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ENGLISH
HUSBANDRY

From the Earliest Times
to the Present Day

by

ROBERT
TROW-SMITH






FABER AND FABER LTD
24 Russell Square
London


First published in mcmli
by Faber and Faber Limited
24 Russell Square, London, W.C.1
Printed in Great Britain by Western Printing Services Limited, Bristol
All rights reserved






To
I. T.-S.
Genios Terrae Britannicae


And he gave it for his opinion, that whoever could make
two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a
spot of ground where only one grew before, would
deserve better of mankind and do more essential service
to his country than the whole race of politicians put
together.
SWIFT


Contents

Preface
1. Prehistoric Preview
2. The Saxon Scene
3. Domesday and Manorial Farming
4. Tenant and Sheep in the Ascendant
5. Sixteenth-century Renaissance
6. The Seventeenth Century
7. The Threshold of Great Things
8. New Ways with Stock and Crop
9. The New Stock
10. Modern Times
11. Modern Times: The Arable Crops
12. Modern Times: Mechanization
13. Modern Times: Milk
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index

Illustrations

1. A prehistoric cattle kraal on Dartmoor
2. Square 'Celtic' fields on the South Downs
3. Mediaeval and modern field patterns
4. Open fields at Laxton, 1635
5. (a) The Saxon plough
(b) The modern plough
6. Seventeenth-century ploughs
7. Worlidge's drill
8. Tull's drill
9. (a) Robert Bakewell
(b) The Colling brothers
10. (a) Eighteenth-century Shorthorn
(b) The modern Shorthorn
11. (a) Ellman's Southdown ram
(b) The modern Southdown
12. (a) A Lancashire Hog of 1795
(b) The modern Tamworth
13. (a) Machine milking in 1900
(b) Auto-recorder milking
14. (a) Harvesting at Laxton, 1635
(b) The combine harvester
15. Mechanized farming: Tull and Young
16. An early threshing machine


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author is grateful to those who have readily given permission
for illustrations to be reproduced: Plate 1, Mr. B. T. Darby; Plates 2 and
3, the Air Ministry; Plates 4 and 14(a), Dr. G. S. Orwin; Plate 5(a), the
British Museum; Plates 5(6), 10(b), 11(b), 12(b), and 13(b), Farmer and
Stock-Breeder; Plates 9(a) and 9(b), Royal Agricultural Society of
England.

Preface

This book began as an examination of the growth of the practices of
English husbandry. But the wonder of John Barleycorn refused to be
kept out; and writing had not progressed far before it also became
obvious that the story could not be wholly divorced from the economic
background. And the techniques and the economics together led straight
into the immense field of rural social development.
This small volume, however, while it glances at all these, is still
something less than a full history of English agriculture as such history
has been understood in the past. The reader will find here a recital of but
few of the variations in prices which filled the pages of Thorold Rogers;
few of the statutes which for six centuries have regulated international
trade in wheat; and few of the perennial disputes between master and
man and church and tithe-payer. All are discussed only where they are
seen to have influenced the art and science of agriculture in the field. For
the same reasonthe concentration of emphasis upon man's ways with
stock and cropthe great reclamations, by the Russells and Vermuyden
in the Fens, by the Knights on Exmoor, by Bennett Evans in Wales,
receive mention only where they have added to the methods and not
merely to the extent of English farming.
For these wider aspects of English farm history Ernie's English
Farming Past and Present remains, and is likely to remain, the standard
work. But it has been drawn upon so freelyand often so uncritically in
the light of new research since Ernie wrote or was last revisedthat it
seemed to me that a fresh approach to his central theme might be of
value. I have, therefore, gone direct to such of the first authorities as are
reasonably accessible and tried to construct anew the story of the
development of the techniques of husbandry. But the more I have delved
the more I have grown aware of the enormous accumulation of material
upon agrarian history that still lies untouched in the muniment rooms of
the Public Record Office and elsewhere, material which might, for
example, alter our whole conception of mediaeval husbandry.
For my earlier chapters I would plead with Camden that 'Who is so
skilful that struggling with Time in the foggie dark sea of Antiquity, may
not run upon rocks?' For the more modern times, the wide knowledge of
my colleagues on Farmer and Stock-Breeder has helped me trace the
main threads of development through a bewildering maze of facts. Even
so, I am only too conscious of how inadequately and with what
imbalance the present century is here treated, and how likely it is that the
perspective of time will eventually indicate other facets than mine as
truer mirrors of our agriculture.

Datchworth Green, Hertfordshire
February, 1950

1. Prehistoric Preview

t some time about eight thousand years ago archaic man in one
small corner of the world reached the great turning point in
history, the harnessing of the forces of nature to his nutritional
needs. In the past he had been dependent on hunting, on the discovery
and collection of wild fruits, roots and grasses for his food; in the future
he was gradually to bring under his control the livestock and cereals
which would best serve to satisfy his appetite and, by directing the
forces of reproduction along prescribed lines, perfect them to his use.
It was an event which, more than the evolution of writing, the
invention of the wheel, the discovery of the power of steam and
electricity, has shaped man's destiny towards its present ends. For
countless centuries before this, man had been a wanderer over the face
of the earth, pursuing or seeking his food through wide territories and
dependent upon caves for shelter. He had been little distinguishable from
the wild beast upon which he preyed, save that his greater intellect had
put into his hands those primitive flint tools which are almost the sole
survivors of his barbarity. In Palaeolithic days the population of the
British Isles probably numbered less than four hundred bodies.
Our knowledge of the discovery of agriculture, whether in the form
of the cultivation of crops or the domestication and breeding of animals,
is shadowy in the extreme. Only the remarkable ingenuity of science in
such fields as methodical excavation and pollen analysis is lifting a
corner of the veil and giving us a hazy glimpse of the picture beyond.
Even so, the little that we think we know is no more than intelligent
guesswork based upon shreds of circumstantial evidence. This should be
borne constantly in mind in reading all that is written on prehistory.
Primitive agriculture, as contrasted with a dependence on
uncontrolled nature, first saw the light of day in the cradle of civilization
between the Eastern Mediterranean and the Himalayas. Working upon
botanical hypotheses, Professor Vavilov of Leningrad has located the
origins of the wild prototypes of cultivated cereals in South-West Asia
(soft wheats, rye and flax), in India (naked oats and barley), and in East
Africa (the harder wheats and some other varieties of barley); it is only
fair to say that archaeology does not confirm his conclusions entirely.
Be that as it may, it was somewhere in this part of the world that
man first discovered how to till the soil, sow the seed and harvest the
grain. Perhaps the earliest indication of his interest in cereal cultivation
comes from the Mesolithic caves of Mount Carmel in Palestine, where
sickles bearing the characteristic gloss imparted by the cutting of straw,
bone hoes, and pestles and mortars for the grinding of grain, came to
light recently; they probably date from 8000 B.C. This evidence is
followed closely by discoveries from the east bank of the Nile in Middle
Egypt, where a still semi-nomadic folk possessed grain rubbers for
grinding meal about 6000 B.C.; and from the Fayum, also in Egypt,
where there are definite indications that in perhaps 5000 B.C. wheat and
barley were grown and stored, flax was known, and there were
domesticated cattle, pigs, and sheep.
Once its practice was firmly established, the intensity of farming
grew rapidly until, before 3000 B.C, it had reached in the civilizations of
Egypt and the Near East the status of an industry. Men no longer grew
A
what they alone needed; surpluses became available for barter in
exchange for urban goods, and for food for the non-productive
aristocratic and priestly castes.







The development of livestock had proceeded hand in hand with the
growth of arable cultivation, with this difference: the tiller of the soil
became temporarily or permanently anchored to it according to the
length of time he cultivated one particular plot; the grazier was bound by
no such tie and could go with his herds and flocks where he would. To
this day many pastoral people remain true nomads, witness the Bedouin.
Even in the British Isles a modified form of nomadism known as
transhumance persisted to our day (and still may exist), in which
Western Highland peasants migrated with their flocks to the upland
sheilings for the summer.
Britain in pre-Roman days lay far beyond the orbit of the early
civilizations, but a handful of knowledge and of goods painfully and
slowly passed through the barrier, and new practices in agriculture
percolated through from the points of origin in the Near East and the
shores of the Mediterranean as migrational wave after wave came
westward and northward. Agriculture, as we know it, came to Britain
about 2,400 B.C.; this must of necessity be an approximate date, but it is
unlikely to be more than a century or two in error. Its arrival coincided
with the appearance here of Neolithic man, and although only a handful
of evidence points to its existence that evidence is quite unequivocal.
It is reasonably certain that in its first stage this early British
farming was a pastoral nomadism with only temporary cultivation of
cereal plots, rather than a system of settled and permanent villages.
Families, tribes, broke up a handful of acres here, worked them for a
year or two, moved on elsewhere, and perhaps later returned to till the
holding again for a spell. It must have been remarkably like fourteenth-
century Wales, where English surveyors found the Welsh ate little bread,
lived mainly on milk, butter and cheese, had no individual property in
land, and shared common grazings over great stretches of country. But a
thousand years and more had yet to go before an animal-drawn plough
was to make possible comparatively extensive cereal cultivation; these
earliest arable fields were tilled by hoe tipped with flint or other hard
stone which did no more than scratch the surface of the ground.
Fields which may be ascribed to this period, towards the close of the
third millennium B.C., have been revealed by air photography on the
moorlands of the south-west and elsewhere; classic examples of the type
are the Dartmoor hut circles. On these the boundaries of minute plots
were drawn by heaps of stones collected from the area under cultivation;
the fields themselves were irregular, an unplanned and casual
disturbance of the surface, and rarely of more than half an acre in extent.
At Trowlesworthy, on the western edge of Dartmoor, four acres in eight
plots apparently supplied the needs of the inhabitants of forty huts; and
the extent of the soil creep towards the edges of the sloping ground, a
sure index of the length of cultivation of any area, shows that these first
fields were tilled for only a short time. Arable farming could hardly play
a smaller part in life and exist.
The only Neolithic grain found in Britain is wheat; identification of
the variety is uncertain, but Sir Rowland Biffin and Professor Percival
tentatively identified a specimen of grain from Hembury in Devon as
Triticum vulgare, of the bread wheat race; vulgare has formed the staple
variety of Britain ever since; other kinds have come and gone, all except
T. turgidum, of which Rivet is a member still covering a small acreage.
The crops were reaped by a sickle formed by the mounting of a single
flint, shaped either like a crescent or a leaf, in a wood or bone handle,
which betrays the use to which it was put by the characteristic gloss
which the silica in the stems of cereals imparts to the implements use for
reaping. The threshed grain was prepared for use by grinding in the
earliest recognizable form of quern, a stone bearing a saucer-like
depression in which the wheat was reduced by a circular motion of a
second stone held in the hand.
As has been said, tillage can have given Neolithic man of 4000
years ago but little of his food. By far the greater bulk of his provisions
came from his livestock. The bones of cattle, sheep, and pigs are found
in immense quantities in the camps which probably were both tribal
centres and cattle compounds. There are also in the heaps of kitchen
refuse the bones of the beasts of the chaseand of man. Domesticated
sheep descend from one or more of the four great foundation stocks, the
mouflon, the urial, the argali, and the bighorn. The earliest British
animals were of the turbary type, probably derived from the urial, a
brownish-red animal standing thirty inches at the shoulder, and still
roaming wild from Turkestan to Tibet. By the time they arrived here
with Neolithic immigrants they had lost their primitive hairy coats and
developed fleeces of wool, and their horns, no longer called upon as
weapons of defence, had become shortened. Their modern descendants,
but little modified, are the Dentes of the Netherland heaths and the local
short-tailed varieties of the Froes, Orkneys and Shetlands, and of Soay
in the St. Kilda group. The legend of the Golden Fleece preserves the
folk memory of the evolution of the woollen fleece, a development
which was later to prove golden indeed. The type remained unchanged
in Britain for 2000 years. Sheep probably formed the mainstay of this
archaic pastoralism and were an added reason why early man farmed
only the lighter upland soils; as Sir Cyril Fox has pointed out, the flocks
would have perished rapidly had they strayed for pasture into the marshy
oak forests with their fatal liver-fluke infestation.
As the Soay sheep enshrine the Neolithic type of the genus Ovis, so
do the Highland cattle perpetuate the bovine species which were first
domesticated in these islands. The long-horned urus (Bos primigenius)
had long wandered wild in Europe and it was from it that the earliest
farm oxen found here were derived; the skull of a Neolithic ox found at
Maiden Castle from a floor of this date had horns three feet long, and a
somewhat shorter-horned urus left its remains at the Trundle in Sussex.
From a crossing of the Celtic shorthorn, an immigrant of the first
millennium B.C., and the urus descend many of the modern breeds of
British cattle; and it may tentatively be suggested that the Longhorns,
the Highland and the Park breed approach most nearly to Bos
primigenius.
The early history of the pig is obscure, but some form of it was a
frequent source of Neolithic food, and its bones abound in settlements of
the period. The horse, derived from the tarpan of European origin and
from Przewalski's horse of the Russian steppes and Asia, first appears in
Britain towards the end of the Neolithic period, somewhere about 2000
B.C. Professor J. C. Ewart has postulated a third original breed as
entering into British stock, the Equus celticus which, if it existed, may
have given rise to the zebra-like stripings occasionally found on the
Norwegian domestic horse; but scanty remains hint at only a meagre
horse population, and that in East Anglia almost exclusively. It was not
until the Late Bronze-Early Iron Age that the horse becomes at all
common, and then it is an 11 to 12-hand, slender-limbed pony.
The advent of metal, which was finally to wield such a profound
influence on the development of civilization, at first wrought no very
great change in British agriculture. Bronze, the first of the metals to be
worked, made its bow here about 2000 B.C, but for some centuries the
mobility of the semi-pastoral farming was not only continued but
perhaps accelerated; settlements of long occupation are even rarer in
Early Bronze Age days than they were in the Neolithic era.
More evidence of cereals come from this timeagain wheat, but
probably of the Emmer variety (T. dicoccum)and flint sickles and
grain rubbers continued in use. It may soon be possible to tell the story
of early English cereal growing more fully, for a technique which has
given remarkable results in Denmark is being applied here. Primitive
pottery, cast wet upon the hut floor, often picked up impressions of
grains lying about, and the baking preserved the indentations;
examination of these grain impressions on archaic pots may tell us
much. Linen fragments in Bronze Age barrows also point to the growing
of flax.
Similar conditions persisted throughout the Middle Bronze Age (to
c. 1000 B.C.) with some slight but important modifications. Barley
makes its first appearance in Britain in a burial urn at Coity, Glamorgan;
and the first bronze sickles came into use. Fewer than thirty examples of
these are known, and they are either riveted or tongued for hafting. At
the same time the saucer quern was giving place to an improved saddle
type in which grain was ground between an upper rubber pushed
backwards and forwards over a lower stone, the saddle-like depression
worn in the latter giving rise to the name. During this period settled
agriculture seems to have reached its lowest ebb since its introduction
into Britain a thousand or more years before. A continuous retrogressive
tendency reached its height and pastoral nomadism became the order of
the day, while tillage sank to even less significant proportions.
One of the major revolutions of agriculture was imminent, however.
In the years between 1000 and 700 B.C. there descended on our shores
the folk of the Late Bronze Age, who were to found improved methods
of farming which were to continue unchanged in many places until the
Anglo-Saxon settlements of 1500 years later. Neolithic man and his
successors of the Early and Middle Bronze Ages had practised a static or
deteriorating semi-nomadic agriculture for a millennium and a half; the
newcomers, basing their tillage upon the first true plough, were to set the
fashion of much of British farming for a second period roughly as long
as the first.
The implement which the Late Bronze Age people brought with
them, or evolved here very soon after their arrival, was to make cereal
cultivation the senior partner in agriculture and to depress stock-rearing
almost to a secondary position. The immigrants were of Celtic race. No
example of their first true plough remainsit was certainly of wood and
not normally likely to be preservedbut its existence can justifiably be
deduced from foreign analogy and from the shape of the fields it
produced. Now generally called the aratrum, or ard, it was essentially a
draw hoe in which the handle had become a mainbeam hitched to a pair
of oxen (or occasionally horses?) by collars or attachments to the beasts'
horns; and handles for guiding the implement were added at the rear. In
effect it became the prototype of the plough as we know it, with
important omissionsthere were no wheels to ease its passage or aid its
power of penetration into the soil, no coulter to cut the side of the
furrow, nor any mouldboard to invert the furrow. Its capacity was
limited to loosening the ground, much as a modern single cultivator tine
does, and its share was not one which completely undercut the sod; it
worked rather as does the nose of the pig, by routing. Indeed, pig and
plough are words that have common origins. This, incidentally, is only
one of the multitude of examples which emphasize the time lag between
the Near Eastern civilizations and barbaric Britain. When the aratrum
was first pictorially represented, on a Sumerian seal of c. 3500 B.C., it
was even then fully developed and with a long history behind it. It
arrived in Britain at least 2500 years later, almost twice the length of
time which has elapsed between the departure of the Roman legions and
our own day.
Primitive and limited in capacity as it was, the aratrum had a
revolutionary effect on the pattern of cultivation. The Neolithic hoe
disturbed the surface of an aimlessly irregular plot; the Late Bronze Age
and Iron Age aratrum, powered by animal traction, drove a straight
furrow to give length to the area under tillage, cross-ploughing over a
similar distance gave breadth to the field, and the result was the
rectangular enclosure which has long been known as the 'Celtic field'.
The name is held to be grossly inaccurate, but it is now of too long a
standing to be readily discarded.
The aratrum had an even more profound influence on permanence
than it had on pattern. It is obvious that a comparatively well-tilled field
will not readily be abandoned once it has been broken up. Rural life
ceased to be mobile and achieved for the first time a high order of
stability. A site at Park Brow, near Worthing, was cultivated
continuously from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Roman
Occupation at least, a period of little less than 1500 years.
These early 'Celtic fields' lie bunched together much as do the half
to two acre small stone-walled enclosures of Cornwall to-day, with a
well worn approach road to them, and in their midst a compound with
the sites of timber huts, of which the supporting post holes can still be
detected. A typical example lies on New Barn Down, near Worthing.
It may be almost certainbut of this no evidence remains
whateverthat with such long-continued periods of cultivation some
form of fallowing or manuring must have been employed, all the more
so as these 'Celtic fields' universally lie on the chalk downs, with a
covering of light soil of no very great inherent fertility, easily cultivated,
and free from timber or overgrowth except small scrub; and, once
cleared, the bushes would be kept in check by the grazing of the herds of
sheep and particularly goats. The time was still some centuries distant
when the dense forests overlying the lower land could be cleared and the
more fertile heavy loams and clays brought under the plough.
The Little Woodbury (Wiltshire) excavations of 1938-9 have not
only given us a greater insight into the agrarian economy of the Iron Age
founded upon the aratrum but have also exploded the theory that all
depressions on such sites were the remains of primitive houses, and have
shown that they were in reality pit silos. Dr. Grahame Clark has drawn a
graphic picture of one of these Early Iron Age farmsthat which has
been carefully excavated at Little Woodbury:
'The main activity of the Little Woodbury people was the cultivation
of their land by the light two-ox plough. The farm was probably about
twenty acres in extent, although probably a half of this would be fallow
land. At harvest the corn would be reaped, brought into the farm
enclosure, and dried on frames, pairs of stout posts set six to eight feet
apart with numerous cross pieces, similar to those used in damp climates
in some parts of Europe to-day. The grain was then husked in an oblong
hollow, scooped out of the ground and probably provided with a rough
shelter to keep off sun and rain. Some would be set aside for seed and
stored in a small rectangular granary raised from ground level on
wooden piles. The bulk, however, would be roasted in preparation for
storage in subterranean silos, circular pits perhaps from three to five feet
in diameter, and sunk anything up to eight or nine feet in the chalk, lined
with some kind of large receptacle, probably of plaited straw. The silos
must have been entered by ladders . . . Since the silos were rendered
stale by bacteriological action in a matter of five years or so they had to
be discarded and new ones cut at frequent intervals. The conservatism
displayed in the maintenance of the farm, the same drying-frame being
rebuilt up to ten times on the same spot, for example, implies a long era
of peace.' (Prehistoric England.)
This notable excavation gives rise to the presumption that the
normal Iron Age homestead had some twenty acres of arable attached to
it, and that the unit of pre-Roman Iron Age settlement was the farm and
not the village.
Bread wheat continued throughout the Late Bronze Age as the
chief, perhaps the only, cereal to be grown, but reaping was made easier
by the spread of the bronze sickle, socketed into a handle, although flint
sickles were still in common use. The true saddle quern was the normal
method of grinding. In spite of this greater concentration on arable
farming, pastoral activities were far from taking an altogether minor
place. The banks, ditches and earthworks on southern downlands, as at
South Lodge Camp on Cranborne Chase, have been interpreted as cattle
kraals, and the great early boundary ditchesthe travelling
earthworkswere probably partly built to deter the cattle thief.
The Late Bronze Age settlers who gave the plough to Britain also
made another notable contribution, the Celtic Shorthorn (Bos
longifrons), small and narrow foreheaded, a dairy type as opposed to the
Neolithic beef beast. It may beand it is admitted that this is pure
conjecturethat these same people laid the foundations of dairying with
cattle; previously milk probably came almost entirely from the ewe
flocks and from the universal herds of goats.
In the Early Iron Age which followedor rather in those
subdivisions which the archaeologist labels Iron Age A and Bthe
fundamental structure of English agriculture remained unchanged, but
the range of cultivated plants was greatly extended, improved methods
of grinding appear, and the life of ploughs was lengthened by fitting iron
points to the shares. Where wheat had hitherto been grown almost
exclusively, except for some little barley, practically the whole gamut of
mediaeval cereals came on the scene. Curwen has listed the grains now
grown. Wheat appears in the varieties of emmer, spelt, and bread wheat,
oats have been found twice (in Wiltshire and at Glastonbury Lake
Village), rye has cropped up at Hunsbury (Northants), barley becomes
relatively common, and beans are recorded at sites at Glastonbury and at
Meare nearby, and at Worlebury, also in Somerset. Both oats and rye
probably came in as weeds of wheat; being hardier they would survive a
bad season where wheat failed, and would be singled out to be grown
individually for their hardiness.
Iron superseded bronze for reaping sickles; their length varies
almost infinitely from as little as two and a half inches to as much as
twenty inches. Almost all are crescentic, sharpened on the inside of the
curve, and with wings at the base which were beaten round the wooden
handles, but occasionally riveted on. From this period come the new
rotary querns, destined to remain in use in Britain to the present day;
remote crofts in the Highlands still utilize them, or did until before the
war. They seem to have been imported by the Iron Age B people who
built the lake dwellings of Glastonbury and Meare and reoccupied
Maiden Castle. Essentially, they comprise two flat circular stones of
similar size, the upper one rotating upon a spindle set in the lower one
and turned round by a horizontal handle. Grain was fed into the space
between the stones through a cavity in the centre of the upper stone, and
it emerged as meal from between the inner faces of the two stones.
A new introduction of primary importance was now on the
threshold. While the Iron Age A and B people were following their
coulterless ploughs as they tilled the light upland soils, fresh arrivals
from the Continent brought with them, c. 75 B.C. onwards, an implement
which was in time to lay low the primeval forests of lowland England.
Their heavy plough, evolved says Pliny in Rhaetia and carried
westwards by waves of Teutonic migrant tribes, was to do more than
bring under cultivation the heavier land; it was to make possible the first
glimmerings of an urban civilization before the Roman conquest, and it
was so to increase the production of grain beyond the needs of Britain as
to initiate the first export of wheat.
The people who brought about this vast change in the character of
English farming were the Belgae. Again, no complete plough of the new
type has been found, but the evidence for its existence is slight but
unmistakable. Two coulters and some large ploughshares from Kent and
Hampshire point to the existence of a plough which, again on
Continental analogies, had a broad-bladed share and a stout and long
concave coulter, and may have been wheeled. Such an implement, with
adequate traction, would have been capable of tackling the most
intractable soil; if it was operated with the implement tilted over to the
right the slant of the sharebeam would be sufficient to turn the furrow
slice over; and a mouldboard would not be essential. The passage in
Pliny in which he describes the Continental prototype is unfortunately
corrupt; he seems to credit what he calls the plaumoratum with a wheel,
coulter and spear share, and to imply that the share turned the sod. R. V.
Lennard has argued that 'a large coulter does not necessarily imply a
wheeled plough', but in spite of his powerful argument majority opinion,
first directed to the question by Colonel Karslake, now credits pre-
Roman Britain with the possession of a wheeled implement.
Yet again, the new ploughwhich may conveniently be called the
caruca to distinguish it from the lighter aratrum or ardaffected the
pattern of the fields. The Celtic aratrum had produced the square or
somewhat oblong field, in which the ratio between length and width was
always fairly close because the implement worked continuously across
the width of the field. The new, heavier plough in time standardized a
field pattern which was eventually to develop into the mediaeval strip,
and to survive for two thousand yearsthe strip of, commonly, a
furlong in length and twenty-two yards in width which later became the
English acre of 4,840 square yards. Many reasons have been advanced
for this new pattern, but to all of them there are objections. My own
theoryand it is no more than a guessis that the practice of ploughing
bouts around an opening ridge was followed from the earliest days of
this Belgic caruca, as it would have to be if the implement did in fact
turn a furrow to only one side. It naturally followed that the furrow-
length should be long in relation to the distance the plough had to travel
empty along the headlands, and a field of great length and narrow width
was the result. The square Celtic field and the long Belgic strip are,
therefore, the natural outcome of the use of a virtually one-way plough
on the one hand (i.e., one that can turn the furrow either to left or right,
or in this case turns none at all), and the familiar plough of to-day.
The caruca, therefore, was the basis of the strip cultivation which
for long was regarded as an Anglo-Saxon introduction into England, but
which recent arguments have convincingly sought to project back to the
time of the Belgic immigrants. It is certain that an elongated strip field
contemporary with the Belgic occupation has been proved at Twyford
Down in Hampshire. The typical strip will fall to be described fully
later; here it will suffice to say that in essence it comprised long narrow
acres or half-acres lying contiguously in a common field, divided into
separate 'shotts' or 'furlongs', the whole system being a logical outcome
of the communal ownership of the plough and the plough team; but it
would be foolhardy indeed to suggest that the pre-Christian Belgae had
evolved anything like the mediaeval open field system.
The cause for this Teutonic invention of the heavy plough has been
attributed with some probability to the sudden change of climate which
occurred in northern Europe about 500 B.C. Colder and wetter
conditions covered the lighter cultivated soils with scrub, and the
survival of the population depended on the evolution of an implement
capable of extending cultivation on to the heavier land; it did more, for
by reducing the extent of downland pasture it made imperative the
preservation of winter feed, and the scythe was developed for the easier
cutting of hay.
The name of Pliny was mentioned above. Its use is a sign that the
threshold of recorded history is being reached. Hitherto the story of
English farming has had to be pieced together tentatively and
laboriously from scraps of material evidence; the haystack has had to be
reconstructed from one rusty needle. Henceforth the statements of
contemporaries, few, unreliable and ambiguous though many of them
are, aid the interpretation of iron and pottery and the barely discernible
shapes of prehistoric fields.
One of the first classical references to the methods of this advancing
but still archaic English agriculture is that by Dio-dorus Siculus, who
says that in the centuries immediately on each side of the beginning of
the Christian era Britons cut off the ears of corn and stored them in
underground pits; we have seen that at Little Woodbury such pits have
been found. It is certain that grain was heat-dried before it was stored,
and certain discoveries point to a process in which the ears were
suspended on a hurdle above a bed of heated flints; heat-cracked flints
often abound in areas suspected of being the sites of primitive threshing
floors. But seed grain must have been excepted from the process, for
such uncontrollable drying would have imperilled germination. Pliny
also credits the Briton with the practice of marling; in Britain, he says,
they sank pits which might be 100 feet deep, to get 'a kind of chalk'.
Marling was lost in the Dark Ages, and its mediaeval re-introduction
was so much in the nature of a new discovery that it will fall to be
described later.
The Belgae of the new heavy plough were few in numbers, as far as
can be told, but they came as conquerors and masterful settlers, autocrats
who were ready to plant in their clearings in dense forests their lonely
homesteads, the crederrima aedificia which Julius Caesar found here in
the first Roman invasion of 54 B.C. Their particular areas of settlement
were two, one in Kent and Hertfordshire and the other in the Hampshire
region, where vast quantities of wheat were grown, with barley as well
for the universal Celtic beer. It was probably on the Herts-Beds. borders,
on the loams of the Ivel-Hiz river region, that these men first attacked
the 'areas of difficult settlement', as the archaeologist calls the sodden
clays to distinguish them from the light lands so attractive to the
Belgae's predecessors in England; certainly heavy clay was brought
under the plough around Cambridge at this time. Some of their farmland
was enclosed by defensive works: at the first Verulam a vast earthwork
protected an area for arable and pasture as well as the city itself. Caesar
had been grossly misinformed when he was told that, except near the
Straits of Dover, Britons knew nothing of agriculture but lived on meat
and milk and dressed in skins. Far from it: there were, side by side, the
advanced agrarian settlements of the Belgic invader on loam and clay,
and the far from despicable older cultivation of the chalk downs and the
river gravels by the already ancient aratrum. The aratrum, indeed, was to
survive for many centuries; even in the early sixteenth century
Fitzherbert, remarking on its survival, gave the reason: 'The plowes that
goo with wheles, me semeth they be far more costly than the other
plowes.' They must also have been useful as a form of heavy harrow.
It might be expected that the Roman Occupation would have far-
reaching effects on English agriculture in the 350 years that the legions
were in Britain. Distance tends to foreshorten the length of their sojourn
hereit was more than a dozen generations, the span of years which
separates Elizabethan England from our own. In fact, however, much as
it extended the scope of native fanning, the Occupation may have done
little to alter its methods as far as the remaining evidence shows,
although it may be inconceivable that in a country so closely in touch
with the advanced systems of the Mediterranean lands nothing of those
southern systems permeated through.
Our knowledge of Romano-British agriculture is surprisingly slight.
The Celtic field system continued in use unchanged, for the peasant
cultivators who practised it flourished under the Pax Romana. So
complete was the peace away from the reach of marauding Border
bands, and until the onset of the Teutonic depredations, that weapons of
war are almost completely absent from the sites of rural houses; and so
prosperous was the community that lived under the foreign sway that the
area of land under the light aratrum was multiplied many-fold. On sixty-
five square miles of the Sussex Downs behind Brighton, Mr. G. A.
Holleyman found that eleven and a half square miles still clearly bear
the boundary lynchets of the Celtic fields, and traces of another three
square miles of fields may also be detected. Mr. Holleyman described
these downland villages as highly organized agrarian settlements, and
additional evidence that south Britain was an important centre of corn
production. Side by side with this growth of the cultivation of the chalk
downs went the extension of heavy land farming, with this important
distinction: the square Celtic fields of aratrum tillage are associated with
small peasant holdings; while the clay land farms are extensive, imply
use of the more efficient caruca, and stand in close relationship to the
magnificently equipped villas which were the homes, not of Romans but
of Romanized Britons, more often than not the great Belgic landowner
who quickly donned the civilization of his successors in conquest. This
distinction is one that is marked and unmistakable. Each system kept
itself to itself; the Celtic village flourished in such areas as Salisbury
Plain, Cranborne Chase and the Border hills; the villas are concentrated
south-east of a line from the Severn to the Trent; rarely or never do the
two intermingle. A third farmer must not be forgotten. He was the
Roman soldier who, in the intervals of fighting, marching, training, and
military building, found time for an agriculture which went some way
towards providing him with food in such settled but isolated stations as
those along the Wall. Off duty, he was probably indistinguishable from
his peasant neighbour. For the year's stock of grain, from quartermaster
or his own fields, he had well-built granaries; a pair at Fendock in
Perthshire were each fifty-six feet long and thirty feet wide and had
ventilated floors, and those at Corbridge were even more capacious.
The strip system of long rectangular lands was probably known in
pre-Roman Britain, and it continued to be practised in association with
the villa estates. In south Lincolnshire strip cultivations were certainly
contemporary with and adjacent to Romano-British homes, and a few
villas have yielded coulters and shares from the heavy plough, but to
read into these remains a prelude to the mediaeval manorial system is
dangerous and unjustified in the extreme.
The Romano-British villas, many-roomed stone-built homes sited
on sheltered and well-watered valley slopes, gave their occupants a
luxurious comfort that was not again to be seen in England before late
mediaeval days, and a standard of decoration on mosaic floor and
painted wall as meaningless as that of our own suburban culture. With
them went a block of farm buildings, with quarters for the labourers.
Some 500 are known in England, many of them rebuilt Belgic homes.
But the Roman villa and the pre-Roman village did not have all the
picture quite to themselves. In Sussex there are traces of a hamlet newly
laid out on a specifically Roman plan; capitalist enterprise drained the
Fens and peopled them with peasants; and towards the end of the Roman
period there are signs of a depopulation of the downs to make way for
the sheep which, a thousand years later, were again to oust men from
their homes. A few scraps of evidence throw a light on agrarian
technique. The tribulum, a wooden sledge studded with flint flakes and
drawn over the ears of grain, was used for threshing on a villa estate at
Poling in Sussex; it still remains in use in Cyprus and elsewhere, and it
is commemorated in our English word 'tribulation'. Highly efficient grain
driers, an adaptation of the hypocaust system of room heating with hot-
air passages under the granary, have been unearthed. Grain kilns were
also used for the same purpose in a few of the more advanced Celtic
villages. Beans became commoner in Britain; vines were grownan
early imperial attempt to give the Italian wine merchant a monopoly of
the market was abandoned in the third century A.D.and vine stems
have actually been found on the site of a Hertfordshire villa.
Prosperity under the wing of the Roman eagle was not to last. When
the urban civilization so laboriously built up in Britain began to fail in
the third century and towns fell into decay never again to regain all their
old glory, rural England weathered the economic storm far better, as it
has always done. Men found they could eat grain, but that money makes
a poor meal. Signs are not wanting that the villa went from strength to
strength right up to the disintegration of rural society in the face of the
Anglo-Saxon marauder in the second half of the fourth century. Villa
self-sufficiency continued to develop right up to this time; on a
Chedworth estate the farmer-magnate smelted his own iron and bleached
his own cloth.
But in spite of all these scraps of evidence we are really profoundly
ignorant of Romano-British farming at its peak. Did the magnificently
prosperous villa dwellers grow the lucerne and the vetches that winter-
fed the Roman cattle at home in Italy? Did they study the economics of
production as closely as did Varro? Did they plough, cross-plough and
obliquely plough nine times until no one could say which way the share
had gone, as Pliny reported of Italy? Did their yields compare with the
tenfold return described by Cicero in Sicily? We do not know. Certainly
there existed in Mediterranean lands an agriculture in many ways as
advanced as early Victorian farming in England; and it is difficult to
escape the conclusion that where so high a level of domestic life
obtained, as it did in many places in Southern England, there also
agriculture must have been followed in an advanced and highly
productive technique.

2. The Saxon Scene

y the end of the fourth century England had suffered repeated
raids by barbarian enemies from three sides, the Saxons from the
east, the Picts from the north, and the Scots from Ireland. A
fourth source of destruction may have been the Bacaudae, peasant rebels
against high taxation who ravaged Gaul and were probably not absent
from the English countryside. In the first half of the fifth century the
Roman legions and the auxiliaries had gone, and the first of the Anglo-
Saxon settlements were being established in a country which, after brave
rallies under native leaders, became defenceless.
The towns with their walls, and however degenerate their
civilizations had become, survived the raids for some decades, but the
wealth and military weakness of the villas made them an obvious and
easy prey. Their apparent decline began before the end of the fourth
century, but this presumption is based on the cessation of coin evidence
and overlooks the fact that in a self-sufficient estate money would have
been unnecessary.
The departure of the Romans by no means left a Britain that was
completely de-Romanized; the ranks of British society were permeated
with time-expired men from the imperial armies, and with civil officials
and foreign merchants who must have remained in large numbers to see
the final end of the culture under which Britain had flourished for almost
four centuries, and which must once have seemed eternal. But reversion
to barbarism was the only result that could follow the removal of props
of an artificially bolstered civilization, and as it gained increasing
momentum the towns fell into ruins, the Iron Age camps were re-
fortified, and the Iron Age Celtic culture was momentarily revivified.
The question of a Romano-British survival here and there, of
something saved from the ruins, does not concern us except in so far as
it handed on the agricultural traditions of both Romanized villa and
native village. For neither is there more than fragmentary evidence of
continuity. The new Saxons seemed to have settled down on the old villa
estates only at Whitcombe (Gloucestershire), Atworth (Wiltshire), and
Langton (Yorkshire), where late Roman and early Anglo-Saxon remains
are so mingled as to suggest a real continuity of occupation; and at one
of the most recently explored of all sites, that at Farthing Down near
Coulsdon (Surrey), where there appears to have been unbroken
occupation from the Early Bronze Age through the period of Celtic and
Romano-British square fields to the flat pagan graves of Saxon families
of c. A.D. 600. The old agriculture seems to have died out almost
completely; on the chalk hills of Wessex and Sussex air photography has
demonstrated 'the contrast between the upland Romano-British villages
with their system of small arable plots and the riverside townships of the
Saxons, whose great open fields cultivated in bundles of acre and half-
acre strips left the ploughlands of the earlier population to return to
pasture and waste'. And because many of them have never since been
cultivated the grass-grown boundaries of the Celtic fields remain to this
day. But the village discontinuity must not be over-emphasized; the river
gravels of the lower Thames and elsewhere had been popular farm land
for many centuries, and here pre-Roman, Roman and Saxon remains
sometimes run close together.
B



Angles, Saxons, and Jutesto perpetuate Bede's ancient tribal
distinctionsimposed on the land, conquered sporadically and occupied
piecemeal over many decades, a system of farming which was based
upon what they had known and practised in their Continental homes.
The problem of agrarian continuity is complicated in that both the
Belgae-become-Roman-Briton of the old order and the Anglo-Saxon of
the new came from a common Teutonic stock and from Continental
homes that ranged over the same lands, and there they had evolved a
common agricultural technique which had probably little changed in the
five centuries between the Belgic invasion of south-east and southern
Britain and the adventus Saxonicum.
There are those who follow Seebohm and see an almost unbroken
continuity of occupation and agrarian practice between the Romano-
Briton and the Anglo-Saxon; there are others who assert a complete
breakdown of the old agriculture along with the old homes. The truth
probably lies somewhere between the two views, with an infinite local
variation ranging from a complete rupture here to an unbroken
continuity there. Kent appears to have retained peculiarities specific to
Celtic Britain (or may have developed them under the influence of a
culturally distinctive Jutish race). In the west Midlands the Saxon
common field system was imposed on a Celtic pattern of isolated farms
and hamlets, in striking contrast to the nucleated villages of the south. In
Northumberland the remnants of the conquered race were large enough
to retain much of their custom and their idiom and pass them on to their
successors. The Anglo-Saxon invaders were farmers to the bone and
their superior equipmentand notably the heavy plough which had first
appeared here with the Belgaeenabled them to penetrate the forests of
England to an extent unparalleled in the Roman period and almost
unknown before. But they were also for the most part culturally
primitive. They largely or completely rejected the amenities of Roman
Britain; and were illiterate. Their squalid homes were wattle and thatch
hovels so flimsily built upon a scooped-out floor that few traces of them
remain, and this in spite of the fine array of barbaric finery their leaders
were able to sport.





