agriculture. But Farmer George did establish one, in 1793;[479] Young paid his bet and became Secretary; Sinclair gained his nineteen volumes and became President of the new Board; and together they did much to make farmers and landlords aware of the rotations of crops, disuse of fallows, new manures, road-makings, that the Secretary had been preaching in vain for thirty years.[480]