Rothemstead diaries from the 1800’s for the Boardwalk experiment state that blackgrass was a big problem for arable farming there even then. So that is when the plough was king and there was no herbicides, never-mind herbicide resistance.Back in the early 2000's the wheat price was £60 a tonne and they couldn't sell min-till gear fast enough as people sought to ditch the cost of ploughing. This was just prior to the introduction of Atlantis, where fop and dim (and IPU) chemistry was all the rage. Of course the BG populations exploded and surprise, surprise, the stuff became resistant to graminicides.
Low rate fungicide use was all the rage as well because it all worked so well on septoria.