The advance of the Anglo-Saxon settlements across the face of
England, the emergence of the Kingdomsgreat as Mercia,
insignificant as that of the East Saxonstheir conversion to Christianity
and their amalgamation under the final supremacy of Wessex, are
subjects as irrelevant to the story of English agriculture as they are
fascinating to the historian. Beneath the inter-state wars and beside the
conflict between the religious practices of Roman and Celt, however, the
forests of England were falling to the axe, the earth was turning brown
beneath the shares of Saxon ploughs, and the rasp of the sickle was
heard where once the howling of wolves and the distant tramp of Roman
legions were the only sounds. From north to south, from cast to west,
England was becoming a fertile field in the hands of men who, despising
the premature and artificial urbanization of their predecessors, were
practising the only culture and calling that they knew. Of their work we
know nothing: the Dark Ages are justly so called. The impenetrable
gloom is lighted only here by an odd reference in an early law code or a
grant of land, there by deductions from the growing science of place-
name study, until the Domesday picture, in a full gleam of daylight,
reveals a country populous with a thriving peasantry, a land turned from
a vast forest into a great sea of arable and pasture. How many Saxon
martyrologies would we sacrifice for the biography of one early peasant
settler!
The Anglo-Saxon settlers did not come as strangers to a foreign
land. Their fathers had probably traded in Britain, served in the Roman
legions which policed it, and raided it when the westering pressure of
Teutonic tribes became stronger than the power of the Empire. A
century of raids was followed by decades of mass settlement, first on the
alluvial valleys and the medium loams, and then as the area of such land
diminished and ploughs, oxen, and manpower became more plentiful, on
the heavier clays. Archaeology helps little, if at all, in illuminating the
agrarian history of Anglo-Saxon England, but the earliest text which
throws light upon the social structure of the newly won land, the early
seventh-century laws of thelberht of Kent, reveals the free peasant
firmly settled on the land, a man ignoble, but subject to none below the
king, who was the foundation of the Jutish civilization of the south-east;
a man possessing that distinctive liberty which, handed on to his
descendants, was to make the mediaeval Kentish land custom a thing
apart. Elsewhere a more aristocratic order of society seems to have
grown up, or to have been imported ready-made from the Continent. In
the West Saxon kingdom the free peasant is shown by the earliest
evidence, the late seventh-century laws of Ine, also to be the main prop
of society. His social standing was perhaps less than that of his Kentish
contemporary, but he was none the less an independent man called upon
only to observe the fundamental obligations of the subject of a
monarchy, military service, the support of his king, and the preservation
of peace. In the absence of evidence to the contrary it may be surmised
that the peasants of the northern kingdoms followed the same pattern.
The unit of settlement that grew out of the orgy of land acquisition
by force or first cultivation was an essentially rational one. It is most
clearly expressed in Bede's phrase, terra unius familiae, the land
necessary to support the peasant and his family and to enable him to
fulfil his seignorial obligations in kindthe feorm or food rent of his
sovereign. Here it may be suggested that the familia was a patriarchal
family of several generations with collateral branches all living around
one central hearth, rather than one in the more limited modern use of the
word. This land unit was called in the charters the 'hide' or hiwisc, and
its elasticity has worried generations of historians bent upon a firm
definition of area. Maitland found that in Cambridgeshire it
approximated to 120 acres; it was rarely if ever larger, and in western
Wessex may have been as little as 40 acres. But whatever its size it was
still 'the land of one family'. Variations in conception between tribes as
to the amount needed to maintain a household can be added to the
marked differences in the quality of the land as the prime causes of the
variable area. Yardlandsone-quarter of the hideon a later Bishop of
Worcester's manors ranged from 12 to 48 acres; and in a single manor,
that of Clifford Chambers, there were yardlands of 48, 36 and 28 acres.
The assessment of hide area probably aimed at standardizing yield rather
than extent. In the modern allocations in the eighteenth-century
enclosure of Kingham there were exchanged for single yardlands areas
which ranged from 11 to 32 acres, and the allotments were claimed to
reflect scrupulously the differing soil and aspect values of roughly equi-
sized parcels of common field holdings. In the course of time, however,
the hide became almost wholly a unit of fiscal measurement, but of that
development later chapters will deal. These late seventh-century laws of
Ine of Wessex not only give a clue as to the social status of the Wessex
peasant-farmer; the forty-second section of the code throws a light on
the system of agricultural tenure which was in being within two
centuries of the Saxon conquest. The passage runs: 'If ceorls have a
common meadow or other shareland to enclose and some have enclosed
their share while others have not, and cattle eat their common crops or
grass, let those to whom the gap is due go to the ceorls who have
enclosed their share and make amends to them.' Much has been read into
this one sentence, far more certainly than may properly be done. It does
not imply common ownership of arable or pasture, but it does seem to
provide prima facie evidence for land individually owned but tilled in
common for convenience, and to point to some absence of intermediary
between peasant and king. Four hundred years later the lord of the
manor's steward would sit in judgment upon such a dispute; in Ine's day
the bulk of the land was lordless, and was in fact as well as name the
king's land. Even at so early a date, however, the insertion of an
intermediary between the king and the peasant was taking place,
although a general seignorial system did not reach full development in
England until a far later date than in Gaulat the time of the Norman
conquest it was still inchoateand a thin stream of peasant freedom was
to run throughout the feudal supremacy where elsewhere in Europe it
had long been dammed up, stopped, and lost.
Some of the land was lordless, but Ine legislated for some that was
not: 'If a man takes or ploughs a yard of land or more at an agreed rent
and his lord wishes to exact both rent and work from him for that land,
he need not take it unless the lord has given him a house, but in that case
he must forfeit the crops.' The yard of landthe quarter-hide or virgate
of some thirty acres in the Midlandsis held by a free tenant of a lord:
the passage is the first sign of the system which, in the course of
centuries, was to curtail the independence of the peasant cultivator and
reduce him to servility. There is little doubt that, while much land might
have been held in active lordship since the days of the settlement by
chiefs of warrior-peasant bands, the rest was to be largely alienated from
the immediate control of the king by his gifts of estates to his followers
and ministers for their past services to his person and to the Church for
the future of his soul. Such gifts could, and usually did, carry with them
the right to take the rent in kind which had formerly been rendered to the
king, some rights of jurisdiction, and other rights of which we know for
certain little; and receipt of many of the obligations of the free settler
was passed over his head from king to lord. Others the peasant
surrendered through the centuries: a nominal ownership of a hide or
virgate precariously guaranteed by a peripatetic monarchy must have
seemed of nebulous worth when it was set against the active protection
which a local magnate could give in times of war, of raids and invasions,
and of civil strife, and the financial and material aid which could stand
between the peasant family and starvation in bad seasons or personal
misfortune. The peasant owner commended himself to a neighbouring
lord, surrendered to him his possessor of land, swore fealty, and received
back a hereditary tenancy bound about with obligations of service and
rent. For twoscore generations of English farmers ownership in fee
simple was to become largely inapprehensible until our own century
abolished copyhold tenure.
Almost two hundred years were to pass before any surviving text
throws a comparable light on the Saxon agricultural system. But this
much seems certain: at the time of Ine the common field system existed
in Wessex, and it is highly probable that it had arisen quite as early in
the Midlands and in those areas of the north from which the Briton was
first displaced. Its appearance at so early a date adds force to the
argument that it was evolved in the Continental homes of the Anglo-
Saxons and brought with them here on their migration. It is only in the
areas of early settlementbefore the end of the sixth centurythat it
later developed fully. In the north and north-west, in the border country
of Shropshire and Hereford, in the south-western peninsula as far east as
western Somerset, it was rarely practised; and even in the areas of early
settlement it was not universal. Kent was from the first culturally and
agriculturally distinctive, and in East Anglia it seems to have been less
common. And, secondly, control of the land was passing from the
cultivator at the bottom and the king at the top to a new figure, a lord
whose stature between the two was heightened yearly.
The Kent system of land tenure which was later to be differentiated
so sharply from that of the rest of England had as its basis not the Saxon
hide but the sulung, an area which could be ploughed by a team of eight
oxen, a relationship which is brought out even more clearly in the
quartering of the sulung into yokes (i.e. each of two oxen). It was larger
than the hidea ninth-century equation related it to two hidesand its
size gives weight to the estimation of the Kentish yeoman as a man the
superior of his Saxon colleague both in prosperity and social status.
Elsewhere in England the rule of primogeniture, inheritance by the
eldest son, held good; in Kent gavelkind prescribed the division of
property among all first heirs. Elsewhere, in places where the open fields
were to reach full development, arable, pasture, meadow, and woodland
formed one compact block within the confines of the village boundaries;
in Kent arable and pasture were often widely separated, the former near
the homestead, the latter at some distance in the denns (e.g. Tenterden)
of the great Wealden oak forest. The system is well illustrated by the
charter of Wihtred, who in 697 granted the monks at Lyminge pasture
for 300 sheep on Romney Marsh to be held in conjunction with the four
sulungs he had previously given them elsewhere.
The pattern of Anglo-Saxon agriculture was first traced by the
pioneers, collective and individual, who won their farms from the forest.
Time developed the thin tracery of isolated homesteads into the intricate
network of villages which stands revealed in the Domesday Survey.
Isolated farms there still werethousands of them remain to this day
which fit easily into no village patternbut the human passion for
companionship, the desire for mutual protection, the urge to develop the
best sites, and an appreciation of the manifold advantages of co-
operation drew the Anglo-Saxon people into rural nuclei. And when
these primary centres became overcrowded the younger sons took
themselves off and created new offshoots of the parent village, such as
the 'greens' which make up the picture of the typical Hertfordshire
village. Of their homes nothing remains, but some of the homestead
moats which dot the eastern counties may be old enough to mark their
sites.
More enduring and more certain memorials are the place names of
the English countryside, the delight of the discerning traveller, the sport
of the amateur philologist, and the material which the new science of
place-name study is using to illuminate the pages of Dark Age history.
These place names give some clue to the areas of Romano-Celtic
survival: in the eastern Chilterns the remnants of the old race were
strong enough to carry on into Anglo-Saxon usage the name of the little
tributary of the Lea, the Beneficcan (River Beane) of the Chronicles.
They give a more certain indication of the areas of early settlement by
the pattern of the ingas names that bespatter the countryside; denoting
the 'folk of some particular settler, their linguistically early formation
indicates the land occupied during the earlier stages of Anglo-Saxon
expansion; 'the folk' may comprehend both military followers of a minor
chief and the family of a lone settler. In both types we may see the
germs of the local lordships to which reference has already been made.
Many other analyses of place and field names are of particular value
to local agrarian history. Early cropping is perpetuated in compounds in
bean as in Bamfurlong, claefer (clover) in Claverley, fleax and lin (flax)
in Flaxley and the innumerable Linleys, hwaete (wheat) in Whitcombe,
pease in Peasfurlong, ryge (rye) in Roydon. Early types of land use
include aecer (arable) as in Gatacre, anger (grassland) in Ongar, butere
(butter) in Butterley, ciese (cheese) in Keswick, and meolc (milk) in
Melkridge for dairying land. Beretun marks many an early outlying
grange for crop storage, and cweorn (quern) the sites of millstone
quarries as at Quorndon. Animal husbandry gave rise to eowestre
(sheepfold) as at Osterley, hlose (pigsty) as in Loose and swin (swine) to
early pig country. The scipen from which Shippon derives its name was
a shippon for cattle, Old English ticcen (kid) named Tickencote, and
stod (a stud of horses) Stoodleigh. The saetr of Satterthwaite and the
schele of the Shields were summer sheilings for stock. The list could be
extended indefinitely. The mediaeval art of apt nomenclature has been
lost for many decades, witness the misnomers which mar every suburban
street and gate.
'It seems,' writes Stenton, 'that within most villages the duty of
supporting the lord by a common render in kind gave way in time more
or less completely to a system by which each of the regular holdings in
the open fields . . . supplied labour for the lord's demesne on a definite
number of days in every week.' This demesne, the home farm of the
manor, had been built up out of the lord's share in the fields, swollen by
forfeitures or reversion for lack of heir among the tenantry, and it lay
still in the open lands, or had been consolidated and enclosed. In the
century or two before the Norman conquest the process had been
accelerated and although most, if not all, of the tenants of a manor were
still technically freemen their seignorial obligations bound them only too
effectively to their native soil. These obligations were graded according
to their place in the social scale and the extent of their holdings. The
geneat, the peasant aristocrat, was a free man who acted as a mounted
retainer to his lord. Next down the scale came the gebur, the typical
village farmer of the yardland of thirty acres; and lower still the kotsetla
with a five-acre share of the common arable. Lowest of all were the
slaves, of whom we know little beyond the fact that they existed in large
numbers before the Norman conquest but thereafter rapidly disappeared.
The tenth-century treatise on estate management known as the
Rectitudines Singularum Personarum, the services due from various
persons, gives the duties and rents which were ideally due from the three
great classes of landholders. The geneat, at the head of the peasantry,
was free from obligations of weekly work upon the lord's demesne, but
was expected to turn out and help at harvest (the later boon work), as
was every able body, and to render to the lord a swine in return for
pasture rights. 'For the rest he pays rent and performs the services of an
esquire.' Such as his were the obligations which were to be appended to
many freeholders who escaped servility after the conquest.
The kotsetla was thought by the writer of the Rectitudines to be
entitled to at least five acres of land in the common fields'too little it is
if he has less'. He worked on his lord's land every Monday, and for three
days every week in harvest; on each of these days he should reap an acre
of oats or half an acre of other corn, and his work was rewarded with a
sheaf, a custom that persisted for many centuries. But in spite of all this
he was a free man. The produce of his five acres would not keep his
family, and in all probability he devoted the bulk of his time to work on
the larger of the neighbouring yardlands for reward in cash or kind. He
was the agricultural labourer of his time, with that small stake in the land
which many of his descendants were to retain until eighteenth-century
enclosures drove them into absolute dependence on a weekly wage.
The geburs were the backbone of the countryside, holding the
quarter hide of about thirty acres. From this the gebur paid a heavy due
in service and money. He worked on the demesne for two days in every
week, at harvest three days a week, and between Candlemas (2
February) and Easter, during the rush of spring cultivations, three days a
week as well. He paid tenpence in rent on Michaelmas Day, twenty-
three bushels of barley and two hens at Martinmas, and a young sheep or
twopence at Easter. He kept guard at the lord's sheepfold when required
from Martinmas to Easter, and from the first ploughing to Martinmas he
ploughed an acre a week in preparing the ground for spring sowing, and
'prepared himself the seed in the lord's barn'. He also ploughed another
eight acres as boon work and as rent for pasture rights and for his
holding, providing the seed for three of them. He gave sixpence to the
swineherd when he drove the village herd into the woods, and he joined
with a neighbour in feeding one of his lord's hounds. On the other hand,
the lord for his part settled him on the land with an initial outfit of two
oxen, one cow, six sheep, and seven acres of his yardland sowed.
The Rectitudines also detail the rights and obligations of the
manorial servants, the swineherd who took the entrails of the baconers,
the oxherd who could pasture two of his own beasts with the lord's 'and
his meat-cow may go with the lord's oxen', of the cowherd who had an
old cow's milk for seven days after she had calved and the strippings
after suckling for fourteen nights, of the shepherd who had a lamb a
year, a fleece, seven nights' milk of the whole flock and a bowl of whey
or buttermilk all the summer, of the hayward (i.e. hedge-ward) whose
arable lay next to the pasture so that if the beast broke through the fences
in his charge on to the corn his would be the first to suffer, and of the
cheese-makers, barn-keepers, goat-herds, and the rest.
Some similar services as those due from the rural hierarchy can be
traced back to the time of Ine three hundred years before. Even in the
late seventh century it was the custom of the lord to start the peasant on
his holding with the bare necessities of his husbandrythe Romans
probably colonized the Fens in much the same wayand what had been
given by the lord reverted to him on the death of the grantee, the origin
of the onerous heriot which in the later mediaeval times obliged the heir
to forfeit to the lord his best beast as a token of his ancestor's
indebtedness for his whole agrarian outfit, while the Church took the
second best in lieu of those tithes of which it was certain the sinful man
must have defrauded it.
The paucity of the equipment which was thought necessary to start a
man on a career of husbandry illustrates the simplicity of the subsistence
farming of Saxon days. His home, by the tenth century probably often of
wooden framework pieced together on the ground and pulled upright
with the help of neighbours, was cut from the woods, shaped with the
adze, and filled in with wattle and daub, with windows latticed or open
to the air, and a hole in the roof through which the smoke from the
family fire eventually found its way. The home was shared by the
husbandman and his stock. The two oxen of his equipment pulled his
light plough or formed part of the plough-team on heavier land. The cow
gave him butter, cheese and meat, and the replacements for his team.
From the sheep came the wool for his clothing, more butter and cheese,
mutton and manure. Life could scarcely be simpler.
The Rectitudines mention no implements. The plough, the most
essential of them, must have been owned in common, by one of the
members of the partnership that made up the plough-team, or on light
land by the yardlander himself. That the eight draught beasts of the full
team were not always in use is evident; even with the massive
framework that formed the Saxon plough two oxen could have been
sufficient on the lighter loams, as the first of all pictures of an English
plough from Cdmon's MS. of the tenth century shows.
This and another drawing in the same manuscript show clearly that
in the century before the Norman conquest this primary implement of
tillage had a main beam borne upon a one- or two-wheeled fore-carriage,
a semi-crescentic coulter, a sharebeam tipped with a crude share, and a
sheath. Yet another well-known drawing in a Cottonian manuscript of a
century later also depicts these same fundamental parts rather more
clearly. Here two handles are distinctly shown, the coulter is bound to
the beam by a thong, the long sharebeam and the two handles appear to
be of one piece of wood from a suitably formed branch, an iron plate did
duty for both share and breast cover, and a sheath steadied the
sharebeam against the main beam. Four oxen draw the plough, goaded
by a leader, the ploughman is at the handles, and a third man broadcasts
the seed upon the upturned furrow, doubtless to be covered in by a tined
beam or brushwood harrow. The particular interest of this illustration is,
as Mr. F. G. Payne has pointed out, that it appears to show a one-way
plough in which the furrow could be turned to either side at will by
altering the set of the coulter and by moving the shifting-ear, discernible
beyond the share-beam, from side to side. A mouldboard with which to
invert the furrow slice more efficiently may or may not yet have come
into use; if it had not it appeared very shortly afterwards, but it was long
before it became universal.
In the same series of drawings are others which illustrate late
Anglo-Saxon methods of cultivation. Ploughing is calendared under
January. In March two men are breaking the clods of the furrows, one
with a spade-like implement tipped with iron, the other with an adze;
here again is a sower broadcasting the spring grain from a seedlip
formed by the skirt of his gown girded up in front. May shows the
shepherd and his sheep, rams horned like an Exmoor Horn and the ewes
apparently hornless. June and August illustrate haysel and harvest. In the
one men are reaping; three peasants hold the corn just below the ear and
sever it high up the straw with a sickle held in the left hand, a fourth
binds the short sheaves, and two more deliver them to the seventh man
who is loading the cart with a pitchfork of almost modern shape. The
construction of the cart with its sectionally built wheels would not have
disgraced a far later century. In the other six men are mowing hay with
long sneathed scythes with modern-shaped blades bound to the sneath.
The whetstone and the method of whetting are the same to-day. In
September the swine feed on the acorns and mast of the wood, strange
stiff-bristled beast with no facial dishing and small ears. The year ends
with the threshing and winnowing of December. Two men carry the
grain to the threshing floor in a wicker basket suspended from a pole
slung on their shoulders. The two threshers use flails that are longer than
their later counterparts but similarly jointed in the middle, and the
winnower is working with what appear to be bellows to blow the chaff
from the grain. The last process of all, that of grinding, was by now done
in a water mill at places where such a device could operate; mills driven
by streams figure constantly in charters of the eighth century onwards,
but windmills had not yet appeared in England. Elsewhere the primitive
rotary quern was used.
These drawings lead us straight into the heart of the problem of the
open field system. Late nineteenth century historians did a great work in
interpreting the organization of mediaeval tillage, but they were so
intoxicated by the beautiful symmetry of the common field cultivations
that they evolved that they sought to impose it everywhere. The
pendulum has now swung to the other extreme, and modern opinion
holds that while such a system reached full development at many places
in the midlands and the south it was far from universal, and shaded off"
into districts where individual cultivation of enclosed land was practised
from an early date. Bearing this in mind, however, it will be simplest to
examine in broad outline the system of the communally cultivated open
fields at the highest stage it had probably reached when the conquest
imposed on it a nascent feudalism.
The humble home of the geburthe yardlandman, the virgater and
the villein of Domesdayand his lesser fellows lay along the street of
the nucleated village, with around it its croft, the garden-enclosure for
the poultry, the sow and piglets, the family cow, and the other stock
which needed constant oversight. Around the village lay the great open
fields, divided by ridge and furrow and markstone into individual
stripsa wide stretch of brown fallow, a vast pasture of weed and
stubble, a sea of corn according to the season. Beyond lay the meadows
near whatever water there might be, and in the background the waste of
the village, woodland pasture for swine, with here and there the hedges
of an enclosure won from the forest or heath. This waste may once have
been under only the nominal supervision of the manorial lord; later it
came to be regarded as his personal possession, to be used according to
his will.
The arable, to deal with that first, was divided into nominal acre,
half-acre, or similar strips, rectangular, curving as an S as the team
swept round on to the headland, triangular in the gores in the corners of
the field and its subdivisions, the furlongs and the shotts into which the
strips were parcelled according to the drainage lie of the land. Each
man's holding lay inextricably mingled with the others, an acre here, half
an acre there, cheek by jowl with the parson's glebe and the lord's
unenclosed demesne. This confusion of strips was once ascribed to a
desire to give each villager a share of the good land in one part of the
field and part of the bad in another. It is now believed to have arisen
naturally from the organization of the plough-team of eight oxen or less:
the owner of the plough might take the first acre broken up, the owner of
the leading pair of beasts the second and so on until every partner in the
team had received a share, when the process was repeated until the limits
of the team's land were reached; in time the allotments would become
permanent. The theory gains weight from the fact that the pattern of
ownership is often repeated through a shott: B's lands always lie between
A's and C's.
A virgater with thirty acresand an acre bore a close or a remote
resemblance to the present area of that unitmight find them spread
over sixty strips in the common fields. It was a distribution which is
claimed to have bound the owner to communal operation and the
common rotation; I suspect that more often than we know he found it
possible to achieve a large measure of individual cropping in order to
introduce the peas and beans which figured so largely in his diet, and the
vetches for his stock.
The boundaries of each strip were once held to have been marked
by a grass strip or baulk, until it was pointed out that the evidence for
such baulks was slight and that it was unlikely that so much land would
have been wasted in delimiting a multiplicity of holdings. Markstones or
sticks were certainly used, for mediaeval complaints were common
against their removal by a dishonest neighbour. Recently, however, Mr.
M. W. Beresford has argued that the ridge and furrow which pattern so
much of modern grassland and persist in spite of modern cultivations
were really the marks of the open field strips. They were once dismissed
as the remains of early surface drainage, but too often they follow no
natural drainage lines; and the comparison between the ridge and furrow
that remain and the earlier open field maps is too striking to be
disregarded. Classic theory sets the arable in two or three great blocks of
some hundred of acres eachthe two-field system and the three-field
system which seems to have grown out of it. In reality the number of the
fields was elastic and it was the rotation practised upon them which was
either two- or three-course. The two-course rotation was the simplest
imaginablefallow one year, corn the next in alternate fields; thus half
the village arable lay resting each year, serving only to give grazing for
stock on its weeds. The three-course system reduced this gross waste of
arable to one-third by keeping fallow only one-third of the fields each
year. With three courses, one block was under autumn corn (wheat or
rye) the first year; the following spring it was set to oats or barley; the
third year it lay fallow. This three-course rotation may well have been
introduced into Britain from the vast ecclesiastical estates of Northern
France where in the immediately pre-Conquest centuries the abbey was
as much in the van of agrarian practice as it continued to be for the next
five hundred years. Manure was short and the fallowing allowed some
measure of regeneration of fertility. Under the optimum conditions
possible a yield of ten bushels an acre of wheat might have been won,
but average tillage produced far less. Opinion once held that continuous
cropping with one break in three years built up a progressive soil
exhaustion; critics of the view pointed to Broadbalk at Rothamsted,
where continuous cropping has not managed to reduce wheat yield
below twelve and a half bushels of wheat to the acre. The truth may be
that inherent fertility was nowhere completely exhausted, but fungoid
infection persistently took its toll. Certainly, the breaking up of grassed
down arable after scores of years under sheep during the wool boom of
the later Middle Ages produced phenomenal crops for the times with
seed that was still as poor and unselected as it had been four hundred
years before.
It is also possible that the Scottish system of run-rig was quite
widely found south of the Scottish Border; with its permanent infield
near the homestead and small parcels of an extensive outfield
successively cropped for a period and then allowed to fall back to grass
for a rest while other patches were cultivated, it was emphatically only
applicable where land was plentiful; and such areas became steadily less
as the Middle Ages progressed. But the late survival of exactly such an
extravagant way of land use has only recently been remarked by Mr. M.
W. Beresford at Sutton Coldfield, upon the wastes of Sutton Chase; and
if we knew more of the agriculture of the great waste lands we might
find many more traces of it.
Pasture, so desperately short that it reduced the stint of stock to a
low level, was provided by the weeds and stubble of the arable, by the
meadows before they were shut up for hay, and by the commons and the
wastes. The usual view that temporary fencing was erected around the
grain crops and around the hay fields when they were closed against
grazing may, I suspect, be mistaken. Some temporary fencing there may
have been occasionally, but it would seem to be asking too much of the
mediaeval peasant that he should occupy himself often in so wasteful
and tedious a process. Permanent hedges and fences may be postulated
in many places, and the classic picture of the hedgeless mediaeval
landscape will perhaps find itself in oblivion, along with grass baulk
strip divisions and a universally rigid communal cultivation. Certainly,
however, in winter the stock had for feed only hay and straw with what
corn could be spared, and many head had to be slaughtereda state of
affairs which persisted until the eighteenth-century spread of a turnip
root break made over-wintering an easier matter.
Of the stock which existed under these adverse conditions we know
little for certain. Many British breeds of red cattle may carry a large
proportion of the blood of the stock which the Anglo-Saxons are thought
to have brought with them. As Mr. F. H. Garner has pointed out, it is
significant that along the eastern and southern seaboards of Britain are
the breeding grounds of the old red breeds, the Sussex and the Devons,
and the East Anglian Red Norfolk Hornbreed which evolved into the
Red Polls. These last may have in them some of the blood of the
Scandinavian polled breeds which the northern invaders brought with
them, and of which all but the Red Polls, the Galloways and the
Aberdeen-Angus have died out. This latter list could once have been
extended to include the Sutherlands and the Skyes, the Devon Natts and
the Somerset Polls; all are now extinct as individual breeds.
Such briefly was the early development of the open field system.
For the Anglo-Saxon period much of the picture has been built up by
projecting into the past the agrarian arrangements of post-conquest
England, but it is a picture which is confirmed by contemporary
evidence at all the important points, evidence which would by itself be
unintelligible except against the background of later mediaeval
agriculture. As has been said, this open field method of husbandry
reached full development only in the Midlands and in the central parts of
southern England. Elsewhere farming's tunes were played on different
fiddles. One of the main exceptions was the Danelaw, that part of
eastern and northern England which was influenced by the Scandinavian
invasions of the ninth century onwards. In East Anglia there are traces of
a system of assessment based on the manslot, the allotment, probably, of
the Danish soldier when raiding turned to settlement. Fallowing was less
commonly followed and a common practice of continuing the individual
occupation of strips even when they were not under crop laid the
foundations of early enclosures. In Lincolnshire the assessment was not
based on the hide, the land which could support one family, but the
acreage which could be ploughed by one ox-team, the ploughland
divided into eight ox-gangs. Differences in the names of peasant
holdings, however, mask a fundamental similarity of agrarian practice.
From the scanty evidence, it seems probable that the Dane tilled the soil
in the same fashion as did his Midland Mercian neighbour, but the
incidence of free men was higher than elsewhere. The sokeman of the
Eastern counties, who formed up to seventy per cent of the assessable
population, might have only the produce of an acre or two of his own to
supplement his earnings on other holdings, but he was bound only by
slender ties to his lord, and he could go with his land to whatever master
he chose. His independence was soon to be doomed, however, for in
Bedfordshire, where there were 672 sokemen in 1066, only 106 were to
be found twenty years later; the rest had sunk into an unfree villein
tenure of land and status of person. These sokemen of the Danelaw
represented in the main the rank and file of the Scandinavian armies
which settled on the land in the ninth century, sometimes replacing the
slaughtered or subjected English peasants, and sometimes pioneering
new settlements for themselves.
This was still in the future, however. Under the Anglo-Saxon
arrangements of society it was more possible for the successful peasant
to better his condition than it was again to be until in Tudor times free
enterprise finally shook off the shackles of feudalism. Ine allowed that
the ceorl who amassed a hide of land might be accounted thegnworthy;
the eighteenth century would have termed it the entry of the yeoman into
the ranks of the minor squirearchy. But for the mass of rural society life
was hard. The lot of the servile Saxon countryman has never been more
poignantly described than by lfric in his Colloquy, that bright flower
in the arid desert of eleventh-century glossaries. His ploughman speaks:
'O my lord, hard do I toil. I go out at dawn with my oxen to the fields
and yoke them to the plough. Be it never so severe a winter I dare not
hide at home for fear of my lord. I yoke the oxen, fasten the share and
coulter to the plough. All day I shall have to plough, an acre or more.'
He fills the mangers of the oxen with hay, and waters them and mucks
them out. 'O, O, much work it is, sir, because I am not free.'
The shepherd speaks: 'In early morning I drive my sheep to the
pasture and stand over them in heat and in cold with my dog, lest the
wolves devour them. I lead them back into their fold and milk them
twice a day, and I make cheese and butter.'
The oxherd speaks: 'O my master, much I work. When the
ploughman unyokes the oxen I lead them to pasture each night. I stand
over them watching for thieves, and again at dawn I take them to the
ploughman well fed and watered.'
The curse of Adam was upon them: truly in the sweat of their faces
did they eat bread. But it is a curse that may not be untempered with
benediction; it may brutalize the mind but it can discipline the soul; and
it may make possible that practical worship which philosophers from
Ezekiel to Dr. Temple have believed to be the highest veneration.

3. Domesday and Manorial
Farming

hen the decadent Anglo-Saxon monarchy fell in 1066 and was
replaced by the virile and capable Norman administration,
new lords gradually came to live in the homes of the Saxon
thegns, but agriculture and the men who practised it changed hardly at
all. When the completeness of the revolution which altered the face of
the higher ranks of society and rationalized government is considered
this may seem surprising; but the Norman had nothing new to teach the
Saxon in the way of land use, and few if any of the newcomers can have
settled down as practising farmers. True, their manorial demesnes were
tilled under new masters, but they were tilled in the old ways and largely
according to the old customs, of which Duke William was so prudently
jealous. True, the ranks of the Saxon freemen dwindled fast, but to the
bulk of the folk who had commended themselves to a Saxon lord the
new master can have been but little different from the old. The struggle
for survival in the face of crop failures, of murrains, of internecine wars
and predatory neighbours, persisted under the Norman as it had under
the Saxon, although once the teething troubles of the new dynasty were
over the land was to come into an era of prosperity such as it had
probably never known before.
Agriculturally, the early years of the reign of William were marked
by two incidents: the ravaging of a rebellious countryside which in
places was so severe that many decades were to pass before the land was
to come into full use again, and this was notably so in the path of the
Conqueror as he marched from Hastings to London, and in Yorkshire
where the Northern Revolt was put down with an iron hand; and the
almost complete replacement of the Saxon thegn by the Norman tenant-
in-chief.
The Domesday Inquest, that great landmark in English history,
followed the Conquest by twenty years, and has ever since been the
canvas upon which the picture of contemporary land use has been
painted. Essentially a fiscal assessmentevery entry was inserted for its
cash nexus, to which was added the important secondary purpose of
judicial visitation for the resolution of territorial disputesthe Inquest
was ordered by William at his Christmas Council at Gloucester in 1085
'after the King had had great thought and deep speech with his wise men
about this land'. His commissioners were sent out to inquire into the
ownership and value of every manor, its extent, the number of its plough
teams, its population, the area of its woods, meadows, and pasture. The
resulting picture is one that is, agriculturally, far closer to farming
England of to-day than is often realizeditself a tribute to the silent and
unchronicled work of the Saxon pioneer.
The Domesday returns, as they were abstracted into the composite
volumes of the survey, are infinite variations upon a common theme. In
the obscure Hertfordshire village of Datchworth the commissioners had
found four landlords: the Abbot of Westminster who held three and a
quarter hides which carried three plough teams, one of the abbot's and
two of the villeins', meadow to feed only one half of a plough-team but
sufficient summer pasture for all the livestock, and woodland pasturage
W
for fifty swine: Archbishop Lanfranc who held one hide with one plough
on the demesne and one on the villeins' share, and pasture for half an ox.
Three other virgates made up the village assessment of five hides, and
these were held by the Norman military successors to three Saxon
sokemen and one freeman. This is one of the classic examples of the
five-hide vill which was at the basis of the Domesday assessment, but in
which the hides bore no very close relationship to the actual acreage.
Lanfranc's one hide carried two ploughs and if these were really eight-ox
teams they were tilling something like 200 acres. On the Abbot's land,
however, three ploughs tilled three and a quarter hides between them;
and on one of the smaller holdings there was one plough while the other
was untilled. These four entries illustrate the impossibility of equating
hidage, plough-teams and the area of land capable of being ploughed by
a specified number of oxen. If, as has been held, the area cultivated by a
plough-team was equal to a hide of 120 acres, then the six ploughs in
Datchworth cultivated some 720 acres, or almost half the present parish
acreage of 1,550, of which some two-thirds is now (1949) under grass or
wood. The insolubility of the equation is emphasized when we glance at
such East Anglian manors as Havering, where each of the forty-one
villeins had a plough apiece but the total hidage was only ten.
At the time of the Surveyor at least to the minds of the Domesday
clerksthe term villein comprehended the more substantial villagers
and ranged from the partially free socmen to the completely servile land
holder and back again to the freeholder of ancient title; they were the
direct descendants of the geburs and geneats of the Rectitudines and the
ancestors of the mediaeval villein who was in complete personal and
economic subordination to his lorda man holding a hide, half a hide, a
virgate (most usually), or half a virgate. Datchworth also had four
bordars or cottars, successors of the kotsetlas, the smallholding labourers
of the village. The slave pure and simple is disappearing under the
emancipation of the Normans; in 1066 there were, for instance, four on
the manor of Rockland in Norfolk, but in 1086 there was only one.
National history, and by that is meant the social development of a
people and not the wars of their kings or the political manoeuvres of
their leaders, is the sum total of local history. Let us, therefore, turn a
parochial eye upon the Domesday Inquest and extract from it some few
of those details which illustrate the agrarian practices of the eleventh
century. Of riches the nation had none except what lay in its rural
estates; but in a prosperous region the wealth carried on the hoof was
considerable. On two hides in Hertford Hundred there were 68 beasts,
350 sheep, 150 swine, 50 goats and a mare for breeding; this intensity of
stocking was made possible only by the commonage which extended the
carrying capacity of the two hides, of which all but the fallow was under
crops. This same county of Hertford also well illustrates the variation in
winter feed available for the all-important plough beast. Datchworth, an
upland manor with only a hundred yards or so of water frontage, could
provide meadow hay for only five oxen of its forty; riverside manors, on
the other hand, could feed all their plough-teams and still have a surplus.
Area of woodland pannage for swine, too, varied from the minute
coppice that fed the ten pigs of the highly cultivated Wymondley, with
its twenty-four plough-teams, to the wide woodlands of Knebworth that
carried a thousand swine.
In the flatter counties, as in Bedfordshire, keep for beasts along the
side of the sluggish rivers was more plentiful; Biggleswade, with its
well-watered meadows of luxuriant grass, could provide sustenance for
its ten teams and still have five shillings' worth of hay for sale. Here, too,
the mills were a markedly valuable source of feudal revenue; the right of
multure almost universally held by the lord forced the villein to bring all
his grain to the manorial mill for grinding, and the water mill at
Tempsford was worth 2 a year, with 120 eels from its millpond thrown
in. This was an insignificant due, however, beside the 17,000 eels which
the mill at Littleport rendered yearly to the monks of Ely. Bedfordshire
was also one of the counties where the new Norman lord tried to grow
the grapes that had given him the wines of his native Normandy: Eudo
Dapifer had two acres of vineyards at Eaton Socon, but a guess may be
hazarded that the sunless English brew was but poor sour stuff, to be
much sweetened by the honey from the beehives that abounded through
the countryside. Bees were kept not only to provide sugar but also for
the wax for church candles and domestic specifics. In a good season,
however, vineyards could be reasonably productive; that at Rayleigh
yielded up to twenty modios of wine a year. At Castle Hedingham there
were still to be seen in the eighteenth century wild vines bearing red
grapes, the descendants of the plants of the Norman vineyard. Some of
the great dairying regions had even then assumed their milky flavour.
That home of Little Gloucesters of blessed memory, the Vale of the
White Horse in Berkshire, was pouring out cheeses. Shillingford alone
was paying thirty weys of 196 pounds apiece in dues, to which both cow
and ewe contributed, and other evidence carries the Vale's priority in
dairying back to the tenth century at least. Buckinghamshire, on the
other hand, in spite of its fertile valleys, was a comparatively thickly
wooded and poor county; forest-reared swine made an essential
contribution to the peasant diet of bread, cheese, pulse and pork, but it
was a poor ranch farming compared with the intensity of arable
cultivation. In spite of the work of the Saxon pioneers probably upwards
of half the country was still thickly wooded, however, and pig farming
was almost the only occupation over vast areas; the royal manor at
King's Brompton had fifteen swineherds tending the stock upon the
Brendon borders of Exmoor.
Domesday has comparatively little to say about the horse, then an
animal of war or burden almost entirely. Cambridgeshire had its stud
farms, however, and there were twenty-four unbroken mares upon the
manor of Doddington; beside them the 'one lame mare' at Wilburton cuts
a pathetic figure. It may well be, however, that horse-breeding had been
a major rural occupation among the Saxon gentry and particularly in
East Anglia, where Domesday entries for Norfolk seem to point to such
an industry in decay: 220 brood mares at Great Hockham in 1066 had all
gone by 1086, and throughout the county the horse population was down
to two-fifths of its pre-Conquest figure. In Somerset, too, there seems to
have been a notable concentration of stud farms.
The northern Midlands present a vastly different picture from the
south country, for the region had developed agriculturally under the
Scandinavian practices of the Danelaw. In Lincolnshire,
Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Yorkshire land reckoning ran in
carucates, each made up of eight bovates, and manorialization had
grown up along highly individual lines. The neat, nucleated, self-
contained holding of the south was impossible of achievement in the
rocky uplands of the Peak, for example, and there was in its place a
central manor with six or more satellite berewicks around it, dispersed
granaries in which the corn of the scattered demesne was stored.
Different units of land measurement were also found in the West
Country. In Devon, which laboured under the disabilities of the forest
law which ran throughout the royal hunting grounds, cultivation was
carried on on ferlings, four of which went to a ploughland which the
Rev. O. J. Reichel has put at sixty-four acres. Here, too, as in all the
western coastal regions, the open field system faded out almost
completely.
The Northern Borderland also had its own distinctive flavour. In
Durham and elsewhere a highly independent peasantry lived in villages
which were manorialized little if at all; holdings were farmed on a
money rent and often with no indication of communal tillage whatever.
Oats formed the bulk of the grain grown. Another Border characteristic,
shared with the equally turbulent counties of the Welsh Marches, was
the encouragement of hospites, settlers invited to clear and cultivate
assarts from the wide wastes, and the tolerance of the voluntary squatters
who performed the same functions unasked. Neither, however, normally
shared the rights of commonage which went with the more ancient intra-
manorial holdings. In these Border lands, too, Domesday reveals the
traces of the ravages of the marauder; in Amounderness, in later
Lancashire, only sixteen of the sixty-two villages were inhabited,
stocked, or tilled. Welshmen had ruined much of Shropshire before the
Conquest, and even as far inland as Northamptonshire the countryside
was only just recovering in 1086 from the devastations of Morcar's army
in 1065.
Opinion was as vocal in mediaeval days against the diversion of
land from agricultural use as it is to-day; and both near-contemporary
chroniclers and many generations of historians up to Freeman himself
voiced the complaints of the men of Hampshire against their eviction for
the making of the royal playground of the New Forest. However hard
William's action may have seemed to those who had to leave their
homes, reversion to forest was probably the best thing that could have
happened to this thin, poor soil. To the land no harm was done; to the
owners little, for much of the region was the king's or his chief barons';
and to the peasants there was no intolerable injustice, for they could
scarcely have found a new home less fertile than the old.
The coastal marshes of the south-east and east were even then in
demand for sheep pasture. Romney was highly stocked, and its area was
greatly extended by the work of the Canterbury monks of later
generations in walling and draining. Domesday also shows that the sea
fringes of Essex carried a large head of stock; of the 18,000 head of
sheep which the Survey records as being on these flats 1,300 were at
Southminster alone. As a result, cheese was a primary product of the
area where, as further north in Norfolk, several manors intercommoned
on the salt marshes, such as that 'pasture common to all the men of the
Hundred of Colneis'. On the Brecklands as well there were large flocks
of both sheep and goats where to-day many thousands of acres are
stockless.
Suffolk is also distinctive for the minuteness of some of its manors;
one, of only twelve acres, was tilled by 'the lord of the manor himself'.
The size of the manor, indeed, was infinitely elastic. It might be as small
as this tiny Suffolk estate; most often its boundaries ran with those of the
village; but royal or ecclesiastical manors might cover a large part of a
county, as those at Bensington or Leominster.
In the West Midland counties were to be found the bulk of the
remaining slaves; Worcester, for instance, had its bovarii, who
commonly ran two to each demesne plough, acting as ploughman and
teamsman, and who were completely servile, men with no rights
whatsoever. For the upkeep of the demesne ploughs the lord was often
dependent upon a villein who held his few acres in payment for this
duty. At Sedgefield, in Durham, the smith had one bovate 'for the
ironwork for the ploughs for which he found the coal', and the carpenter
had twelve acres for making and repairing the wooden parts of ploughs
and harrows.

