forced by the beaste through the corne, did cut down al before it." He insists on the extreme importance of manure, and the value of marl, chalk, and ashes. But he does not consider that farmers can thrive by manure alone. On the contrary, he thinks that " the best doung for ground is the Maister's foot, and the best provender for the house the Maister's eye." He also gives a caution against the persistent use of chalk, because, in the end, it" brings the grounde to be starke nought, whereby the common people have a speache, that grounde enriched with chalke makes a riche father and a beggerly sonne." He mentions the use of rape in the Principality of Cleves, a valuable suggestion whether for green-manuring, for the oil in its seeds, or for use as fodder for sheep. He commends "Trefoil or Burgundian grass," which he believes to be of Moorish origin and Spanish introduction, for " there can be no better fodder devised for cattell." He says that turnips have been found in the Low Countries to be good for live-stock, and that, if sown at Midsummer, they will be ready for winter food. In English gardens turnips were already known. They appear under the name of "turnepez❞ among "Rotys for a gardyn" in a fifteenth century book of cookery recipes; Andrew Borde1 (1542) recommends them "boyled and eaten with flesshe"; William Turner, the herbalist, mentions that "the great round rape called a turnepe groweth in very great plenty in all Germany and more about London then in any other place of England": Tusser classes them among "roots to boil and to butter"; but Googe, though only as a translator, was the first writer to suggest that field cultivation of turnips which revolutionised English farming. 66 Another Elizabethan writer makes the first attempt to combine science with practice. Sir Hugh Plat was an ingenious inventor, and, as Sir Richard Weston calls him, the most curious man of his time." He devotes the second part of his Jewell House of Art and Nature (1594) to the scientific manuring of arable and pasture land. Manure presents itself to his poetic mind as a Goddess with a Cornucopia in her hand. If land, he says, is perpetually cropped, the earth is robbed of her vegetative salt, and ceases to bear. The object, therefore, of the wise husbandman must be to restore this essential element of fertility. His list of manurial substances is long. He recommends not only farm-yard dung, but marl, lime, street refuse, the subsoil of ponds and "watrie bottomes," salt, 1 1 Dyetary, ch. xix. ashes from the burning of stubble, weeds, and bracken; the hair of beasts, malt dust, soap-ashes, putrified pilchards, garbage of fish, blood offal and the entrails of animals. He warns farmers of the difficulty in discovering the right proportion of marl to lay on different sorts of soil. He condemns the waste of the richest properties of farm-yard manure, and recommends the use of covers to all pits used for its accumulation. He himself used a barn roof at his farm at St. Albans, which moved up and down on upright supports, so that the muck-heap could be raised, yet always remain under cover. In his Arte of setting of Corne (1600) he advocates dibbing as superior to broadcast sowing. He traces the origin of the practice to the accident of a silly wench, who deposited some seeds of wheat in holes intended for carrots. He goes so far as to say that, by dibbing, the average yield of wheat per acre would be raised from 4 quarters to 15 quarters! The growth of an agricultural literature, as well as Googe's list of notable authorities, suggest that landowners were beginning to interest themselves in corn and cattle. Probably their taste for farming was encouraged by the fashionable love for horticulture. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries both had declined in the Tudor age both revived. The garden was the precursor of the home-farm. In the reign of Elizabeth, gardening became one of the pursuits and pleasures of English country life. The art was loved by Bacon; it was patronised by Burghley and Walsingham; it gathered round it a rich literature; it claimed the services of explorers and builders of Empire like Sir Walter Raleigh. Tudor architects used pleasure gardens to carry on and support the lines of their main buildings, and even repeated the patterns of their mural decorations in the geometrical "Knots " of their flower borders; but they banished kitchen gardens out of sight. The cultivation of vegetables made less progress than that of flowers and fruits. This useful side of horticulture, like farming, was as yet comparatively neglected by the Tudor gentry. But an advance was made. The first step was to recover lost ground. In order to flatter Elizabeth, Harrison probably exaggerated the disuse of vegetables before the accession of her father. He over-states his case when he says that garden-produce, which before was treated as fit for hogs and savage beasts, now supplied not only food for the "poore commons " but " daintie dishes at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen, and the nobilitie." It was doubtless true 66 that the art of gardening, like that of farming, had declined during the period which preceded Tudor times. Yet in the decadent fifteenth century, rape, carrots, parsnips, turnips, cabbages, leeks, onions, garlic, as well as numerous Herbes for Potage," and "Herbes for a salade" appeared in a book on gardens, or in the recipes of cookery books. On the other hand, it is said that, in the reign of Henry VIII., Queen Catherine was provided with salads from Flanders, because none could be furnished at home, and that onions and cabbages, known in the reign of Henry III. and praised by Piers Plowman, were in the first part of the fifteenth century imported from the Low Countries. Now, however, in the reign of Henry VIII. and onwards, gardening, as Fuller says, began to creep out of Holland into England. In Shakespeare's day, it may be remembered that potatoes 2 as yet only "rained from the sky" and that Anne Page would rather "be set quick i' the earth, And bowled to death with turnips," than marry the wrong man. Sandwich became famous for its carrots, and in the neighbourhood of Fulham, and along the Suffolk coast, gardens were laid out in which vegetables were extensively cultivated. In rich men's gardens potatoes found a place after 1585, though for some years to come, they were regarded, and sold, as luxuries. Here then were accumulating new sources of future advance in farming. Yet progress must have been slow. Robert Child, writing anonymously on the "Deficiencies" of agriculture in 1651,3 says: Some old men in Surrey, where it (the Art of Gardening) flourisheth very much at present, report, That they knew the first Gardiners that came into those parts, to plant Cabages, Colleflowers, and to sowe Turneps, Carrets, and Parsnips, and to sowe Raith [early] Pease, all of which at that time were great rarities, we having few, or none in England, but what came from Holland and Flaunders." He goes on to say that he could name "places, both in the North and West of England, where the name of Gardening and Howing is scarcely knowne, in which places a few Gardiners might have saved the lives of many poor people, who have starved these dear years." 1 The Feate of Gardeninge, by Mayster Ion Gardener, printed in Archaeologia, vol. liv., with a glossary by Mrs. Evelyn Cecil. 2 Merry Wives of Windsor, Act. v. Sc. 5 and Act iii. Sc. 4. 3 Hartlib's Legacie (1651), pp. 11-12. PROMISE OF PROGRESS 103 CHAPTER V. FROM JAMES I. TO THE RESTORATION (1603-1660). FARMING UNDER THE FIRST STEWARTS AND THE Promise of agricultural progress checked by the Civil War: agricultural writers and their suggestions: Sir Richard Weston on turnips and clover: conservatism of English farmers; their dislike to book-farming not unreasonable: unexhausted improvements discussed; Walter Blith on drainage attempts to drain the fens in the eastern counties; the resistance of the fenmen: new views on commons: Winstanley's claims: enclosures advocated as a step towards agricultural improvement. THE beginning of the seventeenth century promised to usher in a new era of agricultural prosperity. During the first four decades of the period prospects steadily brightened. No general improvement in farming practices had been possible until a considerable area of land had been enclosed in one or other of the various forms which enclosures might assume. Under the Tudor sovereigns-in the midst of much agrarian suffering and discontent-this indispensable work had been begun, and it continued throughout the seventeenth century. Estates were consolidated; small farms were thrown together; open village farms in considerable numbers gave place to compact and separate freeholds or tenancies; agrarian partnerships, in which it was no man's interest to be energetic, made way, here and there, for that individual occupation which offered the strongest incentive to enterprise. Thus opportunities were afforded for the introduction of new crops, the application of land to its best use, and the adoption of improved methods. Dairying was extended in the vales of the West and South West; corn and meat found better and dearer markets; under the spur of increased profits arable farming again prospered, and the conversion of tillage to pasture was arrested. New materials for agricultural wealth were accumulating; turnips, already grown in English gardens, were recommended for field cultivation; twenty years later, potatoes were suggested as a farming crop; the value of clover and other artificial grasses had been recognised, and urged upon English farmers. Methods became less barbarous. An Act of Parliament was passed "agaynst plowynge by the taile," and the custom of "pulling off the wool yearly from living sheep" was declared illegal. Drainage was discussed with a sense and sagacity which were not rivalled till the nineteenth century. Increased care was given to manuring; new fertilising agencies were suggested; the merits of Peruvian guano were explained by G. de la Vega at Lisbon in 1602; the use of valuable substances, known to our ancestors but discontinued, was revived. Attention was paid to the improvement of agricultural implements. Patents were taken out for draining machines (Burrell, 1628); for new manures (1636); for improved courses of husbandry (Chiver, 1637 and 1640); for ploughs (Hamilton, 1623; Brouncker, 1627; Parham, 1634); for instruments for mechanical sowing (Ramsey, 1634, and Plattes, 1639). On all sides new energies seemed to be aroused. Much of the land had changed hands during the preceding century, and the infusion of new blood into the ownership of the soil introduced a more enterprising and business-like spirit into farming. The increased wealth of landowners showed itself in the erection of Jacobean mansions; farmer owners, tenant-farmers for lives or long terms of years, copyholders at fixed quit-rents, made money. Only the agricultural labourer still suffered. His wages rose more slowly than the prices of the necessaries of life; his hold on the land was relaxing; his dependence upon his labour-power became more complete. He was more secure of employment; but in this respect alone was his lot altered for the better. The promise of improvement was checked by the outbreak of (the Civil War. Excepting those who were directly engaged in the struggle, men seemed to follow their ordinary business and their accustomed pursuits. The story that a crowd of country gentlemen followed the hounds across Marston Moor between the two armies drawn up in hostile array, may not be true; but it illustrates the temper of a large proportion of the inhabitants. It was the prevailing sense of insecurity, rather than the actual absorption of the whole population in the war, that caused the promise of agricultural progress to perish in the bud. In more settled times under the Commonwealth, farming prospects again brightened. But |