So far the development of English farming has been considered
chronologically, as the scraps of evidence become available. After the
time of the Domesday Inquest, however, that evidence begins to
multiply manyfold, and by the beginning of the thirteenth century there
is enough that has been interpreted and correlated to make possible the
presentation of a reasonably complete picture of the structure of rural
society and of its agrarian practices, actual or theoretical. It may be most
convenient therefore if we take our stand in the early 1300's and there
examine the major orders of society and the industry which they
pursued.
Two points need to be emphasized and re-emphasized: that the
relationship between the territorial lord and his servile tenants was not
altogether one-sided, but one of mutual interest, one in which neither
could work without the other. And while the agriculture of the times was
pursued not primarily for profit but for subsistence, any tendency to
over-stress the universality of subsistence farming must be avoided. The
normal villein undoubtedly farmed to feed himself; but the man of
somewhat larger estate pursued some measure of cash cropping in wheat
or wine, in hide or wool, in meat or cheese, and nowhere was this truer
than in the pastoral regions where the output of the flock obviously
greatly exceeded the personal needs of the peasant and his family.
The higher ranks of this rural society were dominated by the great
tenants-in-chief, who held their manors directly under the crown; but
below them there arose so intricate a structure of sub-infeudation that
there might be several persons standing between the man who exercised
immediate rights over a parcel of land and the tenant in capite. To speak
of the lord of the manor and his villeins, therefore, is to over-simplify
the picture, but at some stage in the chain of tenancy there was some
man who was in actual physical occupation of the demesne, or absentee
lord or ecclesiastical body which depended upon its products in kind for
sustenance or upon its rents in cash for the wherewithal to live. These
products in kind could be very considerable. Thirteen manors of St.
Paul's in 1222 furnished to the canons some 720 quarters of wheat, 720
quarters of oats and 135 quarters of barley. The canons, with these riches
in their storehouse, ate wheaten bread exclusivelyfour quarters of
seven bushels of wheat each went into each baking of 290 loavesbut
rural society in the main existed entirely on rye or maslin loaves. The
bulk of the canonical grain went into the canonical brew vats, however:
in 1286 the thirty canons drank two-thirds of the brew from 175 quarters
of barley, 175 quarters of wheat and 720 quarters of oats, and it has been
calculated that each ecclesiastic must have lowered about 1,500 gallons
of ale down his throat in the year. The apparent impossibility of
consumption on this scale cannot hide the fact that the bulk of the grain
harvest of both layman and cleric, rich or poor, was drunk rather than
eaten.
On estates such as these, of course, the administration of the manor
was supervised from outside; and the early years of the thirteenth
century saw drawn up the first of the practical English treatises on estate
management, manuscripts designed to form guides to manorial lords and
their officers in the supervision of the work of their estate servants, the
reeves and the shepherds, the cowherds and the swineherds, the
dairymen and the haywards. The actual physical labour of the demesne
was provided in three ways: by the services which the dependent tenants
rendered in return for their holdings; by the services purchased with the
cash which these same tenants paid in addition to, or in lieu of, personal
service; and by a small handful of permanent demesne labourers. As
with the size of the manor, so did the proportion of the estate in demesne
vary infinitely from those northern holdings where the whole manor was
farmed to the tenants to other instances where the entire manor was in
the hands of the lord. On the general picture, however, the figures of St.
Paul's manors may be some guide; here three-eighths was in demesne
and five-eighths in tenant holdings. But not every part of every demesne
remained in the hands of the lord even in the century after Domesday;
and the tendency to farm the seignorial acres out to villein tenants grew
as the years passed. On the St. Paul's manor of Belchamp in 1181, thirty-
five tenants held 158 acres of the demesne between them, and by 1222
180 acres had come into the hands of forty-four men.
Foremost among the manorial tenants were the villeins, the semi-
servile occupants of virgates and half-virgates of the common fields:
108,000 of the 283,000 servile tenants of the Domesday Survey were
such villeins, holders of hereditary lands which descended indivisibly to
the next heir so that the services due to the lord from the virgate might
not be jeopardized by subdivision. With the villein's arable strips went a
dole in the common meadows and a right of commonage upon the waste.
But the nominal equation of the villein with the virgate was becoming
obscured by the early fourteenth century by the amalgamation of
holdings in one hand, supplemented by assarts from the waste. The body
of villeins was the backbone of rural society but the vertebrae were not
necessarily virgates of thirty acres or so; the villein holding ranged from
the half virgate shared by several co-tenants, the less well-endowed, the
less fortunate, or the lazier men, to the 100 acres or more of the
prosperous and enterprising man.
However elastic the size of a man's possessions might later become,
to each original holding of a virgate, a half-virgate or other unit were
attached the personal services which went to make up the total labour
force of the demesne. These services can be grouped roughly under three
heads: first, the predial service, the labour of two, three or more 'days' a
week upon the demesne in ploughing, in carting, and the like. Two
important qualifications must be made here: the day approached more
nearly to half a day, ending at 2 p.m. or earlier, so that even on the day
on which one of these regular week-works had to be performed there
remained several hours in which the villein could work upon his own
land; and the services need not be performed by the villein in person, but
could be rendered by one of his family or by one of the paid servants
cottars and bordars with a little land of their ownwhom the better-to-
do employed.
The second services exacted in addition to the predial week-works
were the boon-works or precariae, nominally voluntary labour at harvest
or other pressing time in return for one or two meals in each day. These
meals with which the villein worker was rewarded were normally fixed
by custom, and they grew more and more expensive to the lord as food
rose in price until a precaria became a costly method of obtaining
labour. For a day's haymaking at Nastok twenty-six mowers and eight
haymakers were entitled to the bread of four bushels of wheat, one live
sheep, a fivepenny cheese, and a cheesemould full first of salt and then
of oatmeal. Boon works at Ardeley, Herts, required the provision for two
men of one meal of bean and pea porridge, one maslin and one wheaten
loaf, meat, and beer; and a second meal of bread and cheese. The villein
employer of the workers at Belchamp went to supper at the manor house
and was entitled to 'three honest dishes'. Other services due from the
villein could be quoted ad nauseam: at Wickham, to give only one
example, the tenants were required to cultivate part of the demesne for a
crop of flax, harvest it, steep it, and carry it home for retting; and each
holding furnished a man for three days a year to gather nuts.
And thirdly, there were the innumerable contributions in kind or
cash which were due from the villein, either as part of his rent in chief or
as payment for such privileges as pasturage in the woods.
In all this the villein was but a tenant at will, subject to
dispossession without right of appeal to the courts, liable to an arbitrary
fine on entry to his holding, tied to the manor and mulcted substantially
for the right to leave it, fined upon the marriage of his daughter,
compelled to grind his grain at the manorial mill, and tallaged at the
whim of his lord. Yet in the face of all this total of servile subjections
and the villein was thus made as unfree in person as he was servile in
tenancythe mere necessity for give and take, the interdependence of
master and man if either was to prosper, brought a rough justice into
manorial administration. The man, if he failed in his reasonable services,
might find himself landless and penniless; the master who exacted too
high a toll in labour or cash or kind might find his villeins fled overnight
and his estate tenantless and decaying. Mutual need kept the wheels of
mediaeval society turning, and the custom of the manor which regulated
the relationship between lord and tenant, was normally sufficiently
powerful to put the grosser abuses out of court.
Something has already been said of the great virtue of the lesser
men, the kotsetlas of the Rectitudines, the bordarii of Domesday, the
cottars and bordars of later centuries. They were the landed labourers, a
folk much neglected by the mediaeval economic historian, for without
their services neither lord's demesne nor villein's virgate could often
have been adequately cultivated. It is estimated that in Domesday they
formed thirty-two per cent of the recorded population, and they were
probably recruited from the younger sons of the villeins on the one hand
and from the manumitted slaves on the other. Their holding was
normally one of five acres in the common fields, but it might range from
two to ten, and their obligations in service were correspondingly less
than those of the virgater; they worked probably only one day a week on
manual jobs for they were without plough oxen. For the rest of their time
they were available for paid labour on either demesne or villein virgate,
and were the embryo of the wage-dependent labourer who is now the
lowest member of the agricultural trinity.
The lord on the one hand and the tenants in villeinage on the other
formed the major elements of the rural manor. Standing apart were the
freeholders of less than manorial statusnot to be found on every estate,
holding land of an infinite range of size and holding it freely inasmuch
as their occupation was protected by the royal courts, sharing the work
of the common fields and the communal pastures in which their land
also lay, perhaps even rendering light weekly service to the lord of the
manor, but above it all free in personal status and exempt from the more
degrading obligations of servile tenure. Many of them were the
descendants of the small freeholders of Domesday whose land had for
fiscal and administrative purposes come within the orbit of the manor.
And to their often minute free holdings they often added manorial
virgates, rendering to the lord the services which went with them.
Alongside the freeholders may be set another class which grew up extra-
manorially: the squatters upon the assarts and purprestures, cleared from
waste or wood. Standing outside the open field system, these men
usually had no right of common pasture and rendered money payment
for their land.
For the actual technique of this mediaeval farming we must turn to
the agricultural treatises which survivethat by Walter of Henley,
perhaps an early thirteenth-century bailiff on the Canterbury manor at
Henley, on general husbandry; an anonymous husbandry roughly
contemporary with Henley's; an anonymous Seneschaucie, or rules for
the administration of an estate, which is not later than the early years of
the fourteenth century; and Bishop Grosseteste's Rules of about 1240. In
making use of them it must always be borne in mind that they represent
the acme of agricultural thought of the time, practised fully only on the
most advanced ecclesiastical or baronial estate, and almost certainly far
above the standard of the common husbandry of the period.
Henley's Husbandry is addressed to all who, having land and
hearing and applying his teaching, would receive great wealth from it.
He jumps with both feet right into the middle of the hide-ploughland
controversy with an entirely new conception of ploughland. Survey your
lands, he says, and if they 'are divided into three, one part for winter
seed, the other part for spring seed and the third part fallow, then is a
ploughland 180 acres (i.e. sixty acres of each). If your lands are divided
in two, the one half sown with winter and spring seed, the other fallow,
then shall a ploughland be 160 acres.' And to add to the confusion the
author of the Anonymous Husbandry reminds us that 'acres are not all of
one measure, for in some parts they measure by the perch of eighteen
feet, and some by twenty feet or twenty-two feet or twenty-four feet'. Be
the ploughland what it may, Henley says that the plough-team can
plough it in the year: on a strip forty perches by four open the ridge and
go round it thirty-six times, and you have covered seventy-two furlongs,
'and the ox or horse must be very poor that cannot go easily this distance
in the day', and cover the whole ploughland in the forty-four working
weeks that are left after allowing for 'holy days and other hindrances'.
He liked a mixed team of oxen and horses better than one of all
horses, 'for the malice of the ploughman will not let the horses go faster
than the pace of the oxen', and oxen will keep pulling in hard ground
where horses will stop. Oxen also have the advantage in cheapness:
stalled for the twenty-five weeks from October to April they eat three
and a half sheaves of oats a week eachten sheaves to the bushelplus
grass, fodder, and chaff (saunz et palpayle), costing for the grain 3s. 1d.
Horses, stalled also for the same period, need one and one-sixth bushel
of oats a week each, costing 12s. 5d.: 'and when the horse is worn out
there is nothing left but skin, but ten pennyworth of grass will make an
old ox fit for the larder'. These were arguments in favour of the ox as a
plough animal that were to be repeated for six centuries, to the time of
Arthur Young and after. Certainly in Henley's day mixed teams were
widely used, for it is common to find such entries in thirteenth century
inquisitions as this of 1222: Duae carucae cum xvi capitibus, scilicet
medietas equorum et medietas boum.






For the fallow field Henley advised the first ploughing in April;
stock had till then been feeding on the stubble and weeds which
Grosseteste said should graze two ewes to the acre. This first ploughing
should be a deep one, but the second one, after St. John's Day (24 June),
must be deep enough to destroy the thistles but shallow enough to avoid
a fluffy seed-bed. The third ploughing, at Michaelmas, was immediately
before the sowing of the winter wheat; for this little furrows must be
made so that the seed will fall evenly into the hollows with harrowing.
This seeding must be done in good time 'so that the ground may be
settled and the corn rooted before the great cold'. For spring sowing
earliness was important on two soils in particular, the clay which will
harden in a dry March and the stony ground which will become open
and dry in similar weather. In weeding, thistles must not be cut until
about St. John's Day or for each one cut will come two or three more.
Henley was insistent that the seed must be changed every year, 'for
seed grown on other lands will bring more profit than your own'. If his
readers did not believe him, he told them to sow trial strips of old and
new seed 'and in August you will see that I speak truly'. In all this, and
much of the rest of his instruction, Walter of Henley was doubtless
committing to writing the best of contemporary usage. He was also
perpetuating it, for for centuries to come manuals of agricultural
instruction repeat his advice almost word for word. Five hundred years
later Mortimer wrote that fallows might be grazed till April and
ploughed then and in June and August.





For the rates of seeding and the yields we must turn to the
Anonymous Husbandry. 'One can in many places reasonably sow five
acres with one and a half quarters of wheat, rye, beans and peas (i.e. two
and two-fifths bushels to the acre) and two acres with a quarter of barley
or oats (i.e. four bushels to the acre). At harvest time five men can reap,
with sickles, and bind two acres a day', and (says the Seneschaucie)
cocks and sheaves must be small to hasten drying and only the straw
needed for yard and thatch must be removed; the rest should be
ploughed in. The yields which the author of the Anonymous Husbandry
expects are these: 'Barley should yield to the eighth grain, that is a
quarter sown should yield eight quarters; rye to the seventh grain; mixed
to the sixth grain, but more with a higher proportion of barley; mixtelyn
of wheat and rye to the sixth grain, but more with more rye; wheat to the
fifth grain; and oats to the fourth grain.'
The more enlightened of Henley's contemporaries were beginning to
appreciate some of the broader points of the art of animal husbandry, but
throughout mediaeval days the practice of crop production ran at a far
higher level than that of live stock management. In addition, the stock-
keeper was inescapably handicapped by a shortage of winter keep that
was not to be relieved until the eighteenth century, and by an inferiority
of breeding stock that was not to be remedied until the days of Bakewell
and the Collings on the threshold of the nineteenth century. The most
advanced of the mediaeval farmers realized the great truth, as Henley
put it, that 'bad beasts cost more than good'. For this reason, and the
other of equal importance that all stock could not be carried through the
winter on the meagre rations of hay, straw, and a little grain, he advised
the culling and fattening early in the summer of all cattle earmarked for
autumn slaughter. It is highly improbable that there was much
differentiation between beef and dairy types; and certainly all the
emphasis is on the dairying and tractive merits of the beast. On the
management of dairy stock Henley and his contemporaries are sound as
far as they go, and that is only a very little way. 'Feed cows well that the
milk may not be lessened.' During the winter, milk yields were
negligible or entirely absent, but milk from those cows which yielded in
the winter months was more profitably sold in liquid form, at three times
its summer price, than made into cheese. On the average, however, the
winter yield was worth tenpence and that from May to Michaelmas more
than four times as much, which gives a winter-summer milk yield ratio
of about 1:15. In the weeks between Easter and Michaelmas Henley
estimated that three cows should give a wey of cheese (196 pounds) and
half a gallon of butter (three and a half pounds), an estimate that points
to the primary importance of the cow as a cheese-producing animal.
Breeding advice is also sound but elementary. 'The cowherd, who each
night must lie with the cows in the fold, must see that he has fine bulls
and large and of a good breed.'
Thirty sheep, Henley says, give as much butter and cheese as three
cows, but they were dried off after August because later milking was
believed to prejudice easy tupping. Although their heyday was still many
scores of years ahead, these sheep played as large, if not a larger, part in
rural economy than the cattle. They again were drafted before Lammas
(1 August) so that the old and weak ewes could be fattened to catch the
early winter meat trade, and the flock must be carefully examined again
at Michaelmas because by then they might have eaten 'the little white
snails from which they will sicken and die'. Murrain, the generic name
for the multitude of ills that sheep are heirs to, was a constant visitor to
the mediaeval holding and decimated the flocks again and again.
The sheep were valued for their four products, their wool (of which
our authorities say little), their meat (and they were not destined for
mutton until they had outgrown all other forms of usefulness), their
milk, and their manure. From the last the peasant gained but little
benefit, for on most manors the lord enforced his right of jus faldae and
pastured the village flocks upon his lands almost exclusively. Henley
advised that sheep should be housed in straw and hurdle field folds in
wet weather between Martinmas and Easter and that 'the shepherd and
his dog must sleep in the hurdled fold, and not leave them to go to fairs
or markets or wrestling matches or wakes or to the tavern without
putting a good keeper in his stead'.
At the other extreme from the careful management of the sheep
were the village herds of pigs, which led a hapless existence and found
what sustenance they could in wood or on the stubble. Only in late
winter might they be fattened for slaughter with not more than four
bushels of grain. The meat that came from these flat-sided coarse-boned
carcasses may be judged from the fact that from each baconer only five
pounds of lard was expected, and this after an unconscionably long
period in maturing. The insistence by Henley on a good breed of sow
and boar may savour of the ironical in the light of the limiting factor of
low nutrition, although doubtless he did not mean it so. The sow, he
says, should farrow five times in two years and rear at least seven piglets
each time.
The picture of rural livestock is completed by the poultry that
swarmed everywhere, the eggs from which formed a considerable part of
the villein's rent in kind. A hen, says the Anonymous Husbandry, should
lay 115 eggs a year and rear seven chicks, and a goose should rear five
goslings.
These, the cattle and the sheep, the pigs and the poultry, were the
stock that the lord and the villein alike kept, almost certainly in a far
more rudimentary fashion than that practised by Henley's model
husbandman. To them must be added the manorial pigeons for which the
peasant grudgingly and involuntarily provided the feed from his grain
and surreptitiously popped into his pot; the rabbits in the free warrens
free to the lord but not to his tenantsthat equally fed upon the villein's
crops and were equally often poached; the teeming fish of unpolluted
rivers and the eels of the mill and stew ponds; and all the rest of the wild
life that could add flavour to the pottage.

4. Tenant and Sheep in the
Ascendant

rogressand the word is used purely in its material sensemade
it impossible that the status quo of the last chapter, the peak of
manorial agriculture, should persist for ever. For two centuries the
seeds of decay had been discernible within it, although perhaps not to
the men of the time, and the force of economic circumstances was
playing into the hands of the peasant. If space permitted a pretty parallel
might be drawn between the passing of the late mediaeval power from
seignorial to but recently servile hands and the mid-twentieth century
fall of the Victorian legacy of capitalist laissez faire under the impact of
the common man in combination.
The fourteenth century was to see the full initiation and the rapid
progress of the break-up of the manor as a simple unit of subsistence
farming under three influences: the consolidation of holdings and the
rise of a peasant aristocracy of wealth in land and stock; the
commutation of services consequent upon the growth of a money
economy; and the alienation of the demesne.
Early examples of the addition of holding to holding which made
the peasant thegnworthy have been noted from Anglo-Saxon times. It is
probable that the impact of Norman feudalism upon a society which was
in a state of primitive semi-democracy brought about a temporary check,
but the tendency for the man of ability and initiative to thrive can never
be submerged for long. Miss Levett's notable investigations into the
Winchester estates have shown that by 1346 the exchange of holdings
was becoming a general practice, not disapproved by the lords, for the
securing of more compact and more easily worked farms. To the
accumulation of holdings in single hands may be added the very
considerable purprestures and assarts from the wastes; by the middle of
the fourteenth century the majority of the Winchester tenants in
Hampshire held encroachments on the manorial waste of from five to
eighty acres apiece, all almost invariably enclosed pasture or arable held
at a money rent. The result was that such a villein tenant as Henry le
White at Bishop's Waltham could inherit from his father 107 acres
containing, in addition to open field lands, some twenty-two acres of
purprestures, and other land in five small crofts. But it must always be
remembered that only the enterprising and the fortunate thus thrived;
subdivision of already small holdingsin fact, if not in manorial
theoryreduced others to miserably meagre allotments; in Otterford in
1351 fifteen tenants held three and a half virgates between them. This
may seem a revolutionary change from the tidy regularity of Domesday
divisions, but it may be doubted whether the division of villein lands
was ever as precise as the rationalizing clerks of the Domesday Survey
tried to make it. If it was, it was obvious that any such perfect
mathematical distribution must break down sooner or later before the
twin forces of industry and sloth.
The mere expansion of individual villein acreages could not by
itself carry the tenant far along the road to freedom. But when there was
added to it the commutation of customary services into money rents, and
with it a release from the degradations and the restrictions upon
enterprise which constant labour upon the demesne imposed, the
P
completion of the journey to liberty became only a matter of time. The
subject of commutation is a difficult one. The process was certainly
under way as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, for
Middlesex can provide an example from the first decade of that century.
Much of the difficulty lies in the distinguishing between the temporary
sale of works due and the permanent purchase by the tenant of the lord's
right to his services in person. The first arose from the fact that in
manyperhaps mostplaces the services due from the whole body of
tenants exceeded those normally required by the demesne, and the
remission of the surplus on payments by the tenants who owed them was
a commonplace of manorial administration. At Nailesbourne in 1345-6
there was a total of 3,845 days' work due from the servile tenants; of
these 192 were remitted as payment for services rendered to the manor
as reeve, beadle, and ploughman, and for other reasons; 630 were
actually performed (the majority for harvest, e.g., 348 for reaping,
binding and stooking, ninety-six for haymaking, forty for mattocking the
clods before winter seeding, forty-eight before the spring sowing, and
forty-two for harrowing); and the surplus of 3,023 was sold back
unperformed to the tenants for an average of something under twopence
apiece. At Holway in the same year 1,984 works were performed and
4,096 sold back to the tenants. This was purely an annual arrangement,
and the whole gamut of villein services could still be exacted if the
occasion demanded it.
The superfluity of labour alone was sufficient to undermine the
whole system of personal works, and the value set upon individual
works formed a ready basis upon which a permanent commutation could
be assessed. Commutation was probably a system that developed purely
for the advantage of the lord; and rarely if ever did ethical principles
enter into the question. 'Customary servants', said Henley, 'neglect their
work and it is necessary to guard against fraud'; but labour hired with the
proceeds of commutation could be maintained at a far higher standard of
efficiency. Agrarian management was also more elastic under a system
of contract labour than under the custom-ridden methods of unwilling
villein service. But although the lord conceded commutation for his own
convenience it was eagerly sought, and often initiated, by the villein who
had everything to gain from freedom from the tedious incidents of week-
work and precariae, and from his liberty to concentrate his energies
upon his own acres so often neglected in the past at the most vital times
because of the superior claims of the demesne.
In one major respect did commutation at fixed rates play into the
tenants' hands. The tendency for prices to rise steadily was unforeseen or
disregarded when the contract for commutation was entered into
between lord and man, either the villein individually or the tenancy in
mass. The consequence was that a day's work commuted for one penny,
at which it might have been replaced with hired labour in the late
thirteenth century, cost the demesne perhaps fourpence in wages a
hundred years later. As the years went by commutation at a fixed rate of
rapidly diminishing value tipped the financial scales more and more in
the peasants' favour and was a potent factor in the breakdown of
demesne farming.
Commutation proceeded with the years in an orderly progression,
but little affected by such major incidents as the Black Death of the late
1340's, until the agrarian revolution of the sixteenth century gave the
coup de grce to a system of villein service which had long outlived its
economic usefulness; but its demise was long-drawn-out and well on
towards the end of the fifteenth century and even later odd examples of
the exaction of week work and precariae crop up.
But it was not only commutation which brought about the end of
villein services. Mediaeval society was in the melting pot and many
labour dues expired from mere disuse; and the growing prosperity of the
tenant and the increasing prevalence of money-rented holdings as
against the former bargain of land tenanted for services in person proved
a greater influence in its ending than any other. The pestilence itself
played an indeterminable part in the breakdown of this aspect of
feudalism; it certainly nurtured into full bloom a growing feeling of
mental independence and put manpower at a premium. It gave the
opportunity for prosperous tenants to assume at a money rent holdings
which death had rendered vacant and heirless; and it forced the landlord
by mere pressure of rising costs of labour to farm out his demesne on
land-and-stock leases.
The Black Death itself may have carried off one-third of the
population of England; that or any other estimate can only be tentative
and profoundly unsatisfactory. The Winchester Estate rolls published by
Miss Levett show that large numbers of tenements became vacant; again
and again there is the pathetic entry in explanation of non-payment of
rent'Nothing, because he is dead.' Heriots due to the lord became
embarrassingly many; at Poundesford where there were fifty-three
vacant tenements in 1348-9 some seventy-five beasts came in from the
dead tenants' estates. But the recovery was swift; by 1350-51 there were
only nineteen vacant holdings and by 1353-4 there was none. Vacancies
were due to the failure of heirs; and they were filled by neighbours
willing to take the land on the old terms, by neighbours who would only
take it on a new cash rental basis, or by neighbours upon whom pressure
was appliedas the rolls say, compulsus estby the body of tenants
wary of being saddled with the cultivation of unoccupied land. So
rapidly was the disaster overcome that manorial organization was
maintained almost unchecked, though here and there where the plague
had wrought its greatest devastation recovery was slower. All the facts
point to a very large labour surplus before the Black Death, and
afterwards something approaching a superfluity of labour large enough
to absorb the vacant land and provide most of the demesne services.
Contrary to classical conception, the countryside does not seem to have
been ruined; four bad years of plague, flood, tempest, and murrain gave
a check, but only a temporary one, to the evolution of a new agrarian
economy.
The phrase 'something approaching a superfluity of labour' has just
been used. Depletion of the population was serious enough to make the
supply a Micawber's 19s. 11d. worth to meet a 20s. demand, a state of
affairs which fortified the small peasant's new independence of outlook
and put him, for the first time in English history, in a position in which
he could bargain with his master on nearly equal terms. The shortage
was locally acute enough to send wages sharply upwards and to give rise
first to the Ordinance of Labourers of 1349 and then to the Statute of
Labourers two years later, which sought to peg wages at the pre-Black
Death level 'because a great part of the people, and especially of
workmen and servants, lately died of the pestilence, manyseeing the
necessity of masters and the great scarcity of servantswill not serve
unless they may receive excessive wages'. All able-bodied men and
women without other means of support were to take service at the old
rates of payment. How far this attempt at wage control was successful is
debatable. Certainly there were widespread evasions, as was only to be
expected where two masters sought the services of one man. The Statute
was also evaded in the payment of the landless itinerant labourers of the
Welsh Border, who seem to have come into England in some numbers
for the harvest. John ap Gryffn and his hundred Welsh reapers, for
instance, received double the statutory wages for their work in
Worcestershire and Gloucestershire in 1396.
This new domination of labour which followed the Black Death was
to contribute substantially to the complete change in the agrarian picture.
Until now alienation of the demesne had been sporadic; only here and
there were lords of the manor wishful to farm out their lands, and live
upon the rents in cash or kind. But as the fourteenth century entered its
second half the lord began to find it impossible to turn back the tide of
commutation; even attempts to insist upon the performance of works
whose yearly sale had acquired some of the force of custom could help
to precipitate such a revolt as the Peasant Rising of 1381. And the fixed
copyhold rents paid by the customary tenants and the equally inflexible
rates of commutation and labour sales made it financially impracticable
for the lord to continue to farm his own demesne. Our own generation is
witnessing much the same trend, as income from stationary rents lags
further and further behind rising expenditure. The popular answer then
was the same as it is now, the break-up of the estate and the retirement
of the owner to live upon the proceeds.
The smaller landlords were worst hit. The larger monastic estate,
with its efficient organization, was less affected; where the Bishop of
Winchester was taking a net profit of 60 a year from the minor manor
of Stoke alone he could well afford to see his wages bill of 5 a year
doubled without undue concern. But where the small manor gave the
small lord only a small profit such an event could be disastrous, and the
modern answer of cheapening costs of production by mechanization was
five hundred years ahead. But one other contemporary solution, of
converting labour-extravagant arable into grazing land under the control
of one shepherd, was widely followed. The upper ranks of rural society
might feel hard done by, but it was this early dissolution of a feudally
rigid agriculture, compared with its centuries-long perpetuation in
France and elsewhere, that laid the foundations for the future world pre-
eminence of British yeoman farmingand perhaps of British democracy
itself.
The leasing of the demesne was no new thing, but the impetus of the
Black Death caused it to be followed on an ever-increasing scale. Stock-
and-land leases whereby the owner provided the beasts and the grain had
been legislated for by Ine six hundred years before. Much of the late
fourteenth-century alienation used the old practice to help the potential
tenant with insufficient capital, and Ballard quoted an example from
Witney where for some 210 acres of demesne leased to a tenant the lord
of the manor provided this stock and grain: six horses, seventeen oxen,
twenty-three cows, seven yearling beasts, two sows and twenty-seven
piglets, forty and a quarter quarters of wheat, ninety-eight and a half
quarters of barley, forty-seven quarters of dredge corn and thirty-two
quarters of oats. Sometimes, but rarely, the right to receive the manorial
labour services was included in the lease. Most often the lessors worked
the land with their own family and hired labour, and the villein and his
virgate were released from the customary dues. The growth of demesne
leases put another nail in the coffin of servile tenure, but servility of
person was to persist; in 1549 Kett's demands included one that 'all
bondmen may be free', and in 1586 even so great a man as the mayor of
Bristol had to be saved from the consequences of his hereditary but long
disregarded villein status by the intervention of the Privy Council. Not
until 1618 did the courts finish with villein status; in that year a Mr.
Pigg, otherwise unknown to history, sought and was given a declaration
of his personal freedom.
With the breakdown of the manorial system went much of the
rigidity of the open fields. When holdings were confined to the virgate
and half-virgate pattern by the insistence of the lord upon the smooth
working of his villein labour system the arrangements were theoretically
maintained, even long after the growing excess of labour had brought it
into near disuse. But when the need for villein labour went there
departed also the necessity for maintaining the orderly arrangements of
land division which supplied it. The first stages of consolidation of
holdings by exchange and their expansion by the renting of new land has
been noticed. The second half of the fourteenth century saw its rapid
acceleration, and the division of rural society into a body of largely
prosperous cultivators on the one hand and on the other a multitude who
were eking out a bare existence by the produce of a few acres
supplemented by a daily wage became increasingly emphasized. The
way was at last clear for men of enterprise to found the class which, as
yeomen farmers of substance, has ever since been the backbone of
English farming.
The dispersal of the demesne among leaseholders and all the other
avenues for adding acre to acre were but some of the reasons for the
emergence of a thriving yeomanry; there was another, and a very potent
one, in the 'hoof that turns sand into gold'. The sheep had always played
a major role in the English rural scene; it had grazed upon the prehistoric
downs, clothed the Saxon ceorl, fed in its thousands hoof-under-hoof in
the communal and inter-manorial marsh pastures. It was soon to
dispossess the countryman from his very home. Arable cultivation had
been extended by the Saxon and his successors into most corners of the
country, and even into those places which by their natural economy were
as unsuited to tillage then as they are now, and where to-day a centuries-
old sward covers an even more ancient ridge and furrow. A certain
measure of retrenchment was desirable, and it had for its pattern that
grazing economy with the sheep predominant which had been practised
almost exclusively in many parts of the uplands, a pattern of cash
cropping in wool and to a far lesser extent in mutton which for centuries
had given the lie to the claim that England was exclusively a land of
subsistence farming; the sheep and the cattle grazier must produce
largely for the market if he is to live. Indeed, so completely have these
elementary facts been disregarded that Professor Power had to point out
that the old yardstick against which the prosperity of a holding was
measured, the extent of its arable acreage, was in fact no true measure.
The Saxon and early Norman sokeman was not necessarily a poor man
because he had few acres under the plough; he probably owned a
considerable fortune on the hoof, grazing on waste land, which has gone
completely unrecorded. 'The wealth of the sokeman was often in his
flocks and not in his corn.' And sheep farming, with its lesser emphasis
on servile works, was a nursery of national freedom; in the grazing
counties the rigid lines of manorialization had never been firmly
drawntopographical as well as ethnic considerations controlled the
presence or absence of open fields.
English wool, for long supplying little more than an active home
market, was by the thirteenth century to become the national export
commodity par excellence, the product upon which innumerable and
immense fortunes were to be built in succeeding centuries by the grazier,
the merchant, and the manufacturer; the product which brought into
being the Cots-wold and Welsh Border churches and the incomparable
mediaeval homes of East Anglia. The twelfth-century Henry of
Huntingdon wrote of England's 'most precious wool' and by the
thirteenth century the French could speak of 'carrying wool to England'
in the sense in which we ironically despatch coals to Newcastle. The
King could be told that it was his richest treasure, and the Ordinance of
the Staple called it 'the sovereign merchandise and jewel of this realm of
England'. The 'jewel' underlay many aspects of constitutional
development, and was the mainstay of the national finances. Its
supremacy was unchallenged and absolute.
The humble animal upon which this magnificent erection was
founded has had its conformation and breed almost completely hidden
by the improvements of recent centuries. Bake-well most effectively
concealed the old sheep under the cloak of the New Leicester. But it
seems certain that the modern division into closewool and longwool held
good in mediaeval days, and it is possible to discern the two types. The
shortwools of the uplands of the northern and western Marches, of the
Cistercian Yorkshire moors and the Ryelands of Hereford which grew
the Lemster Ore, gave the wool which, in competition with the fleeces of
the great Spanish merino flocks, was carded, woven, and fulled into
heavy cloth. The longwool upon which the great mass of the export trade
was founded and which had a monopoly of the mediaeval market came
from the prototypes of the Cotswold sheep, now almost lost from
modern breeds but which in its time helped to shape English history,
from the Lincolns of the heaths, from the Romneys of the rich marsh
pastures, and from the Leicesters which peopled the Midland grazings.
A contemporary, Pegolotti of the great merchant house of the Bardi,
placed the Lindsey wool among the highest on the list of European
wools for quality; and Lindsey rams were early in demand for crossing
in other districts. But the Lincolnshire wool was closely rivalled, if not
excelled, by the fine short fleeces of the Welsh Border, from the great
flocks of Tintern Abbey and Abbey Dore.
Mediaeval sheep farming may be divided into two great sections:
the vast flocks of the seignorial demesnes, both lay, as those of the
Bohuns, the Clares, the de Fortibuses, and cleric, about both of which
we know much; and the largely unknown quantity of the flocks of the
villein and the small freehold farmer, much neglected in historical
research but probably of equal or even greater importance than the stock
of the great baronial and monastic magnates. A mass of information
about the great demesne flocks comes from the mediaeval account rolls,
highly detailed and preserved in large numbers. The picture painted from
them by the late Professor Power in her Mediaeval English Wool Trade
cannot be bettered:
'We see the shepherd at the lambing season in the dark sheep-house,
for which he lays in a stock of candles, for he must sit up all night. We
see the pails of milk carried down from the dairy for the weakly lambs,
and the great earthenware pots in which it was heated; and we know how
many were born and how many survived, which ewes twinned, and
which disgraced themselves by remaining sterile. Then comes the ewe-
milking when the dairy maids are busy . . . and dozens of fat, round
cheeses are made and laid by. Even greater is the hustle when the time
for washing and shearing comes round. The shepherd himself hardly
ever does it. Sometimes the tenants have to do the work as a customary
service, sometimes gangs of clippers are hired, and often enough it is a
woman's job. The sheep are driven in from outlying manors to the
washing place . . . From there they go to the shearing shed, and the
shearing and winding of the wool is the great moment of the sheep
farmer's year.
'Besides these great days . . . we see the villeins in the corn-land
manors, moving the fold from place to place over the arable, each man
carrying two wattled hurdles and a stake. We see the reeve, journeying
to market to buy ruddle for marking or tar to keep off the scab. . . . We
see the building of the great sheepcotes, stout stone buildings, where the
sheep are housed at night or in the winter. We see, too, the sudden crises
which disturb the even tenor of the shepherd's lifesuch as the worrying
of the Battle Abbey sheep by a dog, or the search for drowned and
frozen sheep in the dykes on St. Andrew's Day in Holderness, when
extra men had to be hired.'
Then, as now, the good shepherd was a treasure beyond compare.
As Henley had put it: 'It profiteth the lord to have discreet shepherds,
watchful and kindly, so that the sheep be not tormented by their wrath
but crop their pasture in peace and joyfulness; for it is a token of the
shepherd's kindness if the sheep be not scattered abroad but browse
around him in company. Let him provide himself with a good barkable
dog and lie nightly with his sheep.'
These great seignorial flocks did not arise overnight. They were the
result of many decades of orderly and planned expansion. On the
Winchester estates, homes of the fine wools of the Cotswolds, the head
of sheep rose on twenty-six manors from 15,398 in 1208-9 to 20,355 in
1376-7; it was an increase insufficient to dispossess the villein from his
arable land, as later generations alleged, but enough to account for a
great rise in the value of pasture. So highly was every scrap of grass
esteemed that laneside verges and the grazing on the headlands of the
open fields were worth good money to rent.




Demesne farming, whether under corn or sheep, entered upon its
steady decline after the peak of the fourteenth century; and although
pastured flocks, more economical of labour, remained after seignorial
tillage, prodigal of manpower, had virtually ceased, the fourteenth
century saw a steady rise in the peasantor should we now call them
yeoman?flocks. These had always been substantial in some places,
more so perhaps than has been recognized: even in the lay subsidy
returns of 1225 some villages on the chalk uplands of south Wiltshire
could boast of flocks sevenfold the size of those of their great landlord,
the Abbot of Glastonbury. By the fifteenth century Hodge was
unquestionably becoming the master in the realm of sheep.





What effect had all this upon enclosure, that great perennial topic
which from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries was to dominate
the minds not only of rural society but of urban economist and political
philosopher? Wolf is cried over the countryside at little or no
provocation, and the strength of contemporary agrarian criticism is not
always the most reliable of criteria. Certainly the enclosures which
originated from the later fourteenth century, apart from the normal
process of hedging assarts and the reasonable consolidation of scattered
holdings, gave rise to an outcry which echoed through the literature of
the times, but the facts are most often wanting against which it can be
judged. Perhaps much of the trouble lay at the door of a not wholly
explicable stagnation which hung over rural industry after the growing
measure of twelfth to fourteenth century prosperity had reached its
climax. Perhaps there is some truth in the view that declining fertility
was an imponderable but most effective brake upon expansion. The
contemporary was apt to assess rural prosperity by arable acreage rather
than by an effective land use by livestock; men see much virtue in acres
of ripe corn, but little or none in good grass.
Rural society is the most conservative of all societies, rightly critical
of innovations still to be proved, but at times prejudiced of new
methods. That society had been virtually static for some centuries in so
far as what development there had been was a logical extension of an
existing system, and it was natural that it should view rapid change as
the road to chaos and despoliation, famine and penury. The old order
also looked askance at the breakdown of manorial organization which
led to the elevation of the humble husbandman into something
approaching independent yeoman status, a change which spelt the end of
a roughly egalitarian order of working countryfolk. But enclosure, the
gate which set the man of enterprise upon the pathway to the expansion
and the improvement of his lands and which gave him the power to use
them as he would, proved to be the floodgate through which in due time
there poured a torrent of exploitation by the entrepreneur. Those who
damned enclosure may have judged better than they knew, particularly
when they were assessing the virtues of the new rentier class which was
arising. Professor Tawney wrote, of a somewhat later age, that 'the past
has shown no more excellent social order than that in which the mass of
the people were the masters of the holdings which they ploughed and of
the tools with which they worked'. Hitherto land ownership and land use
had coincided, and where, on large lay and clerical estates, there had
been multi-manorial administration on behalf of an absentee magnate,
Christian doctrine had required that there should be some semblance of
regard for a servile tenancy. But a century at least before the
Reformation the Church was already jettisoning its claim to include
social and political activities within the compass of its sanctions, and the
post-Restoration acceptance of a functionless ownership of property was
already coming in evidence at a time when the last practical brakes upon
the new rural profiteer were being removed.
Enclosure there very certainly was in the fifteenth century, and it
would be idle to deny, in the face of the most explicit contemporary
criticism and of later legislation, that the countryman was not here and
there ejected, holdings that had nurtured a family from time immemorial
thrown into a vast sheep walk, and villages forced into decay and
dissolution. The Midlands abound with the mounds that often
unsuspectedly cover mediaeval townships which disappeared from the
face of the countryside five hundred years ago. But it may be argued
with some force that it was more often rural depopulation which brought
the sheep on to the scene rather than the sheep that drove out the men.
The Black Death was but the greatest of a succession of pestilences
which ravaged the country in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; and
much of humanity whom the plague spared was wiped out by civil strife
or foreign war. The villein who survived was often no longer bound to
his native soil, but was free, in practice if not in theory, to abandon the
manor for the glittering life and high pay of the towns. Growing urban
industry set in motion the first of the movements from the country, and
what man abandoned the sheep claimed as its own. The rapid growth of
an urban population of non-food-producers demanded that such
efficiency should be brought to the agrarian practice as was impossible
of achievement in the open fields. The very facts that at no time was
there a prolonged shortage of food or a sustained and abnormal rise in
the prices of grain above those of other commodities point to no very
great loss of effective tillage area.
Much of the outcry perhaps lay in the abuse of the thirteenth-
century Statute of Merton which permitted the lord to make reasonable
enclosures from the manorial waste. Every village had its army of
squatters who won a bare living from the unstinted grazings of the waste
upon which the common field holders had no exclusive claim. Rising
prices for wool, which was now even more in demand for home
processing than it had formerly been for export for foreign cloth mills,
made the appropriation of land where sheep might graze a sore
temptation, and rural ejections fell more heavily on the extra-manorial
squatter than on the intra-manorial class of prospering yeomen. The first
was thrown out from that which he had been permitted to occupy on
sufferance; the second, by the leasing of the demesne and other methods
of consolidation, was winning a certainty of tenure great enough to
justify high expenditure on hedging enclosures and on some degree of
primitive drainage. The hardship fell upon the unprivileged, the humble
family in the shack built upon the waste, dependent upon the rough
grazing for the upkeep of their few livestock and upon employment on
the arable holdings of the privileged for the remainder of their
livelihood. By the enclosure of the waste they lost at once their home
and their beast. To the sum of human misery such enclosure must have
added much; but to the progress of an efficient agriculture it placed
much on the credit side.
Some reference has already been made to the possibility that
declining cereal yields were among the root causes of enclosure for
conversion to pasture. The question has given rise to much dispute, and
it is almost certain that no concrete answer will ever be able to be given.
Protagonists of the theory point out that it is unthinkable that centuries-
long cropping of arable lands with no appreciable return of plant food
could do other than result in steadily falling crops; antagonists retort that
the very fact that a rising population could be adequately fed upon the
yield of perhaps fewer acres is a prima facie case against the theory. It
would be foolish to venture an opinion upon a matter about which so
few facts are available, but the attention of the reader may be directed to
the summaries of crop yields quoted by Ballard from a number of
Oxfordshire manorsmanors which in the nature of their land and the
length of time during which they had been tilled must represent a very
fair average of the agriculture of mediaeval England. At Witney in the
four years 1277 and 1283-5 the demesne yield of wheat averaged eight
and three-quarter bushels an acre; some three-quarters of a century later,
in the years 1350-3, it had fallen to an average of six and a quarter;
barley yields dropped from sixteen to nine and a half bushels, and oats
from twelve to seven and a half bushels. The earlier figures are not
available for the other manor of Downton which Ballard examined, but
in the latter period, 1350-3, the figures were nine bushels for wheat,
twelve and a half for barley and eight for oats; while at Bright-well in
these four years oats averaged only three bushels, or less than the seed.
If the figures given by the author of the Anonymous Husbandry a
century earlier were still relevantand there is no evidence that arable
husbandry had improved appreciably if at all in the intervening period
then the returns per acre which might have been expected were twelve
bushels for wheat, thirty-two for barley and sixteen for oats. Set against
these roughly contemporary ideals, none of the three main cereals was
cropping adequately on land of ancient tillage; and it was well past time
for it to go under grass for a long period of regeneration.
It would be tedious to labour this topic of enclosure further at this
point; it will recur often enough later. But it may be convenient here to
indicate something of the measure of resentment which it aroused in the
succeeding years and the legislative attempts to control a movement
which had become economically uncontrollable. Only the Church could
have stemmed the tide, but the Church was by now not very interested in
the welfare of the earthly bodies of humble men, however jealous it
might be of their souls.
As early as 1413 sixscore men of Edmonton 'did break up divers
pastures, closes and severalties and enter therein and turn them into
common'; and a year later a petition to Parliament asserted that no
houses were left standing at Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, 'except it were
a sheep-cote or a barn'. Contemporary writing and preaching waged war
upon enclosure for sheep in particular; as Bastard wrote: 'Sheep have
eaten up our meadows and our downs, our corn, our wood, whole
villages and towns.' Latimer, preaching before Edward IV, declaimed:
'Where have been a great many householders and inhabitants there is
now but a shepherd and his dog.' The most pathetic and most often
repeated plaint of all came from Thomas More: 'Sheep have become so
great devourers and so wild that they eat up and swallow down the very
men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields,
houses and cities.'
Legislation came to the aid of popular clamour; the 1489 statute
seeking to restrain sheep farming from completely depopulating the
countryside was followed by another in 1515 that ordered all pasture to
be restored to tillage, but the men who obeyed its letter by driving a
single furrow across a field also drove a plough through the
effectiveness of the act. Two commissions and further acts followed, but
after half a century of heated debate and legislation the Government
itself confessed that all that had been done had not 'wrought the effect
that was hoped would follow'. As has happened so often since, the force
of social and economic circumstances could not be stemmed by words.
Latimer summed up the position when he declared: 'Let the preacher
preach till his tongue be worn to the stump, nothing is amended. We
have good statutes made for the commonwealth as touching commoners
and enclosers, but in the end of the matter there cometh nothing forth.'

5. Sixteenth-Century
Renaissance

he fourteenth century had seen the manorial system enter its rapid
decline; and plague and peasant rising helped it on its way. The
fifteenth century, agriculturally a period of technical stagnation
and of alarm over the rising tide of enclosure, witnessed the death throes
of villeinage amid scenes of civil strife, of poverty and want. For all
practical purposes the intake of land into agricultural use in the form of
purprestures and assarts ceased, and a declining area of tillage shifted
around within the limits of a far larger acreage cleared and regularly
cultivated by former generations; land was a glut on the market, and
rising standards of living among landlord and tenant alike were halted.
The closing decades of the fifteenth century and the whole of the
sixteenth were to be the spectators of a growing measure of yeoman
prosperity; of yeoman encroachment on the small holdings of the
peasant on the one hand and on the vast estates which the dissolution of
the monasteries threw upon the land market on the other; and of yeoman
enlightenment in agrarian practice by the writings of Fitzherbert and
Tusser, whose popular treatises on husbandry were to herald a flood of
later and often more ill-informed manuals. (I follow contemporary
popular usage in applying the term yeoman to all that great middle class
of farmers who stood between the cottagers and the gentrythe body of
men who wore russet clothes but made golden paymentinstead of
restricting it more properly to the forty-shilling freeholder engaged in
agriculture).
Viewed dispassionately from the distance of four centuries, the
years of Tudor monarchy were great ones for the English countrysidea
countryside which, as the century passed, was to become more thickly
dotted with the solid, well-proportioned homes of the middle-class
husbandmen which fitted into the rural scene more pleasantly than any
man has since been able to contrive; a countryside which began to
assume in great measure the chequer pattern of hedgerow and covert, a
pattern which men now often conceive to have been original but which
is only a mirror of farm practice to which enclosure added the
quicksilver and which in the twentieth century is becoming antiquely
tarnished under the impact of mechanization.
To understand the reorientation of society which was the motive
force behind the sixteenth century agrarian revolution, the reader must
bear with a brief examination of the varieties of tenure which emerged
from the mediaeval melting pot, in theory little changed from earlier
days but in practice very different. Lyttleton in the fifteenth century
altered but few of Bracton's dicta upon tenure of the thirteenth, but in
this branch of jurisprudence particularly theory was lagging woefully
behind court practice. Form of tenure was then of a vital importance
which is difficult to understand now; in Tudor days an astute lawyer
might easily undermine the foundations of an apparently unimpeachable
title. Lease and copy of court roll and all the great army of documents
which now crowd record office shelves were then jealously preserved in
'the greate wooden cheste' which figured in every yeoman's will.
T
Legally, the lord of the manor retained most if not all of his ancient
powers over his estates, and the great contributions which the
progressive farmers among the gentry made to agricultural technique
should not be disregarded; there were sixteenth-century Townshends and
Cokes who stood as much in the van of technical progress as did their
successors of the eighteenth. But, by and large, land use was passing out
of their hands and into those which held from them by lease or
copyhold, and into those of the sub-manorial freeholders who more often
than not were the same men.
The abandonment of seignorial cultivation of the demesne had
accelerated the growth of leasehold tenure, whether the letting was at
will, for a term of years, for life, or for a number of lives. Tenancies at
will were obviously unpopular and always unprofitable to the lessee; no
man would improve that which might be his for but a short time. Leases
over periods gave scope to the improvingand enclosinglessee,
however, and although no statistical analysis has been made of the
prevalence of the various types of long lease, the work of Miss Mildred
Campbell has shown that in Sussex a term of twenty-one years was most
in favour, but in the four western counties terms of ninety-nine years or
longer vastly predominated.
The second major class of tenants, the copyholdersor those who
held by witness of a copy of the manorial court roll in which their
admittance into possession of a holding had been enrolledwere the
lineal descendants of the mediaeval villeins 'whom the favourable hand
of time hath much enfranchised', and who were now largely freed from
the taint of servile status and almost completely emancipated from the
uncertainties of week work and precariae. But the copyholder was none
the less still often intolerably subject in his copyhold to the whim of the
lord of the manor, a whim held in rein only by manorial custom and the
growing but still incomplete interest of the common law in the matter.
Eviction during the lifetime of the current copyholder was probably
uncommon, perhaps impossible; but the inheritance of land of ancient
copyhold tenure could often be barred by the imposition of a completely
prohibitive fine upon the heir's entry in those cases where rents were
unfixed and fines uncertain. There were also the restrictive customs of
the manor to be taken into account, and the lord who insisted upon the
observance of, say, the obligation of a copyholder to live in what might
be the smallest and least convenient of the houses upon his consolidated
holdings could be an intolerable nuisance. The heriot, too, continued an
almost universal feature of copyhold tenure, and, it is reported, was
exacted in places until the Act of 1926 abolished this form of tenancy.
There has been much controversy over the degree of protection
which the Tudor courts gave to the copyholder; on the weight of the
evidence it is probable that the mass of the customary tenants of the time
had but little legal security, and copyholders were only just beginning to
win a right of hearing in the courts of equity and common law, and also
the right to lease off their copyholds. Uncertainties of fine were always a
haunting fear to those who suffered from themand Tawney and Savine
found that, in 142 manors which they examined, on ninety-five were the
fines on entry unfixedalthough the man holding under fixed incidents
and with certain inheritance could say with Norden's yeoman that 'It is a
quietnesse to a man's minde to dwelle upon his owne and to know his
heir certain'. For the rest, Coke's picture was overpainted when he wrote:
'Let the Lord frown, the Copyholder cares not knowing himself safe, and
not within any danger . . . Time has indeed dealt very favourably with
copyholders in diverse respects.'
Neighbours in person, but beneath the copyholder in statusindeed,
commonly of no status at allwere those squatters upon the waste to
whose growing plight under enclosure notice has already been given.
Some few of them were passed over by the rationalizing storms of the
centuries to emerge as minute but secure freeholders when commons
ceased to be regarded with an enclosing eye, and long residence had
hallowed occupation into ownership, but in the main they went under,
and lost even that little anchor in the sea of life which a cow on the
commons could give.
The freeholders as a legal class ranged from the great owners who
were still in the eyes of the law tenants-in-chief of the crown, nominally
holding by commuted knight service, frankalmoin or sergeantry, to the
men whose estate was but a few barren acres of moor, held by socage
amounting most often by now to no more than periodical appearances at
a manor court and the proffering of a rent of 'a rose, a pepper corne, a
jyllyflower'. But they had this in common: they enjoyed complete legal
security and absolute possession against all comers; they could neither
be rack-rented nor prohibitively fined on entry, evicted when a lease fell
in, nor thrown out upon a chilly world at will. The prosperity of the
times, on the contrary, played into their hands, and their number was
swollen by those yeoman tenants whose growing affluence as the
sixteenth century went on its way enabled them to add freehold lands to
their copyheld holdings. One example of a 'Jake who would be a
gentylman' may suffice. In 1583 Robert Phillips, a Lincolnshire yeoman,
leased land at Wishington for seventeen years for 45 down and an
annual rent of 8 8s. 2d. Two years later he converted the leasehold into
a freehold by the payment of 1,000 6s. 10d., and in 1603 he had risen to
be Robert Phillips, gentleman. He is an instance that could be multiplied
a thousandfold; and he could say with Robert Furse, that late sixteenth-
century Devon yeoman: 'Although our progenytors and forefathers wer
at the begynnynge but plene and sympell men and wemen and of smalle
possessyon and hablyte, yt have theye by lytell and lytell so run ther
corse that we are com to myche more possessyones credett and
reputasyon than ever anye of them hadde.'
It was to men such as thesethe long leaseholders, the copyholders
who felt some high degree of security, the growing army of
freeholdersin short, the great body of English yeomenthat the
agrarian treatises of Fitzherbert and Tusser were addressed. Ready
markets, rising returns, stable tenures, all made for that great awakening
of interest in the technique of a great calling, a new awareness which
perhaps more than any other fact is the hallmark of the sixteenth century
on the land. At a time when communications were primitive and the man
of one county knew little of agricultural thought and practice in the next,
it was more important that knowledge of existing good methods should
be disseminated than that new and untried ideas should be spread when
men were far from ready to receive them. It was in the former field that
Fitzherbert excelled, and in his Boke of Husbandry (1523) he described
in simple detail systems of stock and crop management which he had
tried and proved in his own forty years of farming. Credit for the
authorship of this book, which ran through eight editions before the end
of the sixteenth century, must go either to Anthony or John Fitzherbert,
and modern opinion tends to give it to the former. Certainly Anthony
was already a practised legal writer, and his post as a judge of the Court
of Common Pleas gave him ample opportunity to study regional types of
English farming. Whichever he might have been, the Fitzherbert who
wrote the Boke was a great sheep man as befitted a Derbyshire farmer,
and his belief that 'an husbande can not well thryve by his corne, without
he have other cattell . . .' is still heartily echoed by many husbandmen,
though his rider that 'shepe is the mooste profytablest cattell that any
man can have' may not be so fully endorsed. Fitzherbert's sheep
instruction ranged from the appropriate time for tupping so that the
lambs would fall when pastures were flush and the ewes' milk ran well,
through the still common tricks for foisting an orphan lamb on an
orphaned ewe, to the proper practice of weaning at sixteen to eighteen
weeks for flocks in sound pastures so that the ewe would readily take the
ram again.
Fitzherbert advocated a number of connecting folds so that the
shepherd might the more easily handle his flock for any 'that nedeth any
helpynge or mendinge for any cause'. The four great needs of the
shepherd were a dog, a hook, shears and a tar pot. Tar coped with a
multitude of ills when mixed with oil, goosegrease or capon's grease for
easier spreading; but, for the poorer man to whom tar was too costly,
brome salve was efficacious for lice or scab or 'pymples as brode as a
farthynge'. Tar is still a popular specific, but many of Fitzherbert's
remedies have a quaint ring, although his ills are only too familiar.
Maggots were cured by the universal tar box; for blindness, tar again in
the eye; and foot worms were extracted by knife and finger and the
incision tarred.
Washing came in June, and the better the cleansing the greater the
profit; and the tar box was kept handy for those sheep which suffered
from 'pryckynge with the poynte of the sheres'. After the shearing was
the time to segregate ages and sexes if there were sufficient pastures to
divide the ewes from the share-hogs, the theyves, the lambs, the wedders
and the rams. In these pastures it was important that the shepherd should
be able to recognize those plants and conditions conducive to the rot, the
spearwort and the penny grass, marshy ground and mildewed grass, 'the
lyttell white snailes', and the hunger rot'the worst rotte that can be'.
Fitzherbert did not like folding: it made the sheep scabby and maggoty
and kept them from shelter in storms. Instead he had a novel system of
driving into the fallow which was to be grazed a stake for each sheep, of
letting each sheep rub against one stake, and thereafter each sheep would
follow and graze around its own stake'it will follow that stake as he
flytteth it and syt by it'.
Second in Fitzherbert's favour came his horses, and to a fund of still
sound advice on management he added some caustic comment on the
folly of believing that lunar influence at mating determined the sex of
the foal. Neither mating at the waxing nor at the waning of the moon
would guarantee a horse foal, as his contemporaries believed, for 'I have
myself lx mares and more able to bear the horse, and from Maye daye
unto saynte Barthylmewes daye I have v or vi horses goynge with theym
bothe daye and nyghte and at the foolynge tyme I have upon one daye a
horse-fole and on the nexte daye . . . a mare-fole . . . and so every weeke
of bothe sortes, and by theyr opynyon . . . I shulde have xiiii dayes
together horse-fooles and other xiiii dayes together mare-foles'. Such
debunking of superstition was unusual for that age. Fitzherbert also
threw in some hints on colour mating to get well-marked foals.
He by no means neglected the arable crops, but in much he was
content to acquiesce in the practices described earlier by Walter of
Henley. Some of his touches are delightful. How shall you know the
right time for sowing? 'Go uppon the lande that is plowed, and if it synge
or crye or make any noyse under thy fete then it is to wet to sowe. And if
it make no noyse and wyll bear thy horses, thanne sowe in the name of
godd.'
Fitzherbert's instruction in broadcasting peas is a miracle of lucid
exposition for the time.' Put thy pees in-to thy hopper and take a brode
thonge of ledder or of garthe-wevve of an elle longe, and fasten it to
bothe endes of the hopper and put it over they heed lyke a leysshe; and
stande in the myddst of the lande, where the sacke lyethe, the whiche is
mooste conveniente for the fyllynge of thy hopper, and set they lefte
foote before and take an handful of pees: and whan thou takeste up thy
ryghte foote, than caste thy pees fro the all abrode; and whan thy lefte
fote ryseth take an other handeful and whan the ryght fote ryseth than
cast them fro the. And so at every two paces thou shalt sowe an handeful
of pees . . . And in your castynge ye muste open as well your fyngers as
your hande, the hyer and farther that ye caste your corne the better shall
it sprede.'
In Fitzherbert too we have the earliest examination of cereal
varieties. 'There be thre maner of barleys'sprot barley, flat eared with
white grains, which is the best; longe-eare, less white which 'wyll turne
and growe to otes'; and the bere-barleye or bygge that is the worst. There
were also three varieties of oats known to himred, black, and rough;
the red were the best, and 'verye good to make otemele of; the black
were large but gave little flour and were thick in the husk; and the rough
were the worst'it quitteth not the coste to sowe them'. Fitzherbert
likewise distinguishes six wheats: Flaxen, the brightest and giving the
whitest bread but a hungry crop and low in yield; pollard, again a good
variety but one which shed early; the awne white; the English dun
coloured and the worst sort except for peek-wheat which would grow
where others would not; and the best of all, red wheat 'the greateste
corne and the brodeste blades and the greateste straw and wyl make
whyte bred, and is the rudest of colour in the busshell'.
The weeds that troubled the arable man were the thistle that caused
the reapers to fail to cut clean by discouraging a firm grasp of the sheaf;
the charlock which was still an 'yll wede' under its old name of
kedlocke; the cockle that might be suffered in bread corn because it gave
some flour, but not in seed, and the drake and the kindred darnel that
also might go into the mill but not into the seed lip; the corn marigolds
that abounded in barley and peas; the hawdod-the corn bluebottle
that did little harm; and the fennels that were the worst of all except for
the tares which lodged corn by their weight.
When Fitzherbert turned his attention to haymaking he preached a
gospel to his contemporaries that even to-day still falls on some deaf
ears, that 'the yonger and the grener that the grasse is, the softer and
sweeter it wyll be, and the older the harder and dryer it is and the worse
for al maner of cattell.' 'Moldywarpe-hilles' must have been spread and
the meadow cleared of sticks and other obstructions in May, and the
mower is to cut cleanly into swathes. 'Goode teddynge is the chiefe
poynte to make goode hey', and the crop is to be successively
windrowed and cocked. This early sixteenth-century advice conjures up
a picture of haysel differing only from early nineteenth-century
technique in that the implements were somewhat ruder; practice changed
little if at all over many centuries until the first grass cutter and the first
side rakes, tedders and swath-turners heralded the new era of
mechanization.
Nowhere does Fitzherbert add more to our knowledge of early
Tudor farming than in his explicit descriptions of the late mediaeval
plough, the connecting link between the Belgic and Saxon prototype and
its lineal descendant of Blith and Tull typified by the Great Hertfordshire
plough. Fitzherbert distinguishes several regional types that persisted in
use for centuriesthe long share-beamed implement of Somerset, the
Kentish
one-wheeled model and the early one-way plough from the same
countyand mentions many other county varieties 'the whyche were to
longe processe to declare'. He also dissects his own native implement
and names the parts, and his list is valuable as being the first analysis of
the components of the handmade plough, the work of village blacksmith
and local carpenter.
The main beam of his plough is joined to the share-beam, carrying
an iron spear-shaped share, by the sheath, which should be a thin piece
of dry oak. The plough-tayle, the land handle, was let into the share-
beam and through a slot in it ran the main beam; adjustment by wedges
of the position of the main beam in the tayle varied the pitch of the
share. The furrow handle, called the stylte, joined the groundwrest at its
base and was connected with the land handle by rough staves. The
groundwrest, of wood, was fastened to the rear end of the share-beam
and ran out across the floor of the furrow. The mouldboard, dubbed by
Fitzherbert the sheldbrede, was simply a broad piece of wood pinned to
the sheath in front and the furrow handle at the rear, sharp-edged and
projecting forward beyond the sheath and with a fenboard on the land
side. Adjustment for depth of ploughing was by the plough-foot and for
width by the plough-ear, the latter either pieces of iron of varying length
or a crooked piece of wood on the furrow side of the fore end of the
beamthe equivalent of the modern hakewhich permitted the
attachment of the draught chain to be close or some inches out from the
beam. The only other iron on the implement was the coulter, held in the
beam by wedges, three inches broad, and steeled and sharpened at the
edges.
Fitzherbert also gave lucid instruction on the setting of the plough
for a medium 'seed' furrow, a medium 'stirring' furrow for the second
cultivation of the fallow, and a broad furrow for the initial ploughing;
and for the avoidance of a 'reste-balke, a lyttell ridge standynge betwene
two furrows the whiche dothe brede thistyls'. Fitzherbert liked wheeled
ploughs even for light land, but 'me semeth they be farre more costly
than the other plowes'.
Apart from some remarks on the construction of carts, which were
already fitted with ladders for hay and 'faggotts', and a brief list of minor
tools, Fitzherbert adds to his section on the plough a description of only
one other implement of his day, the harrow. The ox-harrow was built of
six harrow bulls, beams of ash or oak six feet long and as thick as 'the
smale of a mannes legge', into each of which six forward set tines of iron
were inserted. It was a more tedious instrument to pull than the plough
because it 'goeth by twytches' and it was an old saying that 'the ox is
never wo tyll he to the harowe goo'. This ox-harrow broke up the bigger
clods; for covering seed the horse-harrow was used, made of only five
ell-long bulls of ash and with wooden tines cut a foot long so that they
could be progressively driven through the bull as the points wore down.
For raking after corn had been carted the common implement was 'a
great Rake with yron teeth, made fast about a mannes necke with a
string and so drawne up and downe the Lande'. The late mediaeval
Hodge was still not far removed from the beast of burden!
Fitzherbert had had little ground on which to build, apart from the
mediaeval work of Henley and his contemporaries and the classical
authorities upon whom even later generations of authors were to lean
shamelessly and uncritically: Barnaby Googe in the late sixteenth
century omitted to excise a section on camels when he converted
Heresbach to his use and presented him to his English yeoman public.
Fitzherbert had made good the lack of precedent in the best of all ways,
from his own experience on the land. In this he was followed by the
second great Tudor agricultural writer, Thomas Tusser, born in 1524 and
successively chorister, farmer and courtier. 'He spread', said Fuller, 'his
bread with all sorts of butter, yet none of them would ever stick thereon.'
Tusser has been branded as an arch-perpetrator of doggerel, but no man
who could coin the line 'My musick since hath been the plough' was
devoid of all poetic sense. Modern commentators have aspersed the
value of his advice; admittedly a man who could suggest that molehills
should be left unlevelled so that lambs might sit dry upon them above a
wet pasture could be dubbed grotesquely unpractical by the superior
critic of the twentieth century; but beneath the strained stanzas of
Tusser's Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (which appeared in
1573, expanded from a Hundreth Good Points of sixteen years earlier
and with another five hundred points of Good Huswifery added, the
whole in verse) lies a fundamentally sound knowledge of the English
soil, of the crops which it nurtured and of the stock which fed thereon.
So profound and enduring an influence did he exercise on succeeding
generations that in 1723 Lord Molesworth could seriously suggest 'that a
school for husbandry were erected in every county, and that Tusser's old
Book of Husbandry should be taught to the boys to read, to copy and to
get by heart'. It is a comment alike on Tusser's wisdom and the slow
growth of agricultural practice. Much of Tusser is now as unintelligible
as Chaucer in the original, but that which is comprehensible has a vivid
charm of rare earthiness and a mnemonic pungency of phrasingfor
which latter reason, of course, Tusser chose his curious medium.
Tusser wrote of his native East Anglia, then and for three centuries
and more in the van of English farming. He was less explicitly practical
in his instruction than Fitzherbert had been, but the passage of half a
century between the two and the wider range of East Anglian farming
compared with North Midland husbandry gives Tusser the greater
breadth of outlook. As an East Anglian he was more concerned with
crops than with stock; he does not neglect the latter, but it is noteworthy
that nowhere does he even mention breeds (although the work of
Mascall fourteen years later does attempt some breed distinctions) and
his advice upon choice is limited to the excellent but restricted comment:

No storing of pasture with baggagely tit,
With ragged, with aged, and evil at hit.
Let carren and barren be shifted away,
For best is the best, whatsoever ye pay.

This really took one no further than Henley had gone three hundred
years before. On general management Tusser says much with which no
one of whatever century could disagree: rearing stock must be in hard
condition, and only that which is to be sold or killed may be fat;
stockmen must not be men of fury who beat and maim cattle with
ploughstaff, whipstock or flail, or make a hen 'to play tipple up tail'; and
pastures must not be overstocked, a very necessary admonition to
contemporaries who habitually overgrazed.
Calves, in an era of almost universal spring calving and winter
dryness, were put out in May where their mothers might neither see nor
hear them, where water was plenty, and barth (shelter) to sit warm. Old
cows were dried off by August for fattening, all except one good milch
cow for winter, presumably after an autumn calving. Winter housing
was recommended for the good of the beast, for the making of muck, for
the peace of mind of the owner, and for the saving of pasture for sheep.
Housed stock must be fed with common sense: give them the least
appetizing first, the rye straw, wheat straw and pea haulm before the oat
straw and barley straw, with hay last of all; if hay were fed first 'they
love not straw, they had rather to fast'. The only addition to this hard
winter fare before the days of turnips and other roots, silage and
imported cake, was vetches, fed only half-threshed for the plough horses
but 'threshed clean for the cow'. Veterinary medicine was not even in its
infancy; for the bullock with loose teeth Tusser's remedy was to slit its
tail, apply a plaster of soot and garlic to the incision, and bind it up.
Tusser was a great advocate of breeding from twin lambs, in the
belief that twinning was hereditary, but was sensible to add that ewes
with this known propensity should be rammed somewhat later than the
rest of the flock so that the spring flush of grass might be well advanced
for their proper nourishment before they yeaned. Such lambs as showed
a desire to suckle after May 1st were to be weaned, and at Lammas
(August 1st) milking of the ewes should cease so that they might
recuperate before the onset of winter and its short rations. It was advice
that had been given by Henley and it was a timetable that was to
continue until the advent of winter roots and the oblivion of the ewes for
dairy purposes made it obsolete. That ewes were a comparatively
profitable source of milk is shown by Tusser's estimate that five of them
should equal one cow in yield; Henley's ratio had been one to ten, but he
had apparently judged on butter-fat and not on liquid yield. The senior
flock was washed at the beginning of June and shorn within two days;
washed wool then, as now, commanded a more than correspondingly
higher price for the loss of weight in grease and dirt, and, as Fitzherbert
had appreciated, with any longer delay the grease would begin to rise in
the fleece again. Clipping was to be done with care lest the fly should be
attracted by a wound; and lambs waited till the third week of June before
they were shorn. Ewes cast from the flock and crones (old ewes) bought
in to consume excess summer feed were to be fattened in August for
autumn slaughter for the winter salted-meat trade.
Tusser estimated the profit from a sow as the same as that from a
sound well-fed milch cow; and a new interdependence of dairy and
piggery, where the former was largely used for cheese and butter
production and had much skim and whey to spare, points to growing
care in pig rearing. The great Tudor merchant classes of the towns were
beginning to exercise an influence upon quality of meat, where before
the villein consumer had been more concerned with quantity. Maternal
qualities in the sow were not rated highly by Tusser for he recommends
restricting the litter to five, or to three if very large stores were sought;
he knew the virtue of a hog for feeding on, and highly regarded the
January farrower for providing Michaelmas pork and Christmas bacon.
If this was really the normal interval between birth and slaughter and not
merely an ideal then pig meat was not taking much longer to make then
than it does
now.
The twin uses of the horse, for saddle or cart, seem to have been
determined in Tusser's eyes less by breed than by stage of gelding; early
castration was expected to give a light riding animal, and late cutting a
heavy carter. East Anglian practice was to stable in November, after the
last autumn ploughing; and Tusser is emphatic that horses must be first
housed in a dry spell 'for danger of nits or for fear of a louse'.
Apart from the highly prized vetchesand we have no guide as to
how widely they were grownhay was the only winter feed. With the
poor unbred grasses then available, and pasture was an entirely natural
formation with no selection of species, meadows had to be shut up in
early March, with marshier hay lands a little later. Even so, only the
earliest were ready for cutting in Junealthough we do not know
whether Tusser let his hay grow on into coarser stuff than Fitzherbert
would have likedand later fields clashed with the beginning of the oat
harvest so that only as much as could be handled before the dew was
drying off the harvesting oats was cut. The bulk of this later haymaking
fell in July. The master, says Tusser, is to be 'captain' of the haysel. Hay
for horse and sheep feed was treated with more care in turning and
cocking than that for the cattle, which might be left longer in the swathe
and was all the more palatable for being a little burnt in the stack.
Tusser's tillage centred not only around the straight crops of cereals
and pulses but also around the combinations of them, the wheat and rye
that made the maslin, which Tusser disliked because rarely did the two
ripen together and it was better for the miller to mix them; the dredge of
barley and oats; and the bolymong of oats, peas and vetches. In Tusser's
farming year, which began in September, the straight rye was the first to
go in so that it might grow on in the 'Michaelmas Spring', and Tusser did
allow that it might be included in a crop of white wheat as an insurance
against the failure of the latter. He liked a thick seeding of all except
beans so that weeds might be smothered; Tudor, and earlier, cultivation
may not even have aimed at a clean arable field, for some aftermath of
weeds was one of the most important of the early winter feeds. He
names all Fitzherbert's wheat varieties except the flaxen; and his
recommendation of the red rivet which the earlier writer had so favoured
for light land is at direct variance with modern practice which restricts
what is now considered a late-maturing and low-quality sort to heavy
poor clay. This sodden clay Tusser advised should be set to grey wheat,
which was nearer to rye in condition and gave a coarse flour with much
bran.
Green peas went in at Hallantide (November 1st), the grey runcivals
alias the modern duns at Candlemas (February 2nd), barley and oats as
early as January, and white peas, beans and vetches the following
month. It is certain that Tusser's early spring seeding times must have
been far in advance of practice in the more sodden Midlands. It is a
comment upon progress to note that Tusser liked to sow the beans in the
furrow and then harrow them over; after centuries of disfavour the
practice has now been found by Rothamsted to give the best yields of
all. If by May any cereal was too well grown it might be eaten off with
sheep or mown to prevent lodging later. Winter corn was weeded in the
same month with a weed hook or a crotch (a two-clawed weed
extractor). Spring wheat was still far in the future.
Tusser was fully aware of the value of forward planning. For the
corn harvest reapers were to be engaged in advance and given gloves as
largesse. A harvest 'lord' was to be appointed at rather above the
common rate. Clean reaping, secure binding, prompt stooking, carting at
the earliest possible moment, and care in taking wagons through
gateways were all points to be especially observed. It appears that in
East Anglia at any rate only the ears of wheat and rye were reaped, and
the straw was mown later with scythes 'for to brew and to bake', as well
as for fodder and thatch. Barley on the other hand was harvested in one
operation. After carting gleaning was permitted, and after the gleaners
had finished the cattle cleared what was left and the field was closed
until Michaelmas to give an autumn bite of weeds. The last obligation of
the farmer's year, the harvest home, was to be observed with 'good cheer
in the hall'.
Regeneration of the tillage area was accomplished in one of two
ways, by manure or by fallowing. Of the former Tusser has much to say;
he spread dung and left it for a month before ploughing in, and he
steeped straw in water to rot it down as an early form of compost.
Fallowing gave rise to as much theoretical argument as did the variations
upon the Norfolk four courses in later centuries, for it was the keypoint
of all rotations until the introduction of the root break made it
unnecessary; the husbandman's concern over it was understandable, for
upon its success depended the yields of succeeding crops. Indeed, on
land in good heart and in regions where seigneurial demands upon the
bases of fertility were least, the fallow may have disappeared by the
fourteenth century; certainly in Kent some land 'possunt seminari
quolibet anno', but what crops were taken every year we do not know.
Certainly Robert Loder, high up on the Berkshire Downs, was in the
second decade of the seventeenth century sowing what crops he chose
upon his open strips, and several times he snatched a vetch crop from the
fallow field. On open land Tusser recommended a rotation of fallow,
wheat or rye, and barley, or the universal common field rotation of two
crops in three years. On enclosed land a further crop could be inserted
and the field fallowed only once in four years; here the course was
barley, peas or buckwheat, and wheat. In his timing of the first breaking
of the fallow and the following cultivations, the twifallow and the
thrifallow, Tusser follows Henley closely.
Two methods of regeneration have been mentioned; a third may be
added, closely allied to manuring. It was marling, to which Tusser made
no reference, but in spite of this it was very certainly widely followed as
a means of soil improvement. Owen, in his early sixteenth-century
history of Pembrokeshire, observes 'Claye marle is of nature fat, tough
and clammy. The common people are of opinion that this marle is the
fatnesse of the earthe, gathered together at Noah's flood: which is verie
like to be true. . . . It is digged or caste out of the pitte, carried to the
lande, and there caste either upon the fallow or ley ground unplowed,
and this in the sumer tyme . . . where it lyeth so on the lande all the
somer and winter, the rain making it to melte and run like molten ledd
all over the face of the earthe.' Owen claimed that it caused even the
barest pastures to develop good stands of clover, and that it retained its
virtue for 150 years. Worlidge, a century or more later, stressed the
importance of correct measure in applications; too little was better than
too much, and while a common dressing was 40 to 50 tons an acre the
lightest sand might receive 100 tons. Many hundreds of pages of print
were also expended in the assessment of the comparative merits of
various marls. The practice had been lost in early mediaeval days after
its survival from the pre-Roman times; it went out of fashion for the
second time in the nineteenth century; but to-day its value is again being
preached and recent Yorkshire experiments have shown that the
application of modern methods of mechanical extraction and spreading
may again win for marl a place in English husbandry.
While Tusser seems completely to omit all mention of marling he
does commend denshiring, the process claimed to have originated either
in Devonshire or Denbigh by which turf was skimmed and burnt in the
heap and the ashes spread. It had a large and long vogue,
notwithstanding the fact that the accession of available mineral matter
was more than offset by the loss of humus.
Not for some decades was the first tentative blossoming of
mechanical invention to show itself in the field of English farming, and
what Fitzherbert had said about the plough and all the other implements
of husbandry it was sufficient that Tusser should reiterate. He did not go
as far as his predecessorcuriously, for he was the arable man while
Fitzherbert was the grazierand he was content to list the 'husbandry
furniture 'that went to equip the farm and leave it at that. In spite of his
acceptance of the status quofor Tusser was no innovatorhis
catalogue is exhaustive, and he mentions some 150 different items,
many of them smith's and carpenter's tools, that it was prudent for the
husbandman to have. The list runs from a gofe (rick) ladder to a flail,
from a fan for winnowing to a casting shovel with which to cast the
grain and select that which went furthest as the heaviest and therefore
the best for seed. There is much that is obsolete in his nomenclature:
there are to be collars and harness for all the horses, including the thiller,
or shaft horse (Shakespeare's thill-horse and Ellis's Phill); a pannell and
ped, varieties of pack saddles, with a leather wanty as a tie for them.
Carts are to be strongly axle-treed, well clouted and shod with iron but
light withal, with cart ladders and wimbles and a pod, or leather bottle
for grease. The tumbrel or dung cart had its dung crone, or bent muck
fork. Accessories for the plough were a beetle to break the clods and a
staff to clear the weeds from the coulter and breast. For transport of the
plough a sled was necessary; it was a wooden slab with a staple on its
upper surface in which the point of the share was inserted so that the
implement might be held secure for road transport, horses or oxen
drawing the sled. There are a variety of scythes with their creadles, a
meak for hackling peas or raising them for the scythesman to cut,
twitchers for clinching the rings in a hog's nose, a mole-spear, a skuppat
for scooping out ditches and a skavell for spading peat, and a didall
spade for ditching. It is notable that the only major implements of tillage
which Tusser, and also Fitzherbert, enumerates are the plough and
harrows (although the old faggot of brushwood doubtless still did
service on many holdings), and a roller, which Fitzherbert omitted but
the use of which in the consolidation of the sown seed bed Tusser
debates at length. These, with a seedlip for broadcasting seed, a cart, a
sickle and scythe for reaping, a flail and fan for threshing, added up to
the whole sum of the mechanics of sixteenth-century husbandry.
Tusser, a popular writer if ever there was one, added to each of his
monthly chapters some little gems of wisdom which, by quotation in a
work of such profound influence on early modern farming, have
enriched our folklore. There is 'Feb, fill the dike', March dust which is
'worth ransom of gold', 'Sweet April showers that spring May flowers',
and the 'calm weather in June, corn sets in tune'.
To which may be added the theme which runs through the Five
Hundreth Points, that the state of the moon must be observed in all
works, and particularly in sowing. Fitzherbert would have poured scorn
on such lunacy, but these old beliefs have died hard and even to-day
lunar influence still rules the actions of many a good village gardener.

6. The Seventeenth Century

usser had had much to say on the comparison between champion
country and several, between 'the country enclosed I praise' and
the 't'other [the open fields] delighteth me not'. By the end of the
sixteenth century there was in the mind of the progressive farmer no
doubt whatever that enclosed land was preferable on every count to the
possession of many acres scattered through the open fields; although the
old outcry against the movement had lost none of its fervour. It has been
estimated that in the most highly manorialized region of the Midland
counties no more than six per cent of open fields had been fenced by
now for tenure in severalty. But it is probable that these open fields were
then but a small part of the agricultural land of England, and that their
acreage had been equalled and passed long before the close of the
sixteenth century by the vast area of assarts from the mediaeval waste.
No one who has conned contemporary leases and conveyances can fail
to be impressed by the fact that the land upon which the bulk of the best
farming was carried on was now in the form of close or arable field held
individually or in a small partnership, rather than upon the scattered
acres of the common field and upon the disease-ridden and overstocked
communal pastures. It was a typical late sixteenth-century yeoman
holding that Edmond and Richard Bardolfe leased to William North at
Coltsfoot in Datchworth in 1584, of which the 164 acres were made up
of 155 acres in eight enclosures of mediaeval assarts and only nine and a
half acres in eight strips in the open fields of the village.
Everywhere the scaffolding of the modern village stood beside the
ruins of the mediaeval manor. In the Northamptonshire villages which
Mr. Reginald Lennard examined there were still vestiges of mediaeval
uniformity among many holdings, which contained exactly the old local
virgate acreage of thirty-six; and lot meadows persisted at Grafton. The
parson of Datchworth in the 1630's held, in addition to three enclosed
fields, strips covering nine and a half acres in the common fields as his
glebe, and the old basis of allotment in which B's strips always ran
between A's and C's is still discernible. These and the thousands of other
examples which could be given point to the active survival of the
communal field layout of previous centuries but one which was playing
an increasingly minor part in national agriculture, and which was the last
stronghold of the old mediaeval husbandry. Indeed, in spite of the vast
acreages which were enclosed in the great rationalizing movements of
later centuries and the wholesale enclosures under the general act of
1845, some examples of open fields still exist, at Laxton and in the Isle
of Axholme and at Clothall in Hertfordshire.
The value of enclosed land was very many times greater than that
which was still in the shackles of the common field system, with its
repression of progressive husbandry and of agrarian initiative; although,
as has already been said, it was perhaps rather permanent improvement
than freedom of cropping that was made impossible. Even where
amalgamation of strips had not progressed far, the sub-division of a field
into furlongs and shotts enabled a larger range of crops to be embraced
within the compass of, say, the spring field than the classic historian was
prepared to admit, and intermediate between the champion and several
lands were those parcels in the common fields where strips had been
T
exchanged and consolidated; this practice, certainly widespread and
perhaps to be found in almost every open field, made for easier working,
for implements had not to be carted from one acre strip to another, but it
allowed of no relaxation of the system of cropping, for crops still had to
be cleared by the traditional date for throwing the whole field open to
grazing, and they were still subject to common of shack. They did,
however, permit the tenant, say, to take a crop of single-cut clover where
his neighbours were growing oats.
But not only in the open fields was consolidation proceeding.
Mercantile prosperity ran side by side with the rise in wealthand in
standards of lifeof the yeoman; for merchants a large holding was the
first rung of the ladder which led up from Charing Cross to the heaven
of rural squirearchy, for the yeoman it meant even more wealth. In
consequence, as opportunity arose enclosed holdings were thrown into
one by the process of engrossing; and the once small gap between the
villein and the cottar was now a vast gulf between an increasingly
landless labourer and the thriving yeoman with a fine parlour, a fine
horse, a fine wife and fine clothes. At Ashton, Northamptonshire, one
farm of 512 acres comprised the 'capital messuage' and twelve other
tenements, all of which had once been the houses of independent
holdings. At Higham Ferrers, Thomas Rudd's 491 acres were made up of
six distinct holdings, and of these three were themselves old engrossed
farms each comprising up to three smaller holdings apiece. In such
engrossment may be discerned the seeds of the tied-cottage system, to
come to full fruition when later estate owners provided labourers' homes
as part of the fixed equipment of each holding; the unlanded tenements
of an engrossed holding were the obvious homes for the yeoman's staff.
Where such were not available cottages were often built upon the
manorial waste; but the act of 1589 which had sought to secure the
allotment of four acres to every cottage newly built seems to have failed
in its purpose almost entirely, and quarter sessions rolls are full of
presentments for its breach, for it was always cheaper to pay a small fine
than to lose good land.
Economically, these new large farms were more than justifying
themselves. The low levels to which cereal yields had fallen under
continuous mediaeval tillage have been cited. Before the sixteenth
century eight to ten bushels of wheat were thought a reasonable return
for the sowing of two bushels; and thereafter it was still a common
return from the strip in the open field. The sixteenth century, however,
saw a very marked rise in yield in those areas where enclosure had given
land a long rest under sheep pasture, where the new practice of alternate
husbandrythe first glimmerings of a long ley-arable rotationwas
followed, where improved cultivation was given, where there was
adequate manuring with the total disappearance of the jus faldae and
with heavier stocking, and where a progressive selection of seed was
practised. In 1577 William Harrison wrote that 'the yield of our corne-
ground is much after this rate following: through out the land . . . in
meane and indifferent yeares wherein each acre of . . . wheat well tilled
and dressed, will yield commonlie sixteen or twentie bushel', or twice
the mediaeval return. A quarter of a century later Edward Maxey
assessed the open-field yield at not above sixteen bushels, but well-
cultivated enclosed land 'well-dunged and sown with choicely picked
seed' gave forty-eight to sixty-four bushels to the acre. Six years later, in
1607, Norden asserted that some Somerset men on the rich Bridgwater
flats were winning ten quarters to the acre. Professor Percival has placed
part of the reason for this extraordinary advance to yields comparable
with those of the present day, at the door of improvement in wheat
strains 'as a result of the repeated action of improved environment of
well-cultivated fields. . . . It is clear that during the last three hundred
years there has been little or no change in the yields of wheat which can
be obtained from well-cultivated land.'
Before the time of Platt and Maxey and Tull, and indeed for long
after, broadcasting was the common method of sowing. The heavy
seedings which Tusser and others liked were partly necessary because of
the wastefulness of the process, as well as by reason of the weed
competition. Either in broadcasting on the upturned furrow and
harrowing after, or in sowing upon the flat and turning a light furrow
over the seed, much grain was wasted by too deep a covering or by no
covering at all. The drill proper was still in the future, but it was
symptomatic of the new outlook of thoughtful men that Sir Hugh Platt in
1600 and Edward Maxey a year later could put forward a new process
for the dibbling in of wheat, based partly upon the dibbling of beans
which had been practised for centuries. Maxey advocated a seeding rate
of only half a bushel an acre with this method, and calculated that
upwards of a million quarters of seed wheat could be saved in England
each year. For his dibbling he designed a setting table like a large
cribbage board which could be moved forward over the arable, and
which contained equi-spaced holes through which the seed could be
dibbled. It was not surprising that he found no followers, for the method
was quite impracticable for field use. But he may claim credit for being
one of the minor fathers of the new era of mechanization which was to
change the whole art of husbandry after it had overcome the timeless
agrarian antipathy to a new idea. Walter Blith wrote feelingly half a
century later of the 'scandall and prejudice among many of you against
new projections'. Many of Platt's and Maxey's successors were prolific
of ideas for better ways of sowing, and Worlidge in 1668 described an
invention by Gabriel Plattes of a machine with seed funnel and
automatic dibblers, but which failed to work. Worlidge went further, and
himself designed a wheeled corn drill with a coulter, and a grain pipe
containing a wheel to regulate the flow of seed from the hopper; the
design also provided for a second hopper and coulter to follow the first
with a manurial dressing, thus anticipating the modern combine drill.
This again was proclaimed a failure, although it is hard to resist the
belief that amendment and further trial might have given Worlidge the
honour which fell to Tull sixty years later.
From this period, the earlier seventeenth century, that great
agricultural hack Gervase Markham gives what purports to be the
description of a typical day in the life of a farmer, but it is a farmer of
the great rank and file and not a member of the large body of rural
capitalists, not the five-hundred-acre yeoman but one of that honourable
band whose wage-earning descendants to-day have roots deeper in the
village soil than the most venerable oak, and by the yardstick of whose
ancient but unchronicled lineage the new Cecils and the Russells, and
the old de Veres and Bohuns who are entombed in the urns and
sepulchres of mortality, are but newcomers. There are men in every
village to-day who carry the names that their forefathers bore in the
subsidy rolls of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
Markham's man is to rise at four in the morning, feed his cattle and
clean his stable. While the oxen are feeding he is to get his harness
ready, which will take him about two hours. Then he is to have his
breakfast, for which half an hour is allowed. Getting the harness on his
horses or oxen, he is to start by seven to his work and keep at it till
between two and three in the afternoon. Then he shall bring his team
home, groom them and give them their food, dine himself, and at four go
back to his cattle and give them more fodder, and going into his barn
make ready their food for the next day. After supper at six he is to mend
shoes by the fireside for himself and his family, or beat and knock hemp
and flax, or pitch and stamp apples or crabs for cider of verjuice, or else
grind malt, pick candle-rushes or 'do some husbandly office within doors
till it befall eight o'clock'. Then he shall take his lantern, visit his cattle
once more, and go with all his household to rest.
In the sixteenth century Fitzherbert and Tusser had been largely
content to chronicle the good agricultural practices of their times, with
little or no eye to the future. The greatest of the mid-seventeenth-century
writers, Walter Blith, aimed higher. Little seems to be known about him,
but he brought to a profound practical experience an analytical and
receptive mind, and the result was an agrarian counsel, embodied in his
English Improver of 1649 and expanded in the English Improver
Improved of 1652, which in almost every essential set the pattern of
good husbandry until the days of Tull, and in many aspects pointed the
fundamental precepts which still underlie good farming. Like every man
in the forefront of agricultural thought, he saw much of his advice
neglected during his lifetime, but more than a century later his analysis
of the theory of plough design was still the standard; the yeoman of the
high Victorian farming followed his counsels, perhaps not unknowingly,
for well-thumbed copies of the English Improver Improved abound; and
to-day authority is busily publicizing the practices of ley farming of
which he was the great advocate three centuries ago. Blith to-day is not
always easy to read; his uncompromisingly republican sympathies led
him to interlard his books with biblical references and lengthy
moralities, and even at his most lucid he was verbose and incapable of
the clear expression of his thoughts.
Blith's advice fell under 'Six severall heads or Peeces of
Improvement'; first was the introduction of water meadows where the lie
of the land made them possible, and this was a practical expansion of the
pioneer work of Rowland Vaughan, a Herefordshire squire who had
written the first account of drowning in 1610; secondly, the drainage of
wet soils, one of the most pressing needs of the day and the essential
precursor of farm improvement in many counties; third, enclosure,
which, he argued at length, need not lead to depopulation but rather from
intensification of production give an opportunity for even greater rural
employment; fourth, the ploughing of old pastures and the laying down
of worn-out arable to grass; fifth, the nature and use of manures; and
sixth, a policy of afforestation of all land which would be best under
timber, a policy which has won state encouragement only in recent
years.
It would be tedious to follow Blith through the mazes of his major
book, but certain aspects of it must be noticed. Many of the principles of
drainage which he enunciated made him a pioneer, in England at least,
and his detailed instructions encompassed every aspect of taking the
surface water off by ridge and furrow, attention to fall, the avoidance of
corners, and the filling of main ditches with faggots and stones so that
stock might not fall in. He added some precepts upon fen draining which
were appropriate at a time when the reclamation of the Fens was in
active progress. Upon the worst lowland pastures coming into arable he
believed denshiring was the best ameliorator, though he deprecated it for
better land where he thought, and rightly so, that the unburnt humus
turned into the furrow was of far greater benefit than 'a few bushels of
ashes to an acre'.
Blith had nothing but contempt for the open-field farmer who was
contented with his lot. 'He will toyle all his dayes himselfe and Family
for nothing, in and upon his common arable feilde Land; up early and
downe late, drudge and moyle and ware out himselfe and Family; rather
than he will cast how he may Improve his Lands by Impasturing, and
Enclosing of it.'
On the new arable from old grass, which was the complement of
seeding down the newly fenced open fields for pasture, Blith suggested
these fertilizers: 'Liming, Marling, Sanding, Earthing, Mudding, Snayle-
codding, Mucking, Chalking, Pidgeons-Dung, Hens-Dung, Hogs-Dung,
Rags, coarse wooll, Pitch-Markes, and Tarry Stuffe, and any Oyley
Stuffe, Salt . . . and almost anything that hath any Liquidnesse,
Foulnesse, Saltnesse or good Moysture in it.' Liming could do nothing
but good; in Cornwall and Devon great improvement had been wrought
by the use of seaweed; and snayle-cod Blith defined as the sludge from
deep rivers that is full of 'Wrinckles and little Shells'he reported that at
Han worth Lord Cottington had cut ponds at the side of the Ouse from
which snayle-cod was dredged periodically. He dissented from the
common opinion of swines' dung as the worst of all animal ordures, and
commended the keeping of pigs in yards into which not only straw but
all other vegetable refuse was thrown for treading down and rotting.
It is upon marl that Blith is most interesting, for here he speaks of
his own experimental work. He had fifteen gravelly lands in the open
fields, of which he marled some, carted dung on to some, folded some
and left the others untreated. In the first year under cereals the folded
land yielded best, but from the third year onwards the marled land was
supreme and remained so with successive light muckings on all fifteen
lands. It was good, reasoned experimental work in the field that gave
Blith his great hold over succeeding generations of husbandmen. In one
other particular Blith stood out against the contemporary agrarian scene,
and that was in his sustained advocacy of clover, of which he liked the
large red Dutch sort; its failure to grow on certain lands he laid at the
door of the malignant Dutchmen who exported their worst seed; he knew
nothing of bacterial deficiencies in the soil which have to be made good
before clover will take under some conditions. The practice of the few
people who yet grew clover was to sow it under a nurse crop of barley or
oats, and in a good year two cuts and an autumn aftermath for grazing
could be expected from a seeding of nine to ten pounds an acre. A few
years earlier Sir Richard Weston, statesman and estate improver, had
been eulogizing the advantages of clover grown in a similar way as part
of a rotation which also included flax, turnips, and oats; and eleven years
later Andrew Yarranton published a remarkable treatise on the
improvement of lands by clover. The crop was certainly being grown by
now on a small scale on some estates in the West Midlands and the
Home Counties, but it was many years before it came into general use.
Perhaps the wildly extravagant claims made for it did not help.
Blith added a chapter on sainfoin and lucerne, and gave his opinion
that there were thousands of barren light acres which should go under
these crops. Here again Blith was closely following Weston and the
piratical Hartlib, who included chapters on sainfoin founded largely on
the advanced Dutch practices of the time.
But it was upon the plough that Blith concentrated his closest
attention; and the maxims of construction, adjustment, and use which he
laid down showed that he brought to the examination of the implement a
spirit of scientific inquiry, albeit unbacked by mechanical training but
founded upon rules of thumb learnt in the field. Mr. J. B. Passmore has
remarked that 'his conclusions for the most part are well able to stand the
test of comparison with modern ideas'. The precepts which Blith applied
were that that which moved on or worked in the land and carried the
least weight must move the most easily; and that the sharper or thinner a
tool is the more readily will it penetrate the substance upon which it is
used. Both were an implied condemnation of the unwieldy masses of
wood and iron that the sheer brute force of a large team of oxen or
horses alone moved through the soil. As a corollary he asserted that
plough irons must be correctly made and sharp, that the breast and
mouldboard must be designed to follow the natural movement of the
furrow slice, and that each farmer should have several types of plough so
that he might use the lightest possible one for the task on hand.
The ploughs which Blith had found in use were largely variations
on the theme of the instrument described by Fitzherbert and carried upon
a two-wheeled forecarriage, and to which the Dutch wheel coulter was
beginning to be applied. The plough types of the mid-seventeenth
century Blith divided into four. First came the double-wheeled plough
'of most constant use in Hartfordshire', of which all cornmasters must
have one for its strength, and which was to be drawn by a full team
geared two abreast; the greatest fault of this model was its length and the
consequent great weight of earth it bore; but shortening it, Blith said,
would reduce the burden. A variation of the Hertfordshire plough was
the double-wheeled Kentish turnwrest, 'which of all ploughs that I ever
saw surpasseth for weight and clumsiness'. But it was only the
unwieldiness with which he quarrelled; the turnwrest principle he
admired. The single-wheel plough, which he says by implication was
something of an innovation to be seen at Greenwich among other places,
was small and neatly made, could be drawn by one horse, handled by
one man, and would plough an acre a day in light, well-tilled land.
In Norfolk and Suffolk there was a light plough that with one man
and two horses had turned over three light acres in the day, but of this
Blith gives no detailed description. Likewise he passes over the Dutch
plough in use in the fens and marshes of East Anglia as of only limited
application but interesting for its share with a side fin that cast up a
broad furrow cleanly and with ease. This plough was already in the
eastern counties in Barnaby Googe's day, half a century before, and was
another of the debts English farming owes to the Netherlands. There is
also passing mention of a two-furrow plough.
Blith ends by giving the specifications of a plough which he had
invented himself, or rather compiled from the best points of
contemporary models with modifications of his own. It was notable for a
new curve of mouldboard which enabled it to press upon the furrow
slice as it turned and to consolidate it. This plough was to rule the day
for almost a century, and even after the Rotherham plough introduced
radical mechanical improvements in the mid-eighteenth century it
continued in use well on towards the end of the nineteenth century on
the more conservative and remote holdings. It was the greatest tribute
that Blith could have been given, that his design survived for a full two
centuries.
Blith's instruction had been largely addressed to the eye of the larger
improving farmer, and little of the newer practice which he advocated
could have been applicable on the strips of the open fields; but as has
been pointed out far more work has yet to be done on this subject before
the true extent of the limitations of open-field farming can be assessed. It
has been commonly asserted, for instance, that a universal right of shack
over the common field precluded the use of artificial grasses; yet Tull
specifically spoke of the sainfoin grown upon lands of open fields where
there was no such common grazing right; and there are other references
to the inclusion of clovers and turnips in the common-field rotation. The
system has been condemned upon the partisan evidence of contemporary
agricultural writersand very probably rightly condemnedbut there
might once have been some middle way between open field and eviction
and enclosure which would have permitted more Englishmen to have
kept a foot on the land and still achieve efficient production.
Be that as it may, some idea of the extent to which enclosure had
gone may be gained from the figures recently published by Mr. M. W.
Beresford for Leicestershire. In this county there were fifty-two parishes
wholly enclosed before 1550, seven more between 1550 and 1600, fifty-
seven between 1600 and 1650, twenty-four between 1650 and 1700, and
only four from 1700 to 1750 when enclosure by legislation superseded
enclosure by agreement. After 1750, it has been estimated, some thirty-
eight per cent of Leicestershire still remained to be enclosed by Act of
Parliament.
While the man with the large holding had, willy-nilly, some little
part of it scattered among the strips of the open fields, most of these
strips were in the possession of the smallholding cottager and the
slightly more extensive yeoman who still retained some semblance of
his forefathers' mediaeval virgate. To regard such men as the exact
counterparts of the modern smallholder, however, is misleading. To-day
the twenty- or thirty-acre man is a market gardener or grazier, growing
other crops than grass only for the vegetable or fruit market or for the
feeding of his stock. The seventeenth-century man of similar acreage
was preeminently an arable farmer, self-supporting in cereals from his
common lands, and needing grazing for his draught beast, his home
milch cow and his pigs; these he depastured upon the commons. And it
was partly the loss of this common pasture by enclosure that upset the
centuries-old economy of his holding and gave rise to those outcries
which won a sympathetic ear from Government until the days of the
Commonwealth but to which later statesmen were to be politically deaf.
The Restoration saw the end of the declining and almost always futile
attempts to stem the tide of enclosure by legislation, and thereafter the
small man lay completely at the mercy of the large; although the
eighteenth-century enclosure by statute protected the interests of the
cottager in theory, in practice, as we shall see, the economics of the
redistribution of land worked always to his dispossession.
As always, it was in the hands of the substantial yeoman that
progress lay, and to his help there was beginning to come the scientific
knowledge that the new Royal Society, of which Charles II became
patron in 1662, was able to offer. It was a momentous time when exact
information could be substituted for the rules of thumb, largely well
founded upon centuries of experience but none the less completely
empiric, which for generations had become increasingly available in the
stream of agricultural treatises. It is not, of course, to be imagined that
such new knowledge was eagerly sought and immediately applied by the
man in the field; it took decades, almost centuries, to seep through to the
lower strata of agriculture. But to the improving landlord and the secure
tenant it was opening up new vistas of good farming and profitable
farming; and the two are, on the long view, always synonymous. One of
the earliest tasks of the Royal Society was to set up a committee in 1662
to consider a suggestion that the cultivation of the potato should be
extended as an insurance against famine; and this committee agreed
among other steps that all members of the society who held land should
plant the tuber themselves and persuade their friends to do the same, and
that the virtues of the root should be publicized 'in ye Diurnalls'.
The potato itself had been introduced into England in the late
sixteenth century from its native mountains of the New Worldthe
honour for its first appearance here is now being taken from Raleigh
and for many decades its cultivation was confined to the gardens of the
gentry. In 1699, however, Worlidge hinted that it 'might be propagated
in great quantities for food for swine or other cattle', and recommended
the cutting of the seed tuber. However slowly its cultivation spread in
the rest of England, in Lancashire it had made some headway by 1680
when there was a potato market in Wigan; the reasons may be that
Lancashire was a county of early enclosure and that it lay near to Ireland
where the potato had already a firm hold. In the first decade of the
eighteenth century Mortimer still treated it only as an alternative to the
garden artichoke, but repeated Worlidge's speculation on its use as
fodder. The next generation saw its expansion upon the market gardens
of outer London, and notably at Ilford, Plaistow, and Wanstead. Tull
experimented with it as a horse-hoed crop after 1700, but even Arthur
Young in his tours of the second half of the eighteenth century saw it so
infrequently that he thought it worthy of notice on each occasion that he
met with itnone at all in East Anglia, once at Sandy, in Kent, at Poole
in Dorset, and at a handful of other places. In the north, however, the
rise of industry made it a comparatively frequent field crop in Yorkshire;
and it is probably a fair generalization to say that the increase in the
cultivation of potatoes kept step with the growth of the late eighteenth-
century industrial population, demanding cheap food and cut off from all
opportunity of producing it for themselves as their ancestors of only a
few generations back had done.

7. The Threshold of Great
Things

ere, on the threshold of the great developments of the eighteenth
century, may we dwell for a little upon the condition at which
English farming had arrived in the closing years of the
seventeenth century and the opening years of the eighteenth, before the
revolutionary theories of Tull and the work of the stock improvers had
put an entirely new complexion upon the national agriculture? It was a
time at which the methods of many husbandmen were but little removed
from those of mediaeval society but when the practices of a small but
growing number were hinting at the great things to come.
The foundation of all good husbandry was the enclosure of land;
this was the unanimous opinion of all leaders of farming thought. The
legal requirements being completedand the popular method was now
the enrolment of enclosure agreements in the Court of Chancery
fencing of the new 'severall' land with bank, wall or hedge varied with
the local fashion; ditch and quick-set were almost ubiquitous in the
Midlands and the lower land of the south, but marshmen used the dyke,
West Countrymen the double wall filled in with earth and planted with
quick, and the uplander the plain dry stone wall. From theseand
earlierdays date the first of our pure and mixed hedges, the hedges
which, wandering apparently haphazardly between field and field, along
winding lane and path, preserve the ancient lines of open field divisions,
of headlands and gores, of assarts and purprestures from the waste and
woods; they hold much of the key to the history of the English
countryside, and joined to the pre-enclosure map picture the
development of the modern rural scene.
For the hedges themselves the seventeenth century esteemed the
whitethorn most of all, followed by blackthorn and crab, holly (often
planted at intervals along the quick), elder, and alder and furze upon
gravels that would grow nothing else. Of whatever plant, the hedge was
plashed in its eighth or ninth year, and nowhere was this dying art so
highly practised as in Hertfordshire; at the close of the eighteenth
century Young was to hold up this county's laying as a model to the
nation.
Upon the enclosures so formed, arable and pasture were ideally so
divided that the dung from the stock feeding upon the latter was
sufficient to maintain fertility in the former; days of stockless farming
upon the open strips were ending, and the new era of corn without horn
was far in the future of the twentieth century. The seventeenth-century
dung was carted in winter, and often harrowed in with a gate stuck with
bushes. For dressing grassland the bottom layer of the haystack was
valued both for its humus and for the seeds it contained for mending
bare patches upon the sward.
Flooding was coming more and more into fashion, and for those
whose lands could not be naturally drowned the Persian wheel was
brought into use; it had been introduced by Gabriel Plattes and in an
improved form was commended by Blith. With labour plentiful,
however, the wheel could be dispensed with and flooding could be done
by hand, the water being scooped from river or stream by a ladle
H
pivotally suspended from a tripod to take much of the weight. Lands
from which it was necessary to take water rather than to flood could
have their draining hastened by the Lincolnshire wheel, a normal water-
wheel in reverse, and for coastal marshes a primitive one-way valve
drain, releasing surplus land water but barring the entry of the rising
tide, had been devised. All contemporary literature speaks of the
growing importance attached to drainage as the fundamental prerequisite
of good husbandry, but it was not until late in the eighteenth century that
a reasonably effective method of subsoil drainage was evolved.
Upon the success of the hay crop depended the amount of stock that
could be over-wintered. With the scythe, that implement of the haysel
that reigned alone in England for two thousand years, a man could mow
a normal acre a day, but on thin upland grass two acres. Hay was cut
when the seedheads turned brown at the latter end of June (poor
Fitzherbert, how deaf was thy audience!), and was tedded, cocked, and
uncocked, windrowed and generally handled by the plentiful and cheap
labour available until it was fit to cart. Clovers were coming into wider
use, but the encouragement of the pioneersWeston and Hartlib, Blith
and Yarrantonmet with only a slow response at first and it was well on
into the eighteenth century before their use could be called widespread;
the wild white, of course, was an indigenous member of all good
pastures, particularly where it had been encouraged by marling. The
artificial clovers were most commonly sown under black oats, but on dry
land and in a mild winter they would succeed under winter wheat or rye.
The first hay cut of clover was taken towards the end of May, followed
either by the one more and grazing of the aftermath advised by Blith or
by two further cuts as practised by Mortimer. Probably Blith was more
commonly followed, for the large red clover was greatly esteemed for
grazing and one acre of it was claimed to feed as much stock as five or
six acres of natural grass; but trouble even then arose from bloatno
prerogative of the present dayand 250 years ago straw or hay fed with
the clover was as good a preventative as any. Ellis of Gaddesden, for
instance, says that in the Vale of Aylesbury men gave cattle their
bellyful of hay before turning them into new clover; and his other
remedies for 'hoved' stock were doses of a quart of butter-milk, urine
and salt and an eggshell full of tar; a red herring dipped in tar; and,
failing all else, the puncturing of the paunch with a knife. In addition to
its normal use a pound or two of clover seed broadcast on the stubble
gave some spring grazing before the land was broken for fallow.
For Saint Foin or the Holy Hay, and for La Lucerne, the
seventeenth-century improver claimed three advantagesthe great bulk
of the crop itself; its long life over twenty or thirty years; and the
improvement of the subsoil by the deep roots of the plantsand both
were recognized as giving the surest stands for fodder upon the light
chalks and sands. Sainfoin was sown alone or under oats or barley, a
bushel of ryegrass often being added to the normal seeding of four 01
five bushels to the acre to give an early bite before the sainfoin matured;
and marling when the stand was almost spent prolonged its life by
several years. Double this abnormally high seeding was given for
lucerne. On the contrary sort of land, the cold clays, ryegrass sown alone
or with clover was used for a ley.
The improving grazier had other varieties of grass at his disposal.
There was trefoil, of which Hartlib distinguished twenty-three different
varieties; the new French vetches; and such exotic seeds as spurry for
butter and eggs, and parsley for the prevention of foot rot in sheep. The
agricultural mind was often more ready to listen to the tales of old wives
than to those of new mentors. For the rest the man putting land down to
pasture still had only the sweepings of the hay barn for seed.
But in addition to these new artifical grazings there were the old
great natural pastures. The Essex marshes, already well filled at the time
of the Domesday Survey, were used by the men who supplied the
London mutton market and who bought at Smithfield in autumn the
Lincolnshire and Leicestershire wethers and, keeping them in full flesh
on the rich marsh grasses, cashed in on the large difference between
Michaelmas and midwinter meat prices. These same marshes were also
renowned for the veal which came off them. Further north, the
Brecklands fed flocks of sheep of mingled early Suffolk and
Lincolnshire stock, and southwards the ancient and incomparable
pastures of Romney were producing the biggest mutton in England. The
greatest flocks of all, however, were to be found upon the Hampshire,
Wiltshire, and Dorset downs where folding was almost universal. Defoe
was told, in the early years of the eighteenth century, that within six
miles of Dorchester more than six hundred thousand were feeding. 'The
grass or herbage of these downs', he wrote, 'is full of the sweetest and
most aromatick plants such as nourish the sheep to a strange degree.'
Most of the drafts from these flocks went through Weyhill Fair to
replenish the breeding stocks of Home Counties flockmasters, who
almost completely depopulated the Wiltshire downs of their ancient
horned stock. The indigenous grasses of the Vale of Aylesbury
commanded high prices; Leicestershire and the country in between to
Peterborough was a land of great grazings where 'even most of the
gentlemen are grasiers and in some places the grasiers are so rich that
they grow gentlemen'; and the Fens were one of the great fattening
centres, again of Lincolnshires, for the London trade.
To turn from grassland to arable husbandry submerges the reader of
contemporary treatises under a deluge of classical example; the authority
of Cato and Varro, of Columella and Palladius and others of the ancients
was still quoted as uncritically in agriculture as Aristotle and his school
had been in medicine, but quotation was tempered by translation for the
unlettered husbandman. The regional types of plough described by Blith
still held the field half a century later, but the Hertfordshire plough of
great burthen was having its share improved. The methods of cultivation
of the principal cereal crops enunciated by Henley and expanded by
Fitzherbert and his successors still held good, a tribute to the empiric
skill of the mediaeval, or even earlier, mind in determining the optimum
system in a pre-mechanical age. Ridge and furrow served to drain the
bulk of the water off the arable fields, and the more impermeable the
clay the higher was the ridge until the maximum of a yard's difference in
height between ridge top and furrow bottom was said to have been
reached in Huntingdonshire.
Change of seed was practised where possible, but smut was an ever-
present problem and the older treatments with lime, brine, and a solution
of sheep's dung were giving way to fantastic recipes for dressing; one
included a pound of saltpetre, half a pint of spirits of salt, a handful of
bran, yeast the size of an egg, and eight pounds of horse or cow urine, in
all of which seed corn was immersed for twenty-four hours. Houghton,
the economic journalist who was one of the leading members of the
Royal Society, even quoted an experiment in steeping in brandy.
The pre-turnip rotation was commonly oats following a ley; fallow;
rye, wheat or barley; and an 'etch-crop' of oats, beans, and peas, a slight
variation of the late mediaeval bulymong. On the poorest soils the fallow
still came in alternate years, and here men had progressed not at all from
the two-course rotation of five hundred and more years before.
A tremendous number of wheats were by now available, but
probably the dozens of names included many duplicates. Among the
commoner varieties were whole-straw wheat, red straw, rivet, white and
red pollard, turkey (Fitzherbert's peek-wheat), grey, red lammas, white
eggshell, long cone, pendulum, red-eared bearded, and pirks, a variant of
the white lammas. The rivets, pollards, and cones were members of the
rivet family (tr. turgidum), of which the various rivets and blue cones
are the modern but little-used representatives; the others can be less
readily correlated with modern sorts. Sowing was still either by
broadcast or under the furrow, and the plant was often fed off in early
spring; on occasion an early autumn seeding might be grazed until All
Hallowtide (November 1st).
Barley was less prolific of varieties: there were only the sprat
(locally the Fulham), the rathripe which was probably the foundation
stock of the modern Archer and of which it was claimed that it could be
carted within two months of sowing (a variant was the Patney), an early
Scots type, and a native Staffordshire sort mistermed tritico-speltum and
elsewhere called French barley. This last was certainly a survivor from
Celtic times, and a similar variety is still to be found occasionally in
Ireland under the name of Piley. For late sowings of all sorts
germination was hastened by soaking the seed for twenty-four hours in
an infusion of sheeps' and pigeons' dung.
The only distinction in oats was between black and white, but a red
naked sort was valued in the North for its ease in threshing, and Ellis
says it was boiled whole like rice for use as porridge. Peas, however, ran
to a lengthy list: the white, the garden runcivals, the ordinary grey, the
Henley grey and the vale grey, the Hampshire kids, the rathripe, the
blues, and the Cotswolds. Suffolk pea growers had introduced a new
method of sowing by inserting iron pegs into long sticks, the pegs being
stamped into the ground; and children then set a single pea in each hole.
Traditional storage of the cereal crop was in the stack, staddled
against vermin in the stone counties and elsewhere built upon a wooden
framework, but where the straw was needed immediately increasing
attention was being paid to the preservation of the threshed grain, and
specially designed urban granaries claimed to be able to keep wheat in
usable condition for thirty years. Heat drying seems to have left England
with the Romans, and did not return until the closing years of the
nineteenth century.
An even greater range of manurial treatment was followed than
even Blith had listed, if we are to believe that contemporary writers were
recording actual practices and not sometimes their own imaginings. For
denshiring the turf was commonly stripped off with the breastplough
about half an inch thick, turned often to dry, made into heaps of two
barrowloads each, and burnt with or without the aid of added fuel; the
ashes were spread after rain had damped them to prevent their loss in the
wind. Chalk was extracted from the great pits still to be seen in the
middle of many fields; here it was mined, raised in buckets, carted, and
spread. Effects of a thorough chalking were thought to last almost
indefinitely, but burnt lime was regarded as exhausted after five or so
crops. Methods of marling were becoming to be as many as the men
who used them, but the broad basis of the system remained unchanged.
Sea sand was carted inland in great quantities near the coast and dumped
on the clays; seaweed was either spread and ploughed in raw or
composted in the heap, as it is treated to-day in Cornwall and the
Scillies; and every form of dung, animal and human, was used. Failing
all else recourse was had to soap ashes, soot, rope waste, rags, hair, malt
dust, bark, and to salt near the Cheshire mines. Particularly in the Home
Counties were these industrial wastes used, for they could be brought
back from London as return loads after barge and cart had taken up
fodder for the metropolitan dairies and stables. The malt barges that
plied down the Lea from Ware came back loaded with dung for the light
chalk uplands of Hertfordshire.
Among other crops than the cereals and pulses, the great innovation
was the turnip, known in England for some centuries as a garden
vegetable but first seriously advanced as a fodder crop by Weston in
1645. After the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was to
make enormous strides into popular favour, and it probably played an
even greater part in the succeeding livestock improvement than is
commonly credited to it, for it made possible the carrying of breeding
stock in greater numbers and better condition through the winter; and the
work of Bakewell and the Collings would have been the harder without
it. With the pre-eminent faculty of the farmer for quickly arriving
experimentally at the best method of cultivation of any new crop, the
seventeenth-century yeoman had already established the foundations of
modern root growing. He had three varieties of turnips at his command,
the round, the long, and the yellow, all sown at one and a half to two
pounds an acre, in spring for seed and about midsummer for winter feed.
Originally always fed in the field the root was by now more often carted
and fed whole to yarded stock; for this latter purpose turnip and coleseed
were often mixed. The modern pests were already with the Stuart
husbandman: the fly, prevented it was thought by sowing with ashes or
dressing the young plant with soot; the 'black sort of caterpillar',
destroyed by rolling; and 'grubs', exterminated by turning ducks into the
crop. It is probable that autumn pulling and clamping for early spring
use was unknown; certainly it was most usual to leave the turnip in the
field in the hope that winter weather would not be unduly severe. Carrots
were also being experimented with as a field crop for pig feed in
particular.
There was a diversity of cash crops available to the seventeenth-
century arable man with a few acres to spare. Hemp, encouraged by the
Royal Society for its export possibilities, was grown in large quantities
around Wisbech; flax was often fed off by sheep in its early stages;
madder was used both for a red dye and for medicine, and was said to
yield a profit of 300 an acre at maturity at three years; woad had been a
most ancient dye crop; and there were also weld for yellow dye,
liquorice concentrated near towns where large quantities of manure were
available, saffron which gave its name to Saffron Walden, and the
safflower of Oxfordshire which gave a scarlet dye. To-day chemical
dyes have robbed our arable lands of much of their colourful variety.
There was also, of course, the once ubiquitous hop, about which more
had been written than about any other crop, and which has given its
name to hopfields and hop-grounds in counties from which memory of
its cultivation has long since gone. There were also teasels for the cloth-
dressing districts, caraway and coriander seed, aniseed and much else.
Arable farming, the discerning reader will have noticed, had already
reached much of the broad basis of principles which still holds the field.
Tull, the first agricultural engineers, and the swift twentieth-century
development of mechanized farming have only altered the methods by
and the speed at which these principles are translated into effect. With
stock, matters were very different. The work of the breeder and grazier
of the seventeenth century was little different from that of his
predecessor of a couple of centuries before; and the efforts of Bake-well
and the Collings gave a new generation not only virtually new material
on which to work but also new ways in which to use it. The change from
mediaeval ways with stock, projected forward into Tudor and Stuart
times, to the nineteenth-century methods of animal management was a
far greater break with the past than anything which had occurred in the
sphere of crop husbandry.
In the realm of horses the seventeenth century knew the Shire, a
shrunken descendant of the great mediaeval warhorse, and the Flanders
breed which was being used to give it greater size; the great regional
native breeds such as the Suffolk must have been evolving or evolved
but were little known outside their own counties. On the other hand,
localized varieties of cattle were numerous, fairly well defined, and
widely recognized; and restricted communications had tended to
intensify regional characteristics. Contemporary writers distinguish the
Longhorn in the North, probably that which Defoe described as the 'large
noble breed of Yorkshire'; the upland black stock of Wales; the hardy
Scottish types and the black cattle of East Anglia which had sprung from
them; and above all the 'long-legged, Short-horned Dutch breed' that in
Lincolnshire and further north was awaiting the improving hands of the
Collings, Booth, and Bates.
Spring calving was almost universal; but contagious abortion, under
the name of slinking, was troublesome and could only be kept in check
by isolation of beast and infected pasture. Management of both beef and
dairy stock largely followed mediaeval lines, modified only by some
degree of winter fattening upon turnips; these and hay were otherwise
reserved for down-calvers, and the store beast had to make do as best it
could upon straw, fed in the order of priority set down by Tusser a
century and a half before.
That milk yields were not always despicable seems to be indicated
by Bradley's estimate that a dairy of nine cows should give 13,140
gallons of milk in the year, although it must be remembered that the
dairyman immediately replaced the milker whose yield was beginning to
fall with a newly calved animal. Even so, his figure was regarded at the
time as highly optimistic and was widely challenged, but his reply was
that it could be done. Little liquid milk was yet drunk; butter was made
in large quantities, particularly at such centres as Wood-bridge; and
cheese was beginning to be mass-produced in such communal factories
as that at Cheddar, one of the earliest examples of co-operation, while
farm-making assumed enormous proportions in Cheshire, where the
county output was estimated at ten thousand tons a year.
Beef, again, was produced in sizable but coarse joints. In 1697
Defoe was shown four bullocks which dressed out at Smithfield at
eighty stone a quarter, and this after being driven on foot from Steyning.
But the growing needs of the metropolitan market were being
increasingly met by the hordes of beasts driven southwards over the
border from Galloway and Angus; Defoe estimated that more than
50,000 black cattle came from Galloway alone every year. The new
manufacturing areas of the North were also increasing the urban
consumption of beef, and it was here a common practice for all who
could afford it to buy a beast in the autumn for slaughter, salting and
drying for winter use.
At a time when keep and not labour was the great limiting factor,
sheep were still more widely kept than any other stock. Apart from the
Ryelands, the Cotswolds, and the Lincolnshires the present breeds were
largely unknown outside their own counties. A minor luxury trade,
however, was met by the Dorset Horns with their powers of early
lambing. Such lambs yeaned before Christmas were penned indoors and
their dams were brought to them two or three times a day for suckling.
The high return from this early meat made it profitable to keep the ewes
in condition with the best hay, bran, and oats; but for the rest the in-lamb
ewes lived on short rations in the absence of turnips until in the spring
the first flush of grass and the early bites from wheat and rye coincided.
The co-ordination of spring fodder supplies with lambing time was one
of the major skills of the flockmaster.
Of the pig, only the central Midland type centred upon
Leicestershire and Northamptonshire stood much above the level of the
semi-wild sort to be found universally throughout the country, although
the progenitors of the Wessex, the Essex, the Gloucester Old Spot, and
the others were doubtless in being. Both porkers and baconers were
reared in 'middling plight' until it was time to fatten them for slaughter;
until then they received only enough swill to induce them to come home
at night from free range in the spinnies and hedgerows. There was some
fattening upon acorns, but the peas and beans which grew on the
Leicestershire clays were laying the foundation of a local supremacy in
breed, with barley, rye or wheat offal and meal when the pulses were
dear. The common Leicestershire practice in fattening was to stack
beans and peas near water, pen the swine around the stack and allow
them to feed it down until they were killed, largely for salting down for
naval rations. Apart from the plough, the cart was now receiving
attention from the scientific mind, and the Royal Society concerned
itself with experiments to determine the best size of wheel and type of
axle-tree to reduce draught; but the wheel-base still had to conform with
the spacing of the local ruts if a vehicle was to progress at all in winter.
The value of regional types of minor implements, the scythe and the
trenching spade, the hedging hook and the harrow, was discussed at
length, but little or no standardization resulted from the spate of words.
Such revolutionary ideas as Worlidge's drill were probably unknown to
most countrymen, although the contemporary agricultural Press in the
shape of Houghton's newsletters was gradually breaking down the
regional barriers which had hitherto impeded the spread of new ideas;
but the percentage of the agricultural population which even Houghton
reached was probably minute. As is still the case, the local practical
application of a new method by a man whom his neighbours respected
far outweighed the influence which even hundreds of thousands of
words in print could exert; and the rate of permeation of ideas down to
and through such men was still so slow as to be almost impossible of
apprehension except to the observer of the future taking as his view not a
year or a decade but a century. The seventeenth century had largely set
the seal of perfection upon agricultural practice as it knew it. Its ways
have persisted in very many details down to our own day; but the time
was not far distant when the dawning of a new era of industrialization
was to make vast new demands upon domestic food supplies through the
rapid expansion of population, much of it now agriculturally
unproductive. The task which English farming was being set was to be
met, and fully met, by new answers to the old problems.

8. New Ways with Stock
and Crop

s the eighteenth century grew older 'society moved forward
unconsciously towards the industrial revolution'. Merchant and
middleman were helping agriculture to develop so that it could
feed the mouths of the teeming new millions of the slums of London, the
Midlands, and the North. Their task was made the easier by the use of
river and canal for the interchange of farm produce between districts,
and for the pouring into the great open markets of London of such of its
food as was not provided by the market gardeners of the suburbs; many
roads were still too bad for heavy goods traffic, apart from the meat that
travelled on the hoof.
Freehold yeoman and tenant farmer continued to form the backbone
of English farming, as they had for some centuries past; but later in the
eighteenth century the rise in affluence of the landlord with a stake in the
new industry and an inclination to invest his profits therefrom in the new
agriculture gave the tenant of such a man a great advantage over his
freeholding neighbour. Indeed, the latter was often squeezed out by the
large landlord with the wealth and the wish to consolidate his estate. The
taxation of the wars of Anne weighed heavily upon the freeholder who
made up a great part of the minor squirearchy, and this, too, accelerated
the movement of his lands within the boundaries of the great estate.
Indeed, it is doubtful whether since the early part of the eighteenth
century it has profited the man of middling acres to own the land he
farms.
The great new body of landlords, with an old foot in the country and
a new one in the towns, and those whose fortunes had led their steps in
the opposite direction, were buying not only acres but the social prestige
and position that went with them, and which had been so eagerly sought
from early Tudor days. They coveted and acquired not only the lands of
their penniless peers of the middle classes but also the few acres which
had come down through the ages from the cottar of mediaeval society to
the labouring smallholder of Anne and the first Georges, tiny holdings
from which men were forced by their thousands by the new wave of
enclosure which gathered force after the procedure of enclosure by
parliamentary legislation was introduced in the middle years of the
century. The Report of the Committee on Waste Lands in 1797 put the
rate of enclosure by Act of Parliament at: Under Anne (1702-14), 1,439
acres; under George I (1714-27), 17,960 acres; under George II (1727-
60), 318,778 acres; and from 1760 to 1797, 2,804,197 acres. It must be
remembered, of course, that the earlier figures do not include acres
enclosed by private negotiation and the later ones do not represent the
re-allocation of the open fields alone; a large part concerns the intake of
much of the remaining wastes and commons under the impulse of
expanding and profitable markets for the produce of land, markets not
yet swamped by cheap food from the New World.
Both processes, the enclosure of the waste and the re-allocation of
arable strips, injured the small man equally, in spite of the apparently
equitable allocation to him by the enclosure commissioners of his proper
portion: it was a portion which he could not afford to provide with the
A






fences and drains which had been either unnecessary or a communal
obligation upon the ancient common fields and pastures. The alternative
to such crippling or quite impossible expenditure was the sale of his
small acres to a big neighbour.
This divorce of the petty freeholder and copyholder from the land
may have had no very great economic effect upon him at first. His acres
had often given him no more than a mere pittance in kind, and he
probably lived as well as a dependent labourer as he had done as the
master of a few strips in the open fields and the owner of ancient rights
of stint upon the common. He probably even slightly improved his
physical condition by removal into urban employment, and he could
scarcely have worsened his chances of advancement in the material






things of the world. The psychological results of the change, however,
were incalculable in many ways; and in one they were profound and
pregnant with ill omen for the future of the land. Before the industrial
revolution a man might work in the rural 'factory' by day and upon his
own acres at night. The revolution took the factorythe shops of the
village bootmaker, the joiner, and the weaverinto the town, and thither
the new landless workers followed them in their thousands. The
cleavage between town and country was rapidly accomplished and
fundamental. When, after a century or so, the flood of cheap grain and
meat from the new countries over the sea took the economic ground
from beneath the feet of the British farmer, the urban mind which had
the power to protect him with its vote was without sympathy; it had no
ties with the land now, no interests in it, no understanding of its
problems, no appreciation of its essential place in the national
economybut only a bitter folk memory of the wrongs which the
wealthy eighteenth-century land-grabber had done to a grandfather or a
great-grandfather. The pitiful state of British farming in most of the last
seven decades has its roots deep in the eighteenth century.
The facilities provided by the middleman and the flow of new
capital into the countryside combined to concentrate agrarian leadership
in the hands of men who were not mentally yoked to the many surviving
conventions of mediaeval practice; and a wave of improvement surged
through the countryside in the wake of Townshend and Coke and others
of a like mind but less publicity. It is an academically stimulating but
practically unprofitable exercise to discuss whether the progress hand in
hand of the agrarian and industrial revolutions followed the usual course
of cause and effectfrom the need to feed from English acres a
population which doubled in numbers in the eighteenth century; or
whether it blossomed independently out of the new spirit of inquiry,
inventiveness, and a growing receptiveness to new ideas that followed
the pouring of new blood into the old manor houses. Whatever the
answer, the earliest important manifestation of this new urge towards
more productive rural processes was the work of Jethro Tull.
Tull, a man of education and means, left the Bar for his ancestral
home at Howberry in Oxfordshire in 1699, and his natural inclination
towards farming, still to be unusual in a man of his position for a decade
or two yet, was strengthened by the conservative obstructionism of his
staff. It is probable that he was influenced by the work of Worlidge and
Plattes; only two years later he invented the drill which, with his horse-
hoe, his practice of wide drilling to permit inter-row cultivation, and the
consequent great reduction in seeding rate, have made his name an
honoured one in farm history. Tull himself said that his invention was
named the drill because an existing practice of sowing beans or peas by
hand in channels or furrows drawn in the ground was called drilling. He
is usually most highly regarded for the practice of deep pulverization of
the soil which he advocated; it is probable that his greatest achievement
was to guide the way towards the substitution of a root break for the
wasteful fallow. Tull died at Prosperous Farm, Hungerford, in 1741 with
much of the value of his work unrecognized, indeed viciously attacked,
by the great mass of the farming community, but with his own faith in it
undimmed.
Tull set out upon his proto-scientific inquiry, the result of which
was given to the world in 1731 in his Horse-Houghing Husbandry, with
the fundamental question, by what means does the plant receive its
nourishment? And he answered it, through a root system of such extent
and ramifications as had hitherto been unsuspected. The path of
nourishment being established, Tull next examined the nature of the
nourishment itself and, in the then state of knowledge, could only offer
the five sources that had descended from the wisdom of the ancients,
with one addition: Nitre, water, air, fire, and earth; he abandoned the
first four, in spite of Bradley's advocacy of the atmosphere as a potent
factor in plant growth and Digby's experiments sixty years before with
nitre, and plumped for the fifth, earth, in as fine particles as the
cultivator could achieve. The common means of dividing the soil finely
were two, he went on, by dung or by tillage, or a combination of both.
Tull argued that the only virtue of dung was that, by its fermentative
action, it dissolved the soil particles and divided them by reason of its
content of 'salts'. He would allow it no other virtue; for the rest it was an
obnoxious matter that served only to taint that which grew in it. Having
dismissed dung in this way, Tull left himself only tillage as the fons et
origo of good husbandry. It is patent that his argument had been forced
to run to this predestined end, rather than that logic should be permitted
to lead him where it might. He may be forgiven for the old reason, that
the end he reached justified the means he strained to reach it. He had
arrived by experiment at certain sound usages, and no man of his time
could have been expected to fathom the reasons for them.
The object of Tull's tillage was to provide a medium through which
the root system of the plant could penetrate with the least possible
hindrance; and he declared that the first and second ploughings, which
until then were the only operations which preceded the harrowing in of
the seed, scarcely deserved the name of tillage; rather they only served
to prepare the soil for it. In this insistence on tillage Tull was also
thinking of the after-cultivation of the growing plant. The one implement
which he claimed would perform this function efficiently was his horse-
hoe; and in order that this after-cultivation might be possible it was
necessary that his crop rows should be widely spaced, thirty inches apart
for 'vegetables' and five feet for all corn. The horse-hoeing was
performed by what was in effect an ordinary wooden plough with the
mouldboard removed; this implement, besides keeping the soil open for
easy root growth, also reduced or eliminated the weeds which robbed the
soil of nourishment which should have gone to the crop. Although Tull
called the operation horse-hoeing, he designed a yoke for oxen in single
file to draw the implement, with a muzzle to prevent their eating the
growing crop. It is probable that his whole conception of deep
cultivation was not in fact original but was founded upon the practice of
thorough pulverization and no dung which he had seen during a tour of
the French vineyards.
One of the peculiarities of Tull's method of drilling was a seeding at
two levels. In the case of turnips he drilled at depths of four inches and
half an inch. In dry weather the deeper-set seed came up, in rain the
shallower germinated and came away fast; a mixture of old and new
seed gave further variation in germination date. He also intercropped the
turnips with autumn-sown wheat, pulling the roots in the spring.
The great merit of the new system Tull himself does not seem to
have appreciated fully: it was that, by making possible the cleaning of a
widely spaced root crop, the need for a regular fallow for the reduction
of a heavy weed population was eliminated. Tull could not have known
it, but his ideas made possible the evolution of the great Norfolk rotation
and the high farming of the following century. Like all enthusiasts with a
new idea, Tull claimed for his system of husbandry not only the benefits
to which it might properly lay claim but added some less credible ones.
Horse-hoeing, he asserted, reduced the risk of smut or 'blight' in his
wheat, sown in double rows five feet apart, although he was taking
thirteen similar crops in succession; although there is no doubt that
thorough cultivation and more than adequate growing space gave the
plant a healthier resistance to disease. Tull advocated this wide spacing
not only for corn and roots but for some artificial grasses as well.
Sainfoin he drilled in double rows eight inches apart and with thirty
inches between the double drills so that it might be horse-hoed; and by
seeding lucerne at a thirty-three-inch interval he maintained a pure stand
for many years.
Tull had arrived at methods of tillage of which some were an
infinite improvement upon what had gone before, but others of which
carried him almost to the extreme of absurdity. But to perform this
tillage he had to have recourse to implements of a far different kind from
the primitive bush gate and heavy wooden harrows which had so far
served the husbandman; and here his inventive and inquiring mind had
full play for its ingenuity. Again, his enthusiasms occasionally ran amok,
as in his four-coultered single-furrow plough, but even here his curiosity
was a welcome change from the diehard conservatism of ninety-nine out
of a hundred of his fellows. And even if this were not so, he might be
forgiven all his fantasiesand they were only the errors of judgment of
a supremely practical man and not the dreams of a theoristfor his gift
of the seed drill to his country. It stands with the threshing machine, the
tractor, the combine, as one of the great achievements of agricultural
mechanics. It was a necessary corollary of his horse-hoeing husbandry,
which required evenly spaced and straight rows of plants for its practice;
none of the old methods had gone near to providing these, although the
broadcasting of seed into the open furrow approached it most closely,
but carried with it the great disadvantage of uneven depth of placement.
For his drill, invented in 1701, Tull drew his principles from the
organ. He said that:
'The first Idea that I form'd of this Machine, was thus: I imagin'd the
Mortise or Groove, brought from the Soundboard of an Organ, together
with the Tongue and Spring, all of them much alter'd; the Mortise having
an Hole therein, and put on upon one of the Iron Gudgeons of the
Wheelbarrow; which Gudgeon being inlarg'd to an Inch and an half
Diameter, having on it the Notches of the Cylinder of a Cider-mill, on
that Part of it which should be within the Mortise, and this Mortise made
in the Ear of the Wheelbarrow (through which the Gudgeon usually
passes), made broad enough for the Purpose; this I hoped, for any thing I
saw to the contrary, might perform this Work of Drilling; and herein I
was not deceived.
'As for placing a Box over this Mortise to carry a sufficient Quantity
of Seed, it was a thing so obvious, that it occasion'd very little Thought;
and an Instrument for making the Chanels, not much more; neither for
applying Two Wheels, one at each End of the Axis, instead of the single
Wheel in the Middle of the Axis of the Wheelbarrow.
' At first my Plough made open Chanels, and was very rude, being
composed of Four rough Pieces of Planks, of little Value, held together
by Three Shoots, or Pieces of Wood, which held them at a Foot Distance
one from the other: These Pieces, being cut sharp at Bottom, made the
Chanels tolerably well in fine Ground. But I soon contrived a Plough
with Four Iron Shares, to make Chanels in any Ground: This drew a
Hopper after it, having Four Seed boxes at its bottom, carried on a
Spindle by Two low Wheels, which had Liberty to rise and sink by the
Clods that they pass'd over; The seed-boxes delivered their Seed
immediately into the open Chanels.
'This Plough and Hopper were drawn by an Horse, and the Seed,
lying open in the Chanels, was covered sometimes by a very light
Harrow, and sometimes by an Hurdle stuck with Bushes underneath it.
'I soon improv'd this Plough to perform better, and to make Six
Chanels at once, and sometimes a great many more.'
Tull's specifications, given in great detail, range from those for a
simple wheat drill to those for an implement which would sow barley
and undersow clover and sainfoin at the same time. For the eighteenth
century it was the acme of ingenuity.
Invention was one thing, however, popular use was a vastly
different one. One hundred and three years after Tull had first designed
his drill and three-quarters of a century after he had published his
designs Arthur Young wrote of the great tillage county of Hertfordshire:
'I passed through near one hundred miles in the county inquiring for
drilled crops but neither seeing nor hearing of any.' Young quoted as a
typical reply to his inquiries: 'No, I have seen enough of it. I will show
you presently as much barley as can grow out of the earth, broadcast,
and the land clean; what should I drill for?' There were exceptions,
however, and Young quotes the experience of a dozen men who
followed Tull's practices, but these were out of many hundreds of
farmers in the county. The complexity of the construction of the drill
was probably one of the chief reasons for the slow expansion of the
practice of drilling: the skill of the village manufacturersthe
blacksmiths and the carpentersdid not take them beyond the making
of the traditional plough; and even when it was built the drill fell an
early victim to the unpractised and contemptuous hand of the
unmechanical labourer. Not until the end of the century were more
widely practicable implements evolved, on the basis of Tull's drill
designs. Tull's system was also brought into disrepute by a common
failure to carry it out in full. Ellis, for instance, in 1738 gave examples of
widely spaced plants which were smothered by weeds because the
corollary of thorough hoeing had not been observed; and there was also
a common use of unsuitable implements for horse-hoeing which did not
throw up a mulch of earth at the foot of the crop, an important part of
lull's method.
By one man, however, Tull's teachings were assimilated and
followed. Charles second Viscount Townshend rose to high government
office as secretary of state, quarrelled with Walpole, and in 1730
transferred his forceful personality to the administration of his estates at
Rainham in Norfolk. His work there has led his name to be bracketed
ever since with that of Tull as the protagonists of the eighteenth-century
agricultural revolution, rather unfairly to the other great improving
landlords of the timePeterborough, Decies, and many otherswhose
example greatly influenced agrarian practice in their own counties.
Townshend made his name, and his nickname, from his advocacy of the
turnip as a farm crop. His conversation, it was said, was turnips, turnips,
and nothing but turnips. The root already had a respectably long history
behind it as a garden vegetable. Its use for livestock fodder is said not to
have been widely followed, but it is probable that it was more commonly
met with before the middle of the eighteenth century than is believed.
Several years before Townshend went into farming seriously, Defoe had
described the East Anglian practice of feeding and fattening cattle and
sheep upon the turnip, 'from whence the practice is spread over most of
the east and south parts of England to the great enriching of the farmers
and the increase of fat cattle'; and a few years before this the parson of
the Hertfordshire parish of Datchworth was growing turnips on his glebe
regularly and tithing them on the farms of at least four of the seven big
farmers of the village.
However that may beand more will be said of the regional use of
the turnip later in the chapterTownshend's advocacy of it in
conjunction with Tull's practices of wide planting intervals and thorough
inter-row cultivation achieved two great ends in the course of a
generation or two: it made easier the carrying through the winter of a far
larger head of stock, with the result that the way was open for the
livestock improver whose work could not have been done under the old
fashion of seasonal retrenchment in the number of stock carried; and, as
Tull had not seen but as Townshend did, it laid the foundations for
sound rotations which kept the land in production throughout the whole
cycle. Popular acclaim of the turnip as the basis of modern methods of
land use has rather obscured the part that the leguminous grasses played.
The most widely known of the new rotations which arose in place of the
old two and three courses including a fallow was the great Norfolk
rotation either initiated or popularized by Townshend himself: Turnips,
well cultivated and folded off with sheep; barley or oats; clover and
ryegrass; and wheat. Much of Townshend's estate was on the light heath
land of central Norfolk, and here he extended the practice of marling to
give body to the blowing sand. A generation later Young paid this
tribute to his work: '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.' Townshend himself died only eight
years after he had started farming, but as Young's observations show he
left a most tangible memorial.
The fourth decade of the eighteenth century was truly one of great
moment for English farming. It had seen, in the publication of the
Horse-Houghing Husbandry, the first major impact of the new science
of agriculture upon the old crafts of husbandry. Townshend and others
were following the roads signposted by Tull. And, thirdly, the beginning
of a new era in plough design was marked by the patenting of the
Rotherham plough by Stanyforth and Foljambe in 1730. It was a swing
plough, a descendant in this respect of the East Anglian models which
had owned Dutch prototypes imported in the late sixteenth century as
their ancestors. But it broke right away from traditional design by
discarding the sharebeam completely and carrying the share upon the
sheath, to which the base of the land handle was also attached. The
advantage of this compact construction, with its minimum of heavy
framework, over the older models with parts attached to one or both of
two main members is obvious; and its efficiency was further increased
by the use of a winding mouldboardin place of the straight board
which had done service beforewhich followed the turn of the furrow
slice and compressed it firmly upon the previous furrow bottom, thus
both easing the draught of the implement and improving the quality of
the work. It was an improvement, it will be remembered, that was first
conceived by Blith. This change in mouldboard design was carried a
step further by a Norfolk farmer, Arbuthnot, who determined the
optimum curve of breast, and by James Small who reduced to paper the
natural curve of mouldboard which he discovered by allowing the
turning furrow slice to scour a soft wooden mouldboard until it arrived
at the lines which still obtain to-day.
The work of these men, of Stanyforth and Foljambe, of Arbuthnot
and Small, complete the last link in the chain of individual design and
workmanship of the plough, and lead straight into the modern era of
agricultural engineering, for the first products of the late eighteenth-
century founders of the great firm of Ransome, Sims, and Jefferies were
based upon very little improved versions of the Rotherham and
Arbuthnot ploughs. These improvements were mainly those suggested
by Small in his remarkable book The Plough (1784), which contained a
penetrating analysis of the mechanical forces underlying the work of the
implement which was now disowning its lineal descent from the great
Belgic wooden tool, and following new lines in the new mediums of cast
iron and, later, steel.
The perfecting of the swing plough, however, is not quite the whole
picture of plough improvement. Alongside it was proceeding the
evolution of the Kent one-way plough which avoided many of the
disadvantages of the traditional typethe need for drawing many rigs
across the field, the long distances walked without load along the
headlands, and the unevenness of the opening ridges and closing furrows
that remained when the field was finished. Its near relative, the double-
ended plough, first appeared in the early eighteenth century, but has
always been something of an exotic and rare flower in the English field,
despite its once wide use in steam cultivation. The two-furrow plough
mentioned by Blith excited Ellis's interest, and in 1738 he observed of it
that 'with four horses almost double the work could be done in half the
time for which a single plough would be employed'; and later in the
century Marshall found it in fairly general use in Leicestershire. One
Surrey man even had a three-furrow implement; and there were a
number of other minor types in use, the trench plough with a skim
coulter, and a miner, which was a strongly beamed plough without
mouldboard that sub-soiled to a depth of twelve inches below the furrow
bottom.
The procession of great names which marches through the
eighteenth century reached a popular climax in the honoured one of
Coke of Holkham, whose 'Clippings' at his Norfolk home were the
contemporary equivalents of the twentieth-century agricultural show and
conference rolled into one. The preeminence of Coke, indeed, has
caused something less than justice to be done to somewhat lesser men
whose achievements, chronicled in the Board of Agriculture's county
reports, were overshadowed by the fame of the great East Anglian
improver and by the ducal example at Woburn. Coke's estate when he
entered upon it in 1776 was described by the neighbouring Lady
Townshend as 'one blade of grass and two rabbits fighting for that'; it
was, in fact, another Rainham before Townshend. Coke's improvement
of his own land was an important object lesson to all who saw or heard
of it; the opportunities which he gave for others to learn of the latest
innovations in farming and of the best practices of other regions were of
even greater service to agriculture.
Of both aspects of his work so much has been written that there is
perhaps no need to say much here. Coke's own estate was improved out
of all recognition by heavy marling; by the introduction of a rotation of
two straw crops and two years under good grass; by heavy stocking with
Southdowns and Devon cattle; by the wide use of drilled swedes; and
above all by his encouragement of his tenants to follow his example and
rewarding them with magnificent new houses and buildings. Forty-three
of the famous Clippings were held before Coke's death in 1842. They
spanned the greater part of half a century, from the closing decades of
the eighteenth century when Young was chronicling in county after
county the survival of near-mediaeval practices to the momentous early
years of the nineteenth century when the foundations of the new
chemistry of farming were soon to be laid by Leibig, Lawes, and Gilbert.
To each of these Clippings came the best agricultural practitioners of the
day in ever-growing numbers, to learn from others and in their turn to
impart their own ideas under the influence of Coke's great power of
making men talk; at the last of them in 1821 there were seven thousand
guests.
The very obstacle to the raising of the national standard of farming
which Coke had tried to overcome, and in small part succeededthe
slow dissemination of new knowledgewas the reason for the
foundation in 1793 of the Board of Agriculture. It has been a reason that
has held good from the days of Fitzherbert right through to the
twentieth-century formation of the National Agricultural Advisory
Service, for the very grounds that Sinclair, first president of the board,
put to the Commons: 'For though in some particular districts improved
methods of cultivating the soil were practised, yet in the greatest part of
these kingdoms the principles of agriculture are not sufficiently
understood, nor are the implements of husbandry or the stock of the
farmer brought to the perfection of which they are capable.' One of the
first tasks of the board was the initiation of the county surveys which,
unequal in quality though they were from Sinclair's most uncritical
selection of surveyors, form the most thorough and comprehensive
examination of regional farming practices ever made, before or since. In
this the board were following the lead of Marshall, whose Rural
(Economies of many of the regions of England published during the last
quarter of the eighteenth century are prolix but sound.
The bulk of the work of the board was carried on the shoulders of its
secretary, the indefatigable Arthur Younggreatest of all agricultural
reporters, an inveterate experimenter, untiring in his search for facts,
and, for the times, scrupulously fair in his presentation of them
notwithstanding his own violent but often well-founded prejudices.
Young himself, a failure at practical farming but unexcelled in the
interpretation of the theory and practice of others, was one of that
curious band of men who for four centuries have found the practice and
profit of the pen more to their taste than those of the plough; and he
himself wrote one of the board's forty-five original surveys and later re-
surveyed and rewrote six of the more unsatisfactory of the othersall in
addition to his twenty-eight other major works of which one, the Annals
of Agriculture, ran to forty-five completed volumes.
These detailed descriptions of local practices and conditions form a
mine of agricultural information which is largely unexplored as a whole.
They show that at the end of the eighteenth century new methods were
marching alongside the old ones, as they have done in century after
century. Young and his colleagues, and Marshall slightly before them,
found for instance that while Norfolk men almost universally understood
and practised the winter feeding of store cattle upon turnips, that root did
not enter into the scheme of things on the heavy Midland clays
although in the midst of them, on the lighter Leicestershire land, it
formed the basis of the rotation and was largely fed off with sheep; but
the hoeing of the crop, Marshall complained, was in the hands of men
who 'made a trade and mystery of it'. The Norfolk turnip men paid great
attention both to tilth and to heavy manuringfor the latter pulverized
rape cake was popularwith the result that crops of thirty or forty cart-
loads to the acre were taken, accounted enough to fatten a Scottish
bullock. The roots were normally pulled and fed to yarded or stalled
cattle or, upon the lighter land, strewn before stock on the winter wheat.
At the other end of the country turnips were similarly used, but
Devonshire men invariably neglected to hoe them and Marshall records
that in the west of this county the turnip fields in autumn were as yellow
with charlock as the mustard fields in May. In fact, he dubbed West
Country practice with roots 'a disgrace to British agriculture', and urged
the adoption of the northern practice of sowing them upon ridges.
Devonian malpractices, however, could be capped in Hertfordshire, a
county in the van of arable farming: between Hertford and Hatfield
Young found 'the turnip fields over-run with charlock in full blossom'.
Here, however, there was on the credit side the growing use of swedes;
elsewhere they were the prerogative of the gentleman farmer, but here
there were 'few farmers who are without a field of this excellent plant'.
This same county of Hertford was also a pioneer in the large-scale use of
cabbage for both sheep and cattle feed.
Presence or absence of large urban populations determined the use
of the potato. The bulk of the Hertfordshire crop, which ran up to ten
and a half tons to the acre, went to London but the surplus was fed to
milch cows and store pigs; in Devon and Cornwall, on the contrary,
most of the potatoes went to swine after the small needs of Plymouth
had been met. In the Midlands, and largely elsewhere, pre-cultivation
was by spade, with the seed dibbed in and the crop hand-forked and
clamped; Marshall said he had no reason to doubt claims of fifteen tons
to the acre in Leicestershire. In Lancashire, which had a long start over
much of the rest of England in potato cultivation, practice had reached a
high level. Particular attention was paid to the first early crops, and the
first of these were often put on the market in April; the earliest recorded
date in the second half of the century was April 3rd in 1789, for tubers
raised in heated glasshouses. On the smallholdings layering was used to
increase yields; uncut tubers were set and the several stems produced
were pinned down and covered with earth to encourage the striking of
new roots. On a field scale the seed was widely spaced in drills upon
dung: the crop was kept clean by ploughing between the rows, and was
often lifted by two ploughings, the first turning a furrow away from the
roots and the second,with the mouldboard removed, threw up the tubers.
Chitting in the house was also coming into use in Lancashire, with
the cut setts laid two deep, protected from frost by a thin layer of
sawdust, uncovered in the spring, and encouraged to make strong shoots
by the careful regulation of temperatures in the chitting house. John
Holt, in 1795, gave the average Lancashire yield at seven and a half
tons, but a crop of seventeen and a half tons had been recorded on Lord
Derby's estate at Knowsley 'on indifferent land'.
For the old cereal crops drilling, as has already been indicated, was
rarely encountered. Norfolk men late in the eighteenth century evolved a
'drill roller', a cylinder ringed at ten-inch intervals to make shallow
furrows into which much of the broadcast seed fell, but even on these
wide arable acres dibbling was followed. Of the Midlands Marshall
recorded that 'of late years drilling has been tried by a few individuals';
and his comment that beetles were widely used for reducing the clods
after the sowing of barley is a mirror of the advance that had been made
in the sixty years since the days of Tull. In Devonshire 'a modern drill
made its appearance a few years ago but it has since been laid aside'. In
spite of this, yields were not always far below those of to-day; in
Hertfordshire Young in 1804 found they ranged from twenty-five
hundredweight downwards for wheat, barley averaged sixteen
hundredweight for the whole county with an exceptional return of ten
quarters at Stanstead, and oats cropped at the same figure.
Around the Home Counties threshing methods were beginning to
diverge from the traditional ways of the remoter counties. Near London
a four-horse threshing mill built by the firm of Pitt at Hertford was
turning out its ninety bushels a day with a staff of eleven to work it; and
an ingenious machine produced by Burn and M'Donald in London not
only threshed corn but ground it, cut chaff and dressed grain; it is
tantalizing to have been left no full description of this early mechanical
wonder. At the opposite extreme, the common practice with wheat
throughout the West of England was first either to flail the ears lightly or
to knock out the grain against a cask; the sheaves were then suspended
and the ears combed out, and not only was this method followed when
unbroken straw was needed for thatching but also for litter. Marshall
waxed sarcastic at the West Country winnowing which followed:
1

Farmers of every class carry their corn . . . on horseback to the summit
of some airy hill, where it is winnowed in the wind by women.' He
compared it for barbarity with the Scottish habit of loading dung upon
the backs of wives and daughters.
Horses were used almost exclusively in Devon and Cornwall for
purposes of transport; in Devon twenty years before Marshall went there
in 1796 'there was not a pair of wheels in the county' upon any farm, and
the pack-horse still carried home much of the harvest packed between
willow poles inserted upright in the wooden saddle, the bulk of the
manure was carted in horse panniers, and the rest travelled in sledges or
'gurry buts'. This most primitive form of transport contrasted with the
formidable wagons in use elsewhere; the Leicestershire one had a body
fifteen feet long, weighed a ton, and needed an acre of ground on which
to turn. The East Anglian wagon was also unwieldy, but here ladders
were added to the two-wheeled tumbrels, a two-wheeled carriage was
fixed in front to keep the body level, and the result was termed a
hermaphrodite.
The comparative merits of plough oxen and horses had been hotly
debated since the days of Walter of Henley, and at the end of the
eighteenth century the reports showed that they were still potent sources
of controversy. Young himself had no doubt about the matter, and
repeated again and again the old arguments that the ox was the steadier
beast, more easily fed and convertible to meat at the end of its working
life; and although usage varied from district to district, probably most
men agreed with him. Marshall most emphatically did, and even went so
far as to propose a heavy tax upon the farm horse as a deterrent to its
use. 'They make', he said, 'no return whatever to the magazine of human
food', and their extinction would throw into the market an abundant
increase of animal food supplies. Some parts of the West Country
pleased Marshall immensely in this respect, and his description of the
oxen ploughing is delightful: they stepped out at a pace 'which a Kentish
clown would think a hardship to follow, with his high fed horse team';
and their progress was encouraged by something 'resembling with great
exactness the chantings or recitative of the Cathedral service. The plow
boy chants the counter tenor with unabated ardour through the day; the
plow man throwing in at intervals his hoarser notes. . . . I have never
seen so much cheerfulness attend the operation of ploughing anywhere.'
Marshall, however, was critical of the manner in which the oxen were
shod for work upon the rocky Devon soils. A beast was cast and its legs
bound together and hoisted upright on a pole; early accustoming to the
handling of their hooves, he said, would make all this bother
unnecessary.







East Anglian practice was entirely different in this as in most other
directions. Norfolk could show no instance of more than two horses
being put to one plough, even though they seldom exceeded fifteen
hands; but even here the surveyor, Nathaniel Kent, urged that at least
one ox team should be kept on every farm. There is little doubt that the
weight of the plough in local use, related in turn to the nature of the soil,
determined the type of draught animal. Norfolk had rejoiced in the light
East Anglian plough for some centuries and had probably developed the
Suffolk Punch as traction power for it; the West Country plough was at
the other extreme of weight and unwieldiness, as was also the traditional
Hertfordshire implement, and with these the ox had a very definite
advantage. The gradual lightening of implements and vehicles rang the
death knoll of the ox as a working beast in Britain, although the last
teams survived the First World War; just as petrol and other tractor fuels
are putting the horse out of court to-day.








When one speaks of new farming, what is usually meant is the new
use of old material, and even here some of our modern techniques are
surprisingly old. A case in point is controlled grazing, where herbage is
economically used by restricting the access of stock to it to such period
of time as gives them adequate feed and no more. In 1779, 170 years
ago, an Aberdeenshire farmer named James Anderson wrote of the
nutritional value of the young sward, and said: 'To obtain this constant
supply of fresh grass, let us suppose that a farmer who has any extent of
pasture ground should have it divided into fifteen or twenty divisions . . .
and that instead of allowing his beasts to roam indiscriminately through
the whole at once he collects the whole number of beasts . . . into one
flock and turns them all at once into one of these divisions. . . . And if
there were just so many parks as there required days to make the grass of
these fields advance to a proper length after being eat bare down, the
first field would be ready to receive them by the time they had gone over
all the others, so that they might be thus carried round in a constant
rotation.' Anderson then suggested that hungry stores should follow
round and clean up the uneaten grass. Another of the most ingenious of
the early methods of controlling grazing was that evolved by Adams of
Lindridge in Worcestershire who, at the end of the eighteenth century,
was using wheeled but floorless cattle and sheep houses running upon
portable cast-iron railway tracks; these huts were moved progressively
over both roots and greens, and were sold by the inventor as 'Adams'
Patent Portable Beast Houses and Sheep Cotes'. The best of the
twentieth-century milk producers have only recently rediscovered
Anderson's old technique, and authority is even now beginning to press
it upon a somewhat uninterested audience.
Contemporary improvers, too, are apt to pride themselves upon the
ley system as a twentieth-century contribution to agricultural
productivity; and, although they encounter a little debunking from over
the border, they forget that it was no new thing 300 years ago. When the
board's reports were drawn up the surveyors found much that was
admirable to record in the management of temporary grass, although
admittedly their standards fell short of those of the modern grassland
expert. In the great grazing counties of the West some two-thirds of the
arable was under six- or seven-year leys of red clover and ryegrass with
some wild white and trefoil, under-sown in the oats, mown the first year
and then grazed; and Midland men followed similar practices.
The observations upon livestock which the board's surveyors had to
make may be more conveniently reviewed in a later chapter, but some of
the points fall outside the sphere of the development of the pedigree
animal. The practice of letting dairies to milkmen, immortalized in
Hardy's Tess, was already firmly established in Dorset; usually a man
with some capital stocked a number of farms with dairy herds of up to
forty head, maintained the number of stock, supplied pasture and fodder,
and then let the milking to a sub-tenant. Milk further west was still
coming from the remnants of the great mediaeval flocks of goats, and
Marshall was told of some in Cornwall that exceeded a hundred head.
Marshall was also a believer in the breeding of rabbits in warrens upon
the poorer moorlands, and suggested their establishment on Dartmoor
and Exmoor. His advice has been involuntarily followed, for in many
places in these lands the rabbit is now often the most paying crop upon
the farm.

9. The New Stock

n previous chapters some indication has been given in passing of the
probable origins and development of British breeds of livestock. The
time has now come when a survey of the whole field may be
attempted, for the closing years of the eighteenth century and the
opening decades of the nineteenth saw the final emergence of many of
the great breeds of the present day from the diverse mass of material
which then lay to the hands of the. first scientific breeders, of Bakewell
and the Collings, of Ellman and of the great community of lesser-known
men which contributed its quota to the whole.
The subjectand this warning must be read into almost every
statement hereafteris beset with historical uncertainties, is hedged
about with doubts even in more recent years, and is made the more
obscure by the partisanship of some modern breed historians who seek
to trace the pure descent of their fancy from the ancient foundation stock
of Britain.
It has been suggested in earlier pages that among the earliest cattle
which arrived in these islands were the long-horned urus (bos
primigenius) of Neolithic times and the 'Celtic' shorthorn (bos
longifrons) of the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, in both of which the
black colour may have predominated. The reds which figure largely in
the cattle populations of the eastern and southern seaboards may descend
from the blood of the stock of the Anglo-Saxon settler, modified in
places by the influence of a polled variety contributed by Scandinavian
immigrants. It has been said that until the sixteenth or seventeenth
centuries it is doubtful whether any more imported blood went into the
melting pot from which the regional types described by eighteenth-
century writers emerged. This latter introduction is supposed to be that
of a Dutch variety imported during the close contactboth agricultural
and commercialwhich existed between Britain and the Low Countries;
this breed, which probably had a common ancestor with the British
Friesian of to-day, had a profound influence upon both the type and the
performance of the older British stock and is a pre-eminent example of
the national ability to put its borrowings to good use. It is, however,
possible that Dutch blood began to enter British stock far earlier than is
usually supposed, perhaps from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and
through monastic channels, for modifications in colour and performance
which are ascribed to it can be traced back far enough to give rise to
some presumption of their mediaeval origin. In addition it has been
suggested that the white cattle of England, the wild Chillinghams and
the domesticated British Whites, descend from a white stock imported
by the Romans.
The late eighteenth century had a classification of cattle breeds
which, albeit abitrary and neglectful of many distinctive characteristics,
forms as good a groundwork as any on which to build up the story of
later improvements. This classification sought to compress the whole
cattle population of Britain within the compass of seven broad headings:
the Longhorns, the Shorthorns, the Middlehorns, the polled breeds, the
Channel Island breeds, the Scottish breeds, and the 'wild' stock. Each
may first be considered separately, with a glance at the observations
upon it of contemporary agricultural writers.
I
The Longhorn, of high antiquity as a distinct breed, was evolved so
anciently that ascriptions of its origin to interbreeding between the
Neolithic longhorn and the Celtic shorthorn, as well as to imports from
Ireland, can be no more than guesswork; certainly of all British stock it
is among the most likely to go back to the old Adam of native beast.
Less nebulous, perhaps, is the theory which derives the predominantly
characteristic Longhorn finchinga white streak along the top of the
back similar to that in the now almost extinct Gloucestershiresfrom
the inevitable infusion of Dutch blood. At one time the breed was known
as the Lancashire Longhorn from its ancient home, but Midland breeders
had for so long been draining away the best Lancashire stock that it
became better known as the Midland Longhorn; Bakewell was by no
means the first man to take it into Leicestershire and work upon it. But
even the best of each region was slow in maturing into a beef beast that
gave a poorish meat, and milk yields were not high although of good
quality.
These localized varieties of the Longhorn were found in many
counties; of them, the Derbyshires were among the most important as
improved dairy stock, although of 'a foul shape and hairy bagged'. The
neighbouring Staffordshires strove to strike a medium but fell between
the two stools of meat and milk: as Culley observed, 'wherever we
attempt both we are sure to get neither in any perfection'. In all
Longhorn types the excessive length and awkward placement of the
horns were troublesome and thoughts were turning towards de-horning.
Marshall suggested that 'Perhaps applying a cautery to the buds of the
horns on their first breaking might prevent their further progress'.
The Shorthorn, alias the Teeswater, Lincoln, Holderness or
Tweedside, arose from the impact of imported Dutch stock upon a
heterogeneous native breed into which the Highland, Longhorn,
Hereford, and Alderney may have all entered, and the result was known
by its regional name. In colour red and white, it fed to a great weight
witness the Lincolnshire ox standing nineteen hands high and measuring
four yards from nostrils to rumpgave milk beyond any other breed,
but in inferior strains was tainted by lyery, or blackness of the flesh,
particularly in Lincolnshire. Records of the Dutch strain in this breed
come from the middle of the seventeenth century, and further new
Friesian blood continued to flow into the Shorthorn until the end of the
eighteenth century. Culley in 1786 reports the import of bulls from
Holland by Michael Dobinson for use upon Teeswaters, and implies that
their progeny coming out of Teeside were generally raising the
Shorthorn standard. Culley also attempted an assay of the comparative
merits of the Longhorn and Shorthorn; he gave the former the better in
quality of meat, but held that the Shorthorn excelled in quantity of meat,
rate of maturing, and milk yield. These odds against the Longhorn
proved too great even for Bakewell's stockmanship and the breed has
faded successively into insignificance and near-extinction.
As with most of the other breeds there was much mingling of blood,
such as that between the Longhorn and the Shorthorn which produced
the Northern Half-Longhorn which united Shorthorn size and milk yield
with the Longhorn butter-fat. The great offshoot of the original
Shorthorn in its semi-improved state, however, was the Lincoln Red
which by the end of the eighteenth century was already parting from the
parent stock. The Lincoln has largely descended from the all-reds
brought out of Durham by Thomas Turnell of Reasby.
Pre-eminent among Middlehorns in the eighteenth-century mind
was the red Devon, fine boned, earlier maturing than many other beef
breeds, and with the reputation of being the finest draught ox in the
country. Its good name did not extend to its milking powers, however,
for these were negligible except in the South Devon variety into which
dairying virtues had been introduced by a Channel Island cross. Even
within the county regional differences were noticeable, and Marshall
reports that on the Cornish borders type tended to become coarser. A
polled strain had also arisen in the Barnstaple area, known as the Devon
Natt, but whether this was the result of the introduction of a polled stock
from outside or from internal sport is now quite uncertain. There were
also to be found in Somerset sheeted strains which resembled 'the red
cow of North Devonshire with a white sheet thrown over her barrel; her
neck, head and shoulders, and hind parts being uncovered'. This early
rise of the Devon into something approaching the modern type was due
to the work, traceable back to 1703, of the Quartley family at Molland,
and of the great Coke himself, an enthusiast for the Red Ruby.
The Devon was only the archetype of a widespread red order which
also embraced the Herefords, the Sussex, the Gloucester Reds, and
others. The Hereford, already by the late eighteenth century differing
markedly from the parent stock, was said to have received its greater
size from crossing with the neighbouring Welsh heavyweights and its
white face either from the introduction into the breed of the white-faced
ancestors of the modern Groningens of Holland, or from the smoky-
faced red Montgomeries. Although generally acclaimed 'for some
purposes' (quick maturity and good manners in the yoke) 'the most
valuable breed of cattle in the world', the Hereford was accused of
having developed a marked coarseness of bone. Of their draught powers
Lawrence wrote at the beginning of the nineteenth century: 'They are
docile and tractable, and if trained with temper and kindness will drive
to an inch with reins.' He added: 'As milkers they have nothing particular
to boast.'
Hereford influence seems to have spread far abroad, and in addition
to giving rise to the better milking Shropshire Wide-horns they had also
contributed considerably to the blood of some of the Welsh county
breeds, thereby modifying the ancient black stock of Wales into such
varieties as the Glamorgan Reds. Other of the Welsh breeds had been
evolved by interbreeding with the ancient Black and the Longhorn, the
latter probably giving the finching to the otherwise coal-black
Castlemartins of Pembroke, a dairying variation upon their beef cousins
of Anglesey. Some other crossperhaps a Dutch onegave rise to a
white-belted Welsh type.
Across the county border from Hereford again, there had once been
found the Gloucestershire Reds in large numbers, but during the
eighteenth century this breed went into oblivion through the need for a
better dairying animal in an area where cheese-making was a major
industry. The Sussex, on the contrary, could boast some virtues as
milkers in addition to good beef prowess and great powerbut a quick
temperin draught use. What was probably only a regional variation
was the Kentish Homebred, basically a Sussex improved in milk yield
by Alderney, Longhorn, and other dairy breeds.
The third of the major divisions, the polled breeds, has long been
the centre of controversy. The major hornless variety of the eighteenth
century was the Galloway of south-west Scotland, and to its progress
through East Anglia in its tens of thousands on its way to the London
meat market has been ascribed the rise of the later Red Polls of Norfolk
and Suffolk. But the wide dispersion of polled breeds over England
there were the Devon Natts and the Somerset Polls, the polled Yorkshire
Shorthorns and the Scottish types of Sutherland, Skye, and Aberdeen
gives rise to more than a suspicion that the dominant polled strain is of
far older date than the late Galloway incursions into southern England.
The probability that pre-Norman Scandinavian hornless immigrants
were responsible seems high. Although some of the areas in which
polled breeds were once found are remote from the focal points of
Scandinavian invasion, Danes and Vikings ranged widely round British
shores and in any case the Scandinavian poll had many centuries longer
in which to impress its character on local breeds than had the
comparatively new Galloway arrivals. This is not to deny, of course, that
the Galloway did influence the character of the East Anglian breed,
particularly by adding propensities for beef which later contributed to its
success as a dual-purpose animal, but to suggest that the Galloway was
only one of at least two major factors in its loss of horns. Some of the
Scottish polls were themselves of high antiquity and there is some
evidence of their existence before A.D. 1000.
Throughout the eighteenth century, and earlier, the Galloway was
among the leading British beef breeds, laying well-marbled flesh upon
the most valuable joints. It was bred upon the hills of its native land and
reared to four or five years old on the coastal lowlands before being
driven on foot to Norfolk and Suffolk for fattening upon turnips and
consignment to Smith-field in late winter and spring; the manure it made
was, with the folded arable flock, the basis of East Anglia's arable
preeminence. As with all breeds there was some crossing, and a bastard
sort resulted from mating to Longhorn bulls in Westmorland and
Cumberland, but crossing even with Bakewell's improved Longhorns
was frowned upon by the leading Galloway men who thought the breed
incapable of improvement. There had also been for some centuries a
white-faced 'brockit' Galloway, deriving ultimately from a Dutch cross,
and, of course, the Belted Galloway, the origin of whose distinctive
marking is obscure but often attributed also to the Dutch blood which
may have given the other belted varieties their colours. An infusion of
white Park Cattle blood seems also possible, but is rarely put forward as
an explanation. The old horned Galloway probably even outnumbered
the polled before the eighteenth century, and it may represent the
survival of the original breed which evolved from a collateral of the
Highlanders. Into the same polled Scottish category comes the great beef
breed of Aberdeen-Angus, derived perhaps from polled Highland strains
at an early date; its best types were centred around Angus and Speyside.
The other major polled variety was the Suffolk Duns, ancestors of
the Red Polls but in the eighteenth century a dairy animal which Culley
said produced 'the best butter and the worst cheese in the kingdom'. With
a yield of nearly six gallons a day in early lactation, the Suffolk almost
equalled the best Shorthorns of the period. As has been said, the Dun-
become-Red-Poll probably acquired its virtues in beef from the
Galloway, and its change of colour from dun to red followed crossing
with the red Norfolk Homebreds, members of the Devon family. To
John Reeve, a Holkham tenant, probably belongs the credit of fixing the
type of the modern Red Poll.
The ranks of the Galloways as they wound their way southwards
were swollen by large numbers of Kyloes, the Highlanders of to-day and
perhaps modified only by internal selection from the prehistoric
longhorns. Blacks predominated, with some brindles and duns, and all
were hardy and thrifty upon the mountains of the north, but there seems
to have been some alteration in breed character by late eighteenth-
century crossing with the southern Longhorn.
Lawrence, writing in 1805, made some penetrating remarks upon
the forerunners of the great modern breed of Ayrshires. 'In Renfrew and
Ayrshire', he wrote, 'are said to be the best milch cows considering their
size which are to be found in Britain; and that both in point of quantity
and quality of milk, producing from three and a half to seven gallons a
day. They are usually called Dunlops and have the character of being the
best possible "poor man's cows" from their ability to shift on very scanty
keep. In appearance they are small and ill-looking . . . their horns are
short and small, standing remarkably irregular and awkward; colour
generally pied or of a sandy red. They appear unthrifty and thin . . . even
in the best pasture, and the few which are bred up to oxen make but a
poor figure in grazing. I apprehend this milky race to be the result of
crossing the [Highland] cows of the country with Alderney bulls'.
Lawrence was very probably wrong here for southern Scotland had early
imported Holsteins in large numbers and a black and white Ayrshire
very similar to a Friesian often crops up.
The solitary representatives of the Channel Island breeds in Britain
were misnamed the Alderneys'Light red, yellow, dun and fawn
coloured; short, wild-horned, deer-necked, with a general resemblance to
that animal. They are among the best milkers in the world, as to quality.'
Some valued them both for their milk and for their beef 'of the first class
and of considerable weight'. The Alderneys, however, were held in
contempt by the generality of farmers who saw in them only exotics
supporting with their rich milk the luxury of the noble tea-table, and 'too
delicate to bear the cold of this island'. Marshall reported that they were
common around Exeter, where crossing with Devons was frequent. The
result he dismissed as a mongrel sort, but Culley said he had seen
Alderney-Shorthorn crosses which were 'very useful cattle'.
Last of all came the untameable Chillingham Park cattle, then of
little agricultural significance but honoured for their ancestry. Even then
they were confined to the parks of the gentry, where only a glimpse of
their black-pointed white bodies could be caught before they fled the
popular gaze. Slaughter was the occasion of a local hunt, with twenty or
thirty shots poured into one poor body before it was dispatched; and
castration could only be performed when a bull calf could be found
unattended in its form and quickly muzzled against the summoning of its
dam. This great old breed is happily returning to favour through the solid
merits of its polled and domestic descendants, now known as British
Whites but until recently called Park Cattle in honour of their origin.
Such then was the diverse material which was the heritage of the
British live-stock improver, the dough to which Bakewell and the others
were to add the yeast. It must be emphasized that the science of breeding
had been neither unknown nor neglected before Bakewell's day; the
development of the Devon, the high yields of the Shorthorn and the
Ayrshire, prove that men of the calibre of Dobinson and the Quartleys
had already done much unrecorded work before the more publicized
men came on the scene. Many generations of selective breeding, too,
must have gone into the beef perfection of the Galloway and the high
yields of the Suffolk Dun. But much of this previous work foundered
upon two rocks. Apart from a select few in the vanguard of agrarian
progress, the mass of farmers had neither the winter keep to maintain
adequate nuclei of breeding stock before the use of the new fodders such
as turnips and swedes became common, nor the foresight to save their
best beast for the perpetuation of good qualities. On this latter point
Marshall wrote forcefully: 'The business of breeding cattle is conducted
on the worst of bad principles.' Early fatteners were slaughtered, and 'it
follows that the individuals which reach the stage of maturity and from
which new generations are to be raised are, as to fatting quality, the mere
refuse of the breed. . . . Those which are of a nature to fat at two years
old are murdered! and those which will not are kept to breed from.'
Although Robert Bakewell of Dishley in Leicestershire has been
acclaimed as the first of the great live-stock breeders it is unknown how
far his practices were original; he certainly learnt much on his
Continental tours. This is not to decry his work which, a comparative
failure with cattle and a qualified success with sheep, centred public
attention upon the potentialities inherent in British stock, potentialities
realized by men before Bakewell but whose achievements failed to win
the national fame which was the 'Wonder of Dishley's' lot. Bake-well
himself was 'tall, broad-shouldered, stout, of brown-red complexion,
clad in a loose brown coat and scarlet waistcoat, leather breeches and top
boots', a progressive farmer who had two hundred acres of his
Leicestershire grass under irrigation, above all secretive of his methods
of stock improvement, not infrequently accused of inflating the value of
his animals by questionable means, and so impartially and lavishly
hospitable to prince or yeoman who made the pilgrimage to Dishley that
he died a poor man, perhaps a bankrupt.
For his work upon cattle, Bakewell chose the dual-purpose
Longhorns, of slowly maturing beef and a fair yield of good quality
milk, and applied to them what contemporaries called in-and-in breeding
methodswhich bred in fatter beef but bred out the milk. It was,
however, his selection of good stock from within a breed and his in-
breeding to concentrate the required qualities which were something of a
novelty in an age which usually went outside a breed for the blood with
which to improve it; although there is something more than a suspicion
that Bakewell did not find all the qualities of his new Longhorn from
within the ranks of the old. Of the details of his work so much has been
written that it may suffice to say that from two heifers from Webster of
Canley and a Westmorland bull he bred beef beast with masses of fat
upon the hindquarters and with propensities for early maturity, and a
string of bulls, including the celebrated Twopenny, which was let at high
fees. Bakewell's stock laid the foundation of the famous herd of Fowler
of Rollright, but it was destined to fail in the end for within a few
decades the whole race of Longhorns became disregarded and almost
extinct. The new Longhorn probably bathed in the reflected glory of the
new Leicester sheep, but deserved little of it.
Bakewell's work, however, was not really the failure it may have
seemed, for his methods of close in-breeding were applied to the great
conglomerate race of Shorthorns by a disciple, Charles Colling, and by
his brother Robert Colling, of Ketton and Brampton near Darlington.
Quite casually Charles Colling acquired the immortal Hubback bull in
1784, bought females, bred in-and-in, introduced the blood of a red
Galloway strain, by subtler means than Bakewell won even greater
publicity, and received the first hundred guineas ever given for a
Shorthorn cow, a price which set 'every newspaper trumpeting the
marvellous wonder, and every gentleman who wished to begin
improving his herd went to the Collings for a bull, till it came to be
considered a great favour to get one from them'.
The triumph of Charles Colling's career was the breeding of the bull
Comet in 1804. Its pedigree illustrates both his methods and those of his
master Bakewell's, for it was the produce of daughter and sire, its dam
the produce of dam and son, and its sire the offspring of animals nearly
brother and sister. At Charles Colling's retirement sale Comet made a
thousand guineas and the forty-seven head averaged 151 8s. 5d. a head.
News which leaked out shortly after of the red Galloway cross and of a
hitherto unsuspected introduction of Highland blood into the Ketton
stock came as a bombshell. On Charles's retirement the limelight fell on
Robert Colling at Brampton, where in-breeding was followed to even
greater lengths, and whose dispersal sale in 1818 returned an average of
128 14s. 9d.
Although both Charles and Robert Colling were largely unlettered
men, and Charles a slovenly farmer, they deserved well of posterity by
their preservation of the Shorthorn breed and by the groundwork which
they put into making it one of the great breeds of the world. The
Shorthorn of to-day is largely their monument. In a way the success of
their work was the cause of the failure of Bakewell's upon cattle, for the
new Shorthorn retained its milk and added a more economic beef, while
the Dishley Longhorn now only had meat on the credit side.
Bakewell, the Collings, Fowler of Rollright, and others laid the
foundation of a new pedigree stock industry. The merits of pedigree
became commonly appreciatedone of the earliest results of the
Collings' work was the inauguration of Coates's Herd Book for the
Shorthornand pedigree stock-breeding became the fashionable pursuit
of the prosperous country gentleman, who has probably contributed even
more than the yeoman to the supreme excellence of British cattle.
The great division of the improved Shorthorn breed into milk and
beef types dates from the early nineteenth century, and much of it took
place over the Border. The Booths of Killerby and Warlaby made the
beef variety into a better butcher's beast than ever, and Shorthorn history
is full of such famous Scottish names as Cruikshank of Sittyton, Barclay
of Urry, Hay of Shethin, and the rest. Side by side went the
improvement of the dairy strain in the hands of Bates of Kirklevington
founder of the Duchess, Wild Eyes, Foggathorpe, and other families, all
owing much to the great old Hubbackright through to such moderns as
George Taylor and Rothschild, each of whom added his quota to the
work which in time was to produce the first 20,000-gallon milch cow.
The later history of the Shorthorn is the history of the rest of the
British breeds. In every one men less famous than the Collings, Bates,
and Booths but deserving equally well of the modern stock-keeper, took
the ancient foundation stock, magnified its good points, largely
eliminated its bad ones, and in the process built up the great pride of
farming Britain to-day, her pedigree stock.
Hugh Watson and William M'Combie of Tillyfour wrought wonders
with the Aberdeen-Angus and laid the basis of its international repute as
a beef beast; in 1945 no fewer than 62,000 pure-bred Aberdeen calves
were registered in the U.S.A. herd book, all descendants of the old stock
of Angus and Speyside. The Devons, by careful selection of dual-
purpose beast, have added a useful milk strain to the old beef types, as
have the Lincoln Reds. Herefords, in the hands of Tomkins and of
Duckham, of Griffiths and other moderns, have become the best ranch
cattle in the world through their hardihood, prepotency, and high
economy in fodder; they swarm in their thousands over the plains of
South America and South Africa. Sussex are valued for their beef, and
only a generation has passed since the last of their plough teams ceased
to be used. The Welsh Blacks are producing better beef and more milk at
great heights on their native hills. The Highlander has won a new lease
of life through its crossing with the Shorthorn to give a quicker maturing
but still hardy beef beast, and the Galloway, with a uniformly high
performance at Smithfield, is also being used with a Shorthorn cross to
produce the quicker feeding Blue Grey.
The modern Red Poll, a good beef beast, overlaps into the dairying
section of English live stock with its average yield of between eight and
nine hundred gallons of milk. The unsightly bags which it inherited from
the Suffolk Dun have been largely bred out, and the breed as a whole
goes some way to disprove Culley's dictum that one cannot have both
good beef and plenty of milk in one animal. Among the great native
breeds, the Ayrshire stands supreme for milk yield, and many herds of
this old Fifeshire 'smallholder's cow' are giving at least a thousand-
gallon average at four per cent butter fat, although the world's record in
this last quality is held by a South Devon, of the breed which founded
the Devon cream industry, which gave four pounds ten and a half ounces
of butter in one day at a London Dairy Show.
Britain's ancient beef breeds have remained unchallenged, but
among milk producers there has been an outstanding pacemaker, again
from the modern descendants of the Dutch breeds that impressed so
much of their character upon our stock in the eighteenth and earlier
centuriesthe Friesian, and in recent years its close cousin the Canadian
Holstein. Imported in increasing numbers since the prohibition upon
stock imports which followed the rinderpest scourge of the seventies
was lifted in 1892, the black and white British Friesian has become the
most familiar of sights upon the pastures of the dairying districts, and
although the butter-fat content of its milk is only now being improved
from a low level there have been several hundreds of Friesians in this
country which have given more than fifty tons of milk in their lifetimes.
The value of the British Friesian steer as a coarse-boned but economical
beef beast is also coming to be appreciated.
Among other foreigners, the Guernseythe Alderney of Marshall
and Culleyis now almost a native breed, and with its cousin the Jersey
has maintained its fame for giving high-quality milk in large quantities
and lost the ill repute which it once heldprobably unjustlyfor
unhardiness. Two Irishmen have come over as well, the small Dexter
and the Kerry, good milkers on small rations.

SHEEP
To say that the English sheep is historically the most important
animal, apart from man, that ever walked upon English soil may be
platitudinous, but it is no over-statement. It has laid up fertility in the
chalk hills, its wool was for centuries the very heart of the English
export trade, and upon it the whole financial structure of late mediaeval
civilization was built. Traces of its grand supremacy remain on every
handin the magnificent wool churches of the Cotswolds and East
Anglia, in the more intimately beautiful homes of the old wool
merchants that grace the market towns, in the schools and universities
founded with the wealth won from its fleece, even in our familiar
surnames of Weaver and Webber, Fuller, Walker, and Dyer. The glory
of the sheep has become dimmed by the rising suns of milk and beef,
and its eclipse may be made permanent by new methods of soil
management, but there will always be a place on the hills which only it
can fillthose hills from which it came and to which it has now so
largely returned.
The history of the modern English sheep is almost entirely the tale
of the modification of the ancient breeds by the blood of Bakewell's
New Leicester Longwool and Ellman's new Southdown Closewool.
These ancient breeds have a quite indeterminate descent from the
prehistoric European stock of argali, urial, and mouflon, and apart from
a fewbut a most illustrious fewexceptions their evolution down to
the eighteenth century is completely obscure. Of these exceptions
something has already been said: the Ryelands that gave that Lemster
Ore that with the Merino fleece dominated the mediaeval fine-wool
market, and the Lincolns, Romneys, Leicesters, and Cotswolds that
produced the most valuable long-wool exports. As Dr. Allan Fraser has
recently written: 'How did men who knew nothing of genetical science,
of nutritional science, of veterinary science, with pastures unimproved,
roots non-existent, and cake undreamt of, produce breeds that have
stamped an English seal on the faces of sheep of three continents . . .?
Unsolved though [these questions] are, and unsolved though they may
ever be, yet surely they should make humble those who in their arrogant
modernity would seek to scorn the splendid triumphs of their fathers'
breeding.' The answer is surely that a knowledgeable eye and an
experienced hand are here a sufficient 'science' in themselves.
A classification of the old sheep breeds into long and short wools
was made in the late eighteenth century by Culley, the Northumberland
farmer and himself a breeder who was one of the most accurate and
acute of agricultural journalists of his day. This classification, modified
a few years later by John Lawrence, divided the then existing types thus:
Longwool, the Teeswater, Lincoln, Leicester, Cotswold, Romney Marsh,
Dartmoor or Bampton, Exmoor, Heath, and Berkshire; Shortwool, the
Ryeland, Morfe, Dorset, Wiltshire, Southdown, Norfolk, Herdwick,
Cheviot, Dunfaced, and Shetlandtogether with a Spanish Merino
strain, a few breeds already almost extinct, and one or two others
omitted but almost certainly in existence.
Most of the longwools suffered from great coarseness of bone and
slowly maturing flesh of poor quality, both the result of centuries of
concentration upon the sheep first as a wool producer, secondly as a
purveyor of fertility, thirdly as a milch animal, and only fourthly for its
mutton. The rapidly expanding industrial population had to be given its
meat, however, and the future lay with the breeds that could give it, in
quantity, in quality or in both.
Lincolns, before the introduction of Dishley blood, were gaunt,
weak-carcassed stock of great size, a sweet mutton sheep but often not
ready for the butcher before the fourth year. Upon Teeswaters, originally
from Lincoln stock, some little attention to meat propensities had been
paid, but they were already well on their way to extinction and the future
was in the hands of the other Lincoln cousin, the Leicester. As the pick
of the Longhorn cattle had migrated into the Midlands so the best
Lincoln sheep went to breeders upon the great Leicestershire pastures
where they had acquired the new county name but had lost few of their
Lincoln characteristics.
Nourished by the marsh pastures and selected to thrive in their
peculiar environment, the Romneys produced vast quantities of wool:
the rams clipped up to twelve pounds apiece, and it was common to take
twenty pounds of wool off each marsh acre in the year. The West
Country boasted of several closely related longwoolsthe Bamptons or
Devonshire Natts, producing good wool and mutton more quickly than
the longwools of the east and Midlands; the Exmoors, horned and more
properly middlewools, and thought to originate from a Devon cross upon
the old Mendip stock; and other local longwools that were already dying
out. The Berkshires might also be classed as middlewools, 'straight made
like horses', Roman-nosed, spotted-faced and a near relative of the yet
obscure Oxford.
Culley's Heaths were the modern Scottish Blackfaces, 'with a fierce
wild-looking eye . . . and of amazing agility', rarely fattened before the
age of five, and populating much of the hill land between North
Yorkshire and Caithness; they seem originally to have been a Border
breed, but, moving northwards, they had ousted from the highlands the
Dunfaces, of black, brown, dun or red-streaked fleeces, and traditionally
descended from the Merinos landed from the wrecks of the Spanish
galleons of the Armada.
Among the shortwools the Ryeland was anciently supreme. It bore
the finest fleece of any British sheep, challenging Merino wool in
quality, but the days of its supremacy were numbered and before the end
of the eighteenth century the inevitable Dishley cross had brought about
a great deterioration in fleece. Pride of shortwool place, for wool, passed
from the Ryeland to the neighbouring Shropshire or Morfe, a West
Midland commonland breed with small horns and speckled or black
faces. Morfe Common, their centre, summered 15,800 of them on its
3,600 acres in 1799.
The Dorset horned stock struck Lawrence as 'one of the best breeds
in England, if not superior to all others', and Lawrence was a shrewd
observer who preferred his own to the fashionable opinion. From their
great virtuethat of taking the ram at any season of the year, with a
readiness to lamb twice in the twelvemonthsarose their value as
breeders of early lambs, the eighteenth-century 'house lambs' reared
ready for the Christmas market or even earlier.
Then, as now, the Wiltshire Horn was virtually woolless. It was
alternatively known as the Horned Crock and by the end of the
eighteenth century was in decline from its once wide occupation of the
Home Counties; here it was thought to have left descendants in the
already defunct Hertfordshire, a somewhat smaller breed carrying more
wool. The Wiltshire itself was believed to have arisen from a longwool-
Dorset cross, and to have acquired its peculiar horn formation from a
remote Tartarian ancestry.
The Southdowns had been in immemorial but obscure possession of
the Sussex Downs before the patronage of the Bedfords and of the great
Coke himself, who brought them into the limelight that was to be made
the brighter by John Ellman of Glynde. Even before Ellman, however, a
good Southdown quarter weighed its forty pounds. The older breeders
believed that their short forequarters made them closer grazers than
other sheep, but pre-Ellman improvement was already raising the
forefront. To-day the opinion is commonly expressed that to fold sheep
is a wasteful process; the animal is a notoriously extravagant converter
of fodder into meat, and the eighteenth century was already saying that
'the folding system is to purchase crown pieces at six shillings each'. The
Norfolks, the earlier name of the unimproved Suffolks, were the breed
most widely used for folding upon roots. They added to their black
faces, which remain, horns a yard in length and a foot in circumference
at the base, which they have now lost. They had a name for wildness and
for slow fattening, and their earlier crosses with the Southdown won
poor repute for length and leanness of carcass. For length of breeding
life the small hardy Herdwick, perhaps a Scandinavian introduction of
the ninth century, was hard to surpass; ewes commonly lambed right up
to the age of fifteen. The breed, however, was restricted to the small part
of the Cumberland hills which is still their chief home and where, in
spite of near starvation for twelve months in the year, annual losses were
small. Improvement by crossing was unwanted: as they said of the
localized breed over the Westmorland border 'the sheep are sik as God
set upon the land', and the close resemblance to a mountain goat
persisted until modern times. Lawrence wrote scathingly: 'It is averred
. . . that the sheep of these wild regions are subject to be bewitched; an
error of the press . . . the sheep owners only are bewitched.' The
Wensleydales over the county border were in better repute for both wool
and mutton.
The Cheviot had a good name for mutton but none at all for wool. It
had already invaded the extreme north, and by the turn of the century
there was at least one flock in Caithness, ancestors of the present North
Country Cheviot as distinct from the South Country or Border kind. In
the north they were in competition with the Blackfaces and with the
allegedly Merino-descended Dunfaces, and also with the Shetlanders
and with another 'Kindly' breed which could maintain a bare existence
upon seaweed if all else failed.
Upon the other hills, in Wales, were the small-horned white
ancestors of the present national breed, giving a first class sweet mutton,
and, from the ewes, rich milk for cheese-making for a full three months
after the weaning of their lambs. One other of these ancient breeds
deserves to be mentioned although it died out in the middle of the
eighteenth centurythe Northumberland Mugg, a flat-sided, arched-
backed curiosity carrying a short curled fleece that extended to its toes
and so far across its eyes as to impair its vision.
The incontrovertible fact that most breeds of to-day bear very little
resemblance to their forebears is due to the work of Bakewell on the one
hand and of Ellman on the other. It has been seen that Bakewell's
improvement of the Longhorn cattle bore little permanent fruit; with
sheep the animals that emerged from his mould were not above criticism
in themselves but their influence upon the longwool breeds was both
deep and persistent. Taking the old Leicester as his raw materialthey
were the Midland offshoots of Lincoln stockBakewell selected and
inbred until the New Leicester emerged from his hands. It is probable
that he may have added a touch of the Lincoln cousin to its make-up,
and it is possible, as his critics alleged, that more alien breeds went into
the melting-pot. His aim was implicit in his expressed principle 'that like
produces like, that small bones, thin pelts and the barrel shape are
soonest and most productive of fat at the least expense of food'.
Bakewell eminently succeeded in producing a readily fattening
sheep. Lawrence once dined upon a seventeen-pound leg of Dishley
mutton: 'The fat which dripped in cooking was measured and it
amounted to between two and three quarts; besides this, the dish was a
mere bag of loose, oily fat, huge deep flakes of which remained to
garnish that which we called, by courtesy, lean.' In the process the
Dishleys lost some of their prepotency, of their hardiness, of their wool,
and of their maternal qualities. When they were crossed upon other
unimproved breeds, however, they transmitted their qualities of early
maturity and what the Holkham toast called 'symmetry well covered'. It
was here that Bakewell's triumph lay. His financial rewards were also
great, for one ram alone, the famous Two Pounder, brought him 1,200
guineas in fees in the season of 1789, as well as much information on the
quality of its get. Bakewell's lettings were not the result of an altruistic
desire for the bettering of his neighbours' stock but an early and
ingenious form of progeny testing.
John Ellman of Glynde was neither the innovator nor the publicist
that Bakewell was, but his remaking of the Southdown has been a
fundamental of the whole sheep industry. Ellman, working from 1778 to
his death in 1832, saw in the Southdown potentialities for mutton. The
old breed was long-legged, light and speckle-faced, with the embryo of a
good leg of mutton; when Ellman and his successor Jonas Webb of
Babraham had finished with it the Southdown was largely the compact,
blocky, perfect mutton beast of to-day, still retaining an astonishly good
fleece. Lawrence reported that the polled Berkshire Natt had also been
brought into the Southdown blood by Ellman, but others held the new
Southdown to be entirely the old one improved by internal selection
alone. It matters little either way: there are few material virtues in long
descent, once type has been fixed to breed true; and good mutton is
better than ancient blood.
Be that as it may, the Southdown was later taken up by Coke, the
ducal houses of Richmond and Bedford, Waldegrave and other great
landowners; but it was the simple commoner Webb who, with that blend
of patience, of conscious and sub-conscious appreciation of form, and of
imagination that goes to make the genius of a great breeder, set the final
seal of perfection upon the Southdown both in its own virtues and in the
character it stamped upon its progeny out of other shortwool stock.
The modern Leicester has been improved back into something of its
old state, regaining both fleece and quality of carcass, but its greatness
lies in the past, in its contribution to the development of other
longwools, and these not only of native breeds but of the Rambouillet
and of the Australian Corriedale, of a Leicester-Merino cross. Used on
British stock the Dishley Leicester has produced the Border Leicester
first localized in Northumberland by the Culleys and with a dash of
Cheviot blood, which in its turn has become the basis of the great Half-
Bred and Greyface early maturing cross-breds of the north, the first with
a Cheviot cross and the second with a Blackface cross. The Wensleydale
also derives from Dishley blood, this time from its use upon the old
Teeswater by a Yorkshire flockmaster of the 1830's, and this in its turn
gives Masham crosses out of various of the North Country breeds.
The Dishley, into which Lincoln blood had gone, was later crossed
back on the Lincoln and the result gave a sheep unsurpassed for weight
of both mutton and wool. As with the Leicester its great day is probably
gone, but Dr. Allan Fraser pays it this tribute: 'It may be fated to fade
into sheep historybut what sheep history it has made.' On the other
longwool breeds the Leicester has had far less influence; it was less
applicable to the peculiar environment of the Romney Marsh and,
indeed, could scarcely have improved the marsh stock; and Kent men
have always denied the use of either Leicester or Lincoln on their breed.
It has little altered the Devon Longwool; and the Cotswold, now mainly
only of magnificent memory, remained largely pure until its almost
complete extinction in the present century.
The new Southdown of Ellman and Webb had probably an even
wider influence than the Dishley because it not only itself remained pre-
eminent among British sheep but also brought into being new, or almost
new, breedsthe Suffolks and the Hampshire and Oxford Downs. The
Suffolks originated from crosses between Southdown and the black-
faced Norfolk horned type, of which only a handful of survivors
remains, and were largely the outcome of experiments by Arthur Young
himself. To-day it is probably unexcelled in the production of prepotent
mutton sires. The Hampshires came from a Southdown cross upon the
old Wiltshire in the early nineteenth century, and were developed by
Humfrey of Oak Ash, near Newbury, as an arable sheep as valuable for
crossing as the Suffolk. In its turn the Hampshire was put to a Cotswold
ewe to produce the largest, most heavily woolled Down breed, the
Oxford, which has come into great demand for use upon North Country
ewes. Of all the Downs only the Shropshire has avoided a Southdown
cross in all but the earliest days, and has reached its present high
standard by selection within the compass of the heath breeds of Morfe,
Cannock, and other West Midland commons.
Other of the ancient breeds in the west and north have also remained
almost pure, apart from the Ryeland whom the Leicester cross has
turned from Lemster Ore to fat lamb production. The Dorset Horns
retain unimpaired their ability to give two crops of lambs a year, and the
Wiltshire Horn is only now returning to its native county after a long
sojourn in the Midlands. From the old white Welsh Mountain has been
selected and fixed a jet-black strain which was established as a separate
breed with its own association in 1922; the black strain goes back many
centuries. In the north the Lonks and the Gritstones have emerged as
distinct breeds to join the Swale-dales, the Herdwicks, and the Rough
Fell, the last a cousin of the Blackface.
Two of the upland breeds, however, have come down the hillside
and won popularity in the valleysthe Kerry Hills of Welsh Mountain
ancestry, with good mutton, wool, and maternal qualities; and the Cluns,
bred from the Shropshire, Radnor, and Ryeland upon the foundation of
an ancient local type, that is numerically surpassing the rather older
Kerry.

THE PIG
For countless centuries the pig was at the very centre of the
peasant's domestic economy, 'the Husbandman's best scavenger and the
Huswife's most wholesome sinke'. Its very domesticity had prevented
the emergence of such definite breeds as were to be found among cattle
and sheep, except in Leicestershire, which had long been famous for its
commercial production of swine of large 'light spotted' type; the other
great local variety, the Berkshire progenitors of the present breed,
underwent in the later eighteenth century some sort of improvement
from a long shallow-bodied pig into a shorter-carcassed sort, dark-
spotted upon a reddish background, lop-eared and rearing to a great
weightin time. Marshall, on the other hand, calls them black and
white, a contradiction which is typical of the great uncertainties of early
pig history. Young records one, of unspecified age, which was fed to
eighty-one stone; and Culley was told of another in Cheshire which
killed out at ten and three-quarter hundredweight deadweight. Two
others at least of the great modern breeds can be traced somewhat hazily
back into the eighteenth century: the Yorkshire Large Whites, then of no
very high repute; and the Essex Half-Blacks concentrated around the
Rodings. Lawrence called the Yorkshire type 'the worst large variety we
have', weak hammed, of poor constitutions but quicker feeders than
other better breeds.
Much of the improvement which took place from the later years of
the eighteenth century is ascribed to the influence of Chinese types
which arrived in Britain via the Mediterranean countries; but it was well
on into the second half of the nineteenth century before the first of the
modern breeds reached anything like their present standard. The Large
Whites from Yorkshire remained almost unknown outside their own
country until in 1851 the Keighley weaver Joseph Tuley amazed visitors
at the Royal Show with the extraordinary standard of his stock; his great
boar Sampson enters into the pedigrees of almost all Large Whites to-
dayanimals noted for their prepotency, production of lean bacon, and
value as crosses upon other breeds. The Middle White, too, was the
work of Tuley, who crossed a boar of the old Small White breed with a
Large White sow; and further work towards the perfection of this choice
small porker was done by Sanders Spencer in the last quarter of last
century.
The ancient Berkshire, so valued 150 years ago, has been overtaken
in popularity by its western neighbour, the Wessex Saddleback, which
for centuries was concentrated almost unrecorded in the Isle of Purbeck,
and which has made great strides into favour since its herd book was
started as recently as 1919and this in spite of the fact that there has
not yet been time to fix its colour firmly. Mr. J. W. Reid has recently
written that the Tamworth is regarded by many as the oldest pure breed
of pig in the world. Its colour is said to have been fixed by the use by Sir
Francis Lawley of an imported Indian jungle pig in 1880. But its ancient
ancestry seems as difficult to prove as that claimed by the Large Black;
in the latter, however, an ability to thrive upon pasture hints at the
inheritance of some of the character of the mediaeval swine who picked
up its living in the woods and stubble. The Essex 'Half-Black', already
distinct in the opening years of the nineteenth century, did not see its
herd book formed until 1919, but in the thirty years that have passed it
has come to overwhelm all other breeds at East Anglian shows.
There are several other breeds of less importance which can be
traced back for a century or more. The Gloucester Old Spot, great
favourites in the 1920's, were esteemed to be 'good stock for any
purpose' in 1807. The Lincolnshire Curly Coat was at the same time a
'quick proving pig, many with curled or woolly coats'. The Large White
Lop, the Welsh and the Cumberland are also descendants of local
breeds, the first coming from the extreme south-west, where pig rearing
was still in a primitive state when Marshall visited it in 1796. In Devon,
he wrote, the practice was to shut pigs up 'in a narrow close hutch, in
which they eat, drink and discharge their urine and faeces; which are
formed into a bed of mud to sleep in, their bristly coats being presently
converted into thick coats of mail; in which filthy plight they remain
until they are slaughtered'.

THE HORSE
Enough has been said in previous chapters to indicate the
comparatively fleeting impact of the horse upon English agriculture, an
impact long enough, however, to give rise to much clamour over its
rapid decline. The horse has been used in certain parts, and notably in
East Anglia, for some centuries as a draught beast, but elsewhere it has
ousted the oxen only within the memories of our great-grandfathers,
many of whom could still heartily pray with the Psalmist' that our oxen
may be strong to labour'. So little did the horse enter into the farming
picture that many writers did not treat of it as an agricultural animal at
all; and Marshall said in 1796 that it was only then 'beginning to creep'
into the West Country plough team.
The great black war horse of the Midlands which gave rise to the
modern Shire is probably the oldest of the English breeds. The
mediaeval type seems to have been much modified by Continental stock
imported successively by an eighteenth-century earl of Chesterfield, by
Bakewell himself, and by George Salisbury, all of them bringing in
Flanders mares to shorten the long back and restore the size of the old
Shire. The older type appears to have been a triple-purpose animal:
Culley says that the largest went to London for dray horses, the medium
sized for farm use, and the smallest as cavalry mounts or for gun
carriage teams. The size of the Shire has increased for some centuries,
however, and Bakewell's work seems finally to have made it too large
for anything but hard draught work.
The early development of the light swing plough in the eastern
counties probably accounts for the rise of the Suffolk Punch which may
even have had its origin in the Saxon horse-breeding industry which
Domesday hints existed in East Anglia. Although Culley was somewhat
contemptuous of it as 'a very plain made horse' of a colour mostly
yellowish or sorrel with a white ratch or blaze on the face, its powers of
work enabled 'the Suffolk and Norfolk farmers to plough more land in a
day than any other people in the island'.
The Cleveland Bay, now so rarely seen outside Yorkshire, was
successively popular as a coach horse, for use in the early coal workings
of the industrial north, and between the shafts of a plough upon the
lighter northern soils. It was once the ubiquitous pack horse and saddle
horse of the North Country hills, but the breed was largely spoilt for this
purpose by the concentration of breeders upon the production of the
fashionable carriage horse.
The Clydesdales have for some centuries been esteemed for their
power and their good temper; they were believed to have arisen from a
cross, upon the native Scottish mares, of six black coach stallions
brought from Flanders by a duke of Hamilton in the late seventeenth
centuryyet another example, with the Shire, of the debt which British
stock owes to the Low Countries. This Scottish native seems to have
been similar to the Highland pony of to-day, still in great use among the
Western Highland crofters. A previous cross upon it gave rise to the
Galloway horse, nearly extinct by the early nineteenth century; and like
every other inexplicable Scottish breed of live stock, four-footed
survivors of the Armada were believed to have entered into its ancestry.
The latest Continental addition to our equine stock has been the
powerful Percheron. Two stallions and twelve mares were imported
from France in 1916, and since then some 4,000 purebred animals have
been registered in the stud book which was started in 1918.
In the ten years from 1938 the agricultural horse population has
fallen by nearly one-third, from 650,000 to 458,000; and the quadrupling
of the number of farm tractors to a figure of 260,000 in 1948 has meant
a gain of 68 per cent in the traction power available on the farm. It is
difficult to see, in the light of modern mechanical developments, what
part the horse can continue to play in agriculture, apart from the odd
animal for light haulage on lowland farms and a rather wider scope in
the hills. Europe puts the unwanted horse to use as food; the Englishman
has a deep-rooted and sentimental dislike of horse flesh, but it is not
impossible that he may be susceptible to some conversion to Continental
tastes.

10. Modern Times

he new day in agriculture, which had dawned with such promise
in the later years of the eighteenth century, must have seemed to
the observer who stood on the threshold of the nineteenth century
one of a sunshine which was both brilliant and eternal. New machines
which worked faster and more cheaply than the human body were soon
to put a new face on the old farming; better stock was paying higher
dividends on the food which was fed into it; and the yeoman
administered the farm with a hand now beginning to be guided by a new
understanding of plant growth and animal breeding. And the fine day did
last, with cloudy but insignificant intervals, for nearly three-quarters of a
century. But when the storm came the flood of depression that arose did
not subside; and it is still carrying the British farmer along with it, his
head only occasionally buoyed above water by the self-interested lifebelt
which his urban cousin from time to time throws him.
The Napoleonic wars of the first decade and a half of the nineteenth
century threw the British public very largely back upon its own
resources in food; and the stability which European grain imports had
imposed on agricultural prices at home was removed. Wheat in 1792
stood at 42s. the quarter; in 1812 the new generation of dwellers in the
mean streets of the industrial slums had to pay for their bread on the
basis of wheat at 126s. the quarter. Arable farming and arable farmers
yeoman freeholder and copyholderwere almost unprecedentedly
prosperous. Peace after Waterloo brought a short relapse; but good times
returned again after the passing of new protective corn laws. Thereafter
the question of agricultural protection was to divide the nation for more
than thirty years, against a background of deepening distrust between
townsman and countryman; and of a growing cleavage between farm
master and mana cleavage which was widened by the degradations of
the Speenhamland system that maintained men in work at the expense of
the parish poor rate, by the game laws that transported the father of a
family for the poaching of a rabbit, by the rick-burnings and riotings that
were the countryman's reaction to the threat which new machinery
seemed to offer to full employment, and by the 'martyrdom' at
Tolpuddle. The master grew richer daily; but the man was faced with
that sheer hopelessness which found expression in the alehouse
monologue which Young recorded: 'For whom are they to be sober? For
whom are they to save? Such are their questions. For the parish? If I am
diligent, shall I have leave to build a cottage? If I am sober, shall I have
land for a cow? If I am frugal, shall I have half an acre of potatoes? You
offer no motives; you have nothing but a parish officer and a
workhouse! Bring me another pot!' This was surely the very nadir of
despair.
Young wrote primarily of the bitterness of the wage-earner who had
been lately the owner of ancient common rights. But against his picture
must be set that which Billingsley drew of the Somerset commoner: 'The
possession of a cow or two, with a hog, and a few geese, naturally exalts
the peasant, in his own conception, above his brothers in the same rank
of society. . . . In sauntering after his cattle he acquires a habit of
indolence. Quarter, half, and occasionally whole days are imperceptibly
lost. Day labour becomes disgusting . . . and at length the sale of a half-
T
fed calf or hog furnishes the means of adding intemperance to idleness.'
These were the words not of an intolerant and hard-hearted man, but of a
man who saw that the amiable leisureliness which had been the very
essence of rural routine was becoming a foreign way of life in a
community which set Samuel Smiles upon a pedestal and worshipped at
the feet of the gods of efficiency. That such efficiency was to become a
very necessary virtue in a new world of international cut-throat
competition the man of the time may be excused for failing to see. None
the less, a new and evil feeling was penetrating rural society, and the
early nineteenth-century farmer cannot be acquitted of possessing some
measure of that inhumanity which was condemning five-year-old
children to long days of slavery in the mills. The industrial iron was
entering into the rural soul.
The newly enfranchized urban elector won his political victory at
last, and the corn laws which had guaranteed agricultural prosperity
were repealed in 1846. But the population was growing so fast, and its
purse was becoming so much deeper, that the agrarian prosperity
endured for another quarter of a century. The 'high farming' of these
days has come to be admired, but it may be that it was really no very
admirable thing, for it relied for its success upon the oil cakes and meals
that had begun to come in from overseas at the turn of the century. It
abandoned that perfect circle of self-sufficiency which it had followed in
the past, and to which farming is again now being forced to return. The
cake and meal were got at the expense of the fertility of foreign soils,
and many parts of an eroded world are to-day paying the piper for the
tune played at the call of the English mid-Victorian yeoman.
The judges for the farms competition at the Oxford Royal Show of
1870 described one example of this high farming, then almost on the
brink of ruin. On eight hundred light acres near Bicester the Norfolk
rotation was being followed in its entirety. Four hundred Lincoln ewes
were folded and their lambs sold after fattening on the roots. Seventy
head of store cattle were winter-fed on the straw, a few roots and a
liberal ration of linseed cake; and on their sale to the grazier for finishing
in spring, they were expected only to pay the cost of their purchase and
the cake they had eaten; the dung they made was accounted an adequate
return for all else. The only artificial fertilizer used was a light dressing
of superphosphate on the roots, and fertility was maintained by the
liberal cake feeding and the consumption on the farm of everything that
it grew except the wheat and some of the barley. There was, of course,
another side to the picture. When Thomas Bowstead judged the
Glamorgan and Monmouth farms at much the same time he commented
of some of the entries: 'Lands dirty, imperfectly tilled and out of
condition; fences crooked, broken down and three times too wide;
gateways without gates; buildings low, dark and dilapidated, badly
ventilated and inadequate to the requirements of the farms; livestock ill
bred, ill fed and ill looking.'
By about 1870 the products of the land mining of the Mid-Western
States of America were beginning to reach British shores; and the British
farmer was swept into the flood which rushed through the gates of Free
Trade, thrown open in accordance with the urban gospel of cheap bread
at any cost. One degradation only was left, the imposition of a town-
made education and of an urban outlook upon the child of the
countryside. Between 1875 and 1884 the wheat acreage fell by one
million acres and the land tumbled down to grass; but the new pastures
could not be profitably stocked, for frozen meat that was beginning to
pour in from South America, Australia, and New Zealand swept the
economic ground from beneath the feet of the stock-keeper. Henceforth
for nearly seventy years and with one brief interval British farming was
to be an unwanted creature, wandering in an economic maze which
yearly became more tortuous and impossible of escape, and the exit to
which not even agriculture's few friends knew.
It is easy, perhaps too easy, to overpaint the picture of the
depression which fell upon farming. Much depended upon the mental
reaction of the individual man. Those who were irretrievably tied to high
farming went underthe Romsey Kings who in the middle of the
century had made vast profits out of corn and sheep disappeared through
the bankruptcy court door one by one; the strong Midland wheat lands
became rabbit runs that no one would buy even for 10 an acre; and a
typical Wiltshire Down farm of 700 acres that had sold in 1812 for
27,000 when it was profitable to plough the downs for corn, made only
7,000 in 1892 after it had fallen back to 'bake' grass.
But on the other side of the picture the dairy men continued to make
a living, and Scotsmen in particular prospered on the new grass of the
old arable farms of Hertfordshire and Essex. The pedigree stock-breeder,
and especially men with the stock needed to populate the grazings of the
New World and the Antipodes, made satisfactory profits out of the
white-faced Hereford and the Lincoln ram. The fruit-grower of
Worcestershire and Kent was not yet meeting competition, and the great
draughts of beer which went down the throats of mill worker and miner
brought even greater prosperity to the hopfields. Even the arable man
was not everywhere ruined, for there were some with the realization that
cheaper production could meet foreign competition on more equal terms,
and that the new artificial fertilizers were a far less extravagant way of
bringing fertility to the arable field than the cake-fed beast and folded
sheep. Of them more will be said later. Others weathered the storm by
expansion rather than retrenchment. Benjamin Bomford in
Worcestershire increased his acreage from 1,360 to 6,000 in the thirteen
years to 1880, drained, threw small enclosures into great arable fields,
straightened hedges, and once showed some visitors 9,000 worth of
steam tackle at work ploughing.
The economic flood has carried us also along somewhat too far, and
we must retrace our steps and consider some of the auxiliary aids to
agricultural progress which were now evolving. The Board of
Agriculture, whose foundation in 1793 was noted in the last chapter, was
the first of the great national organizations devoted entirely to farming
interest which was to come under the financial wing of the State. Its
work was not an unqualified success. The surveys had done much to
disseminate the knowledge of good regional practices, and they were
followed by publication of the communications which poured in upon
the board and which form almost as useful a guide to contemporary
agrarian thought and practice. But projects for an experimental farm
failed, and a scheme of essays upon the conversion of grassland to
tillage had no very practical result; the summary of the essays declared
that all had agreed that no distressand wheat was rising in price yearly
during the Napoleonic Warcould justify the ploughing up of the best
store-fattening, sheep, and dairying lands, but that there was a vast
acreage of inferior pasture, commons, and wastes which could profitably
go under corn and eventually return to better grass. A century and a half
later men again said exactly the same thing.







One of the more useful pieces of work by the board was the
introduction to the general farmer of the new idea that agricultural
chemistry might have some practical help to give to the man on the land;
and Sir Humphry Davy's lectures from 1803 were the result. In one of
them Davy called attention to the 'substance in South America called
guana [sic], being the dung of birds', which he thought might have some
manurial value. The board also sponsored the first rudimentary
geological and soil survey of the country, for which it paid William
Smith, the father of English geology, the sum of 8. The first
agricultural show on a national scale was also held under the board's
aegis at Aldridge's Repository in St. Martin's Lane, London, on the 9th
and 10th of April 1821; entries numbered ten bulls and nine cows and
heifers, mainly Shorthorns but with a few Herefords, Devons,
Longhorns, and Alderneys, some fat stores, seven pens of Leicester and
Cotswold rams and ewes, twelve pens of various of the Down sheep
breeds and ten of Merinos. But in the meantime the government grant
had ceased, voluntary subscriptions were sought but were inadequately
forthcoming, and three months after the second show in 1822 the board
was wound up.








The interregnum between the demise of the board and the
foundation of the English Agricultural Society in 1838, later to become
the Royal Agricultural Society of England, was only short. With the
example of the Highland, Yorkshire, Bath and West of England and
other societies before him, Earl Spencer first mooted the formation of a
national society at the annual dinner in 1837 of the Smithfield Club,
itself the patron of a famous show. By the time of the first annual
meeting in 1839 the new society had 1,100 members and an invested
capital of 3,000. And no better guide could have been found for the
new venture than Spencer, Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1830, a keen
Shorthorn man who had built up his stock at Wiseton on the foundation
of the bull Regent and several cows bought at Robert Colling's
Brampton sale, a founder of the Yorkshire Agricultural Society, and the
retriever of the Smithfield Club's fortunes during their low ebb in 1825.
His farming came before all else: his butler in Downing Street during the
height of his political career told a visitor, 'You've come about cows, sir,
so you'll not have to wait long'.
The Royal Agricultural Society has been best known through the
century and more of its life for the great annual show which it sponsors,
although this has been far from being the total of its work. The first of
these shows was held on 'Mr. Pinfold's pasture ground in Holywell' at
Oxford, now long since built over, in 1839. Twenty thousand visitors
came by coach and postchaise, on horse and on foot; and among the 247
entries of stock were a string of Bates's Shorthorns of the Duchess tribe
which made the three weeks' journey from Kirklevington in Yorkshire
on foot to Hull, by boat to London, by canal barge to Aylesbury, and on
foot to Oxford. They were still in good enough form to take four of the
five Shorthorn awards and astonish all southerners 'by their perfection'.
Judging took place in private, every precaution was taken to conceal the
identities of owners and animals from the judges, and the results were
not announced until the great dinner in the afternoon. The schedule
included classes for Shorthorns, Herefords, Devons, dairy, and any other
cattle, plough oxen, horses, Leicester, Southdown, and other shortwool
sheep, longwools, pigs, implements, roots and seeds; the any-other-stock
class included a Nogore cow from Delhi. Twenty or so implement
makers exhibited, and Ransomes won the gold medal: among the
machinery was a weed scorchera coke firegrate and blower on wheels
which would 'in one day kill all the weeds on an acre of ground after the
crop had been removed'.
The society's second show at Cambridge in 1840 saw the real
beginning of the great machinery section which now threatens to
overwhelm the show; and implement makers were granted their request
that they should be allotted areas which they could fencein theirs
Ransomes showed eighty-six different varieties of ploughs. Bates,
debarred from exhibiting his previous winners, took only two Shorthorn
prizes; but Jonas Webb of Babraham, who had the previous day refused
the offer of 100 from the Duke of Richmond for the hire of a ram, won
both Southdown female prizes. Other winners included two 'New
Oxfordshires'. The Royal Show had of necessity to concentrate largely
on stock and implements, but for many years it held a local farm
competition in conjunction with it. And much of the arable farming
which the judges saw was beginning to respond to the recent provision
of two of the fundamental needs for good crop growthefficient
drainage and adequate plant nutrients. The mediaeval form of open-
furrow drain had persisted into the nineteenth century until James Smith
of Deanston in 1823 returned to some of Blith's ideas of nearly two
hundred years before and evolved a method of taking the surface water
away through stone-filled trenches used in combination with sub-soiling;
and a little later Josiah Parkes showed the value of deep drains on boggy
land. Twenty years of experiment with different trench fillings followed
Smith's work, but in 1843 John Reade produced a tile drain-pipe through
which the moisture could permeate and which soon became cheaply
available through the invention of pipe-making machinery. The main
advance in drainage practice since has been the evolution of mechanical
mole draining, founded upon the method which Switzer first described
in 1724, in which a trench was dug, a plug inserted, clay was rammed
over the plug, and the plug was then withdrawn leaving a hollow
subterranean channel through which the water could run. Applications
for patents for mole ploughs drawn by horse or by windlass and cable
date from the end of the eighteenth century, but none was really
successful until in 1850 John Fowler produced a mole plough that was
adapted nine years later for use with steam tackle, and which
revolutionized much of the farming of clay land which had not been tile
drained, by providing the cheapest of all substitutes for the old ridge and
furrow.
The story of the evolution of the other prime necessity of arable
farming, a fertilizer which would supplement the always inadequate
supplies of farmyard manure, is largely associated with the name of
Rothamsted, the great experimental station founded by John Bennett
Lawes at his home at Harpenden in 1843, in conjunction with J. H.
Gilbert. Guano, the bird manure from the South Pacific to which Davy
had drawn attention, had been arriving in substantial quantities for two
years before Lawes in 1842 set up a factory for the manufacture of
superphosphate, the virtues of which he had discovered by dissolving in
sulphuric acid the bones which centuries of farmers had previously
applied to their land and left there to decompose slowly; production of
superphosphate on a larger scale followed the discovery in 1845 of the
coprolite beds of Cambridgeshire. Nitrogen had been first shown to be
of agricultural value when in 1669 Digby had watered barley with a
weak solution of nitre, but sodium nitrates did not arrive in quantity until
the 1830's. The third of the great mineral fertilizer trinity, potassium,
became available in compound form from Germany in 1860.
The effect of these chemical nutrients upon crop growth had been
demonstrated by Liebig, the great German chemist, for some ten years
when Lawes and Gilbert initiated on the classic Broadbalk field at
Rothamsted some long-term experiments which showed remarkable
results. On one section of the field, continuously under wheat, the crop
received no farmyard manure at all from 1852 onwardsindeed, to the
present daybut a complete artifical fertilizer applied yearly brought an
average yield of thirty-three bushels compared with the thirty-four from
a section upon which there had been applied a light dressing of dung
(fourteen tons) every year. In 1925 it was found necessary to fallow the
field for weed control, and since then sections have been fallowed every
fifth year. For the last two cycles of four crops and one fallow, from
1936 to 1945, the section fed with a complete artificial fertilizer
produced 140 bushels of wheat over the whole period and the farmyard
manure section 130.3 bushels.
In their early years these Rothamsted results were confirmed in farm
practice at Blount's Farm, Sawbridgeworth, some twenty miles away,
where Prout had been taking since 1865 successive cereal, legume, and
root crops upon the entire holding with neither stock upon the farm nor
manure bought in; and all straw was sold off. Instead, an artificial
manurial policy was based on the results of soil analyses made by
Voelcker, the great late Victorian chemist. After thirty years Prout's son
and successor was taking crops of thirty-six bushels of wheat, forty of
barley, and forty of oats off each acre in a year (1895), when the
Hertfordshire averages were twenty-six, twenty-nine, and thirty-five
respectively; and Prout's yields were only fair ones for Blount's Farm.
This was the first great practical demonstration of the possibility of
farming for corn without horn, practised of necessity upon many of the
open fields from mediaeval days onwards but with disastrous results
without the aid of chemical substitutes for dung. Prout was only the first
of a succession of men with the courage to jettison the traditional ideas
of fertility; but the present generation is still shaking a doubtful head
over the similar practices of Mr. F. P. Chamberlain in Oxfordshire and
Mr. P. J. MacMorland in Hampshire, both of whom, however, add a
green undercrop for ploughing in for the maintenance of the humus
content of the soil. The organic enthusiastthe muck and compost
manprophesies the eventual doom of the inorganic farmer and of the
nation which eats the food he grows. He may yet be proved right, but the
fact that good grain crops can be grown continuously for many years
upon chemical fertilizers alone is now beyond dispute. And side by side
with the evolution of the artificial fertilizer, giving a factory-produced
chemical nutrition to the plant, has gone the development of chemical
methods of control of weeds and insect pests, of fungoid and virus
infections, which bid fair to minimize the vast annual wastage of food
from these sources.
Animal disease causes an even greater loss each year, and it took
the first of the great modern epidemics, the rinderpest of the 1860's
which at its peak killed 20,000 cattle a week, to upset the policy of
commercial laissez-faire which Victorian political thought had permitted
to remain in agriculture, and to establish the first government service to
be purely concerned with a farm function. The department, the cattle
plague section of the Home Office, came into being during the serious
outbreak of the rinderpest in 1865; it later blossomed into a new Board
of Agriculture, founded in 1889 with its president a cabinet minister: the
'board' never met and was in fact the president alone. For many years its
work was concerned with crop and animal disease and with agricultural
education, until the submarine blockade of 1917 made the food situation
such that the State could no longer disregard the daily practices of
agriculture and the pattern of land use. The peculiar framework of
farming, made up of relatively small and isolated units, demanded some
unusual measure if Britain was to avert starvation; and the Corn
Production Act of 1917 guaranteed prices, regulated wages, and directed
the extent of tillage. The industry, with high rewards for its work, looked
forward to a rosy future; but it forgot the lessons of 1815 when the post-
Napoleonic War market had collapsed. In the way it doesand no one
ever learns from ithistory repeated itself; and the financial safeguards
of the 1917 Act, amended by the Agriculture Act of 1920, were thrown
overboard to lighten the financial load upon the ship of state when the
post-war boom ended in 1921. Prices slumped until wheat in 1923 was
making little more than half its 1920 price, and there seemed no ray of
hope upon the horizon until the Beet Sugar Subsidy Act of 1925
provided one solid lifebelt to which the drowning arable farmer could
cling.
Somewhat curiously, it was again a Labour Government returned
largely upon an urban vote that in 1931 provided the administrative
machinery by which the chaos of agricultural marketing could be
reduced to order in some of its branches. The Agricultural Marketing
Act of 1931, extended by the 1933 Act, enabled the National Farmers'
Union to sponsor schemes for the control of marketing by the producers
of hops, milk, potatoes, pigs, and other commodities; and for the first
time brought the farmer into effective combination against the strongly
organized bodies of buyers which, almost since farming for self-
subsistence ended, had had things very much their own way. Other
legislative actionthe restriction of imports, producer and consumer
subsidies, and tariffswas later supported, as a result of a not altogether
disinterested concern under the shadow of war for the fertility of a long-
neglected land, by subsidies for lime and the ploughing up of grassland.
After 1939 an industry which could have gone to the devil a few
years before for all the bulk of the nation cared became the public
darling; and a limelight of publicity played upon farmer, farm worker,
and land girl only a little less brightly than that which magnified the
civilian soldier into the stature of a hero. Planned cropping under the
direction of county war agricultural executive committees, founded upon
the lines of those of the 1914-18 war, directed a farming effort which
between 1938 and 1944 doubled the production of wheat, barley, and
potatoes at the expense of livestock. And post-war farming has
continued along crisis lines under the impetus of dollar shortage and the
fear of world famine. The Agriculture Act passed by the third Labour
Government in 1947 has now basically changed the commercial
structure of farming. In return for guaranteed prices and markets for his
principal commodities, and for that part of the Act which has made
tenancy of an efficiently conducted farm almost as secure a tenure as
ownership in fee simple, the British farmer has promised to produce the
foodin corn, potatoes, milk, and meatwhich the nation asks of him.
It is, on the face of it, a fair bargain.
While the business face of farming has so radically alteredand the
supremely free and individual industry of agriculture has by a largely
silent revolution become the direct servant of the omnicompetent state,
permitted to proceed on a loose rein so long as it obediently follows the
planned pathtechniques in the field have changed under the impact of
new machines and new crops, of which more will be said in later
chapters. And the immemorial time lag between knowledge and practice
has been progressively reduced by new channels for the dissemination of
agricultural knowledge. Committees of the county councils in 1890
assumed a new responsibility for agricultural education, and county
organizers became one of the liaison links between the growing chain of
research stations and the farmer, while farm institutes supplemented the
work of the new agricultural departments of the universities. A great
agricultural Pressthe Farmer and Stock-Breeder with more than a
century of service to the farming community behind it, the more recent
Farmers Weekly, and a host of other journalshas been a profound
educational influence. And latest of all, the National Agricultural
Advisory Service is bringing advice and instruction to the growing body
of farmers in the field ready to receive them.
The new system of agricultural education which has made possible
the foundation of the National Agricultural Advisory Service, with its
great but still largely unrealized potentialities for good, is still evolving.
Its course has been curiously different from that of other occupations, in
that while qualification in the law, in medicine, and in much else is a
necessary prelude to practice, the bulk of the great farming community
still learns its business in the field, and turns to the scientifically trained
mind often, infrequently, or not at all, as whim or need decides. And
perhaps herein is farming's weakness, and its strength: its weakness in
that the potential of the land is still so often unachieved through
ignorance or prejudice; and its strength, for neither scientific farming nor
the professional advisor is quite free from a rigidity of outlook or an
intolerance of such inspired empiricism as that which bred Bakewell's
Leicesters and the Collings' Shorthorns. Neither rigidity nor intolerance,
it must be added, is inherent in the person of the advisory officer, but is
imposed on him from outside; and the advisory service has been further
hamstrung by the administrative and constabulary duties which have
been attached to it and which make the advisor a civil-service policeman
first and a guide and friend to the farmer only second.
In spite of these bottlenecks in the channel between laboratory and
field, however, the debt that modern farming owes to the new science is
very great indeed. This science was first bred in the laboratories and
experimental fields of the nineteenth-century universities and private
research stations, and was first widely disseminated by the county
organizers and their staffs, to whom the pre-war farmer owed so much.
These same schools of agriculture staffed the farm institutes which have
brought the elements of planned agricultural training out into the
counties; and upon them the advisory duties might well again be hinged.
The university schools have also been the breeding-ground of the
specialists at the research institutes which followed Rothamsted into
being, and whose work is now co-ordinated by the Agricultural Research
Council. It is easy, and common, however, to over-emphasize the debt
which farming owes to the state research station and the state advisor. It
is still in the manufacturer's workshop that good modern machines and
implements are conceived; in the seedsman's trial ground that many of
the best strains of plants are still evolved; in the flocks and herds of the
pedigree and commercial breeder that one eye for an animal and another
for breeding and performance are achieving so much; and in the arable
fields that the age-old ways of cultivations are still fundamentally
unchanged. The mechanical genius of Hosier, Paterson, and Warburton,
the pastoral perfections of Morrey and Mackie, the reclamations of
Bennett Evans, the stockmanship at Bargower and Eyton, Kelmscott,
Terling, and Wall, have blossomed in field and byre and not in
laboratory or classroom.

11. Modern Times:
the Arable Crops

t is probable that the arable husbandry of the seventeenth century
underwent a profound change under the influence of the new one-
year clover course. It is certain that that of the eighteenth was even
more deeply affected by the growing use of the folded turnip as a root
break in place of the former bare fallow; and that the nineteenth century
saw both the consolidation of the new rotations and the beginnings of
their dissolution. The past fifty years have witnessed the complete
breakdown of orderly cropping as our grandfathers knew it and the
substitution of a husbandry of opportunism. This has been made possible
by the development of mineral fertilizers which have largely obviated
the old dependence of crop upon stock, by the chemical methods of
weed control which are sending the cleaning crop into the oblivion to
which the fallow has almost completely gone, and by the rise to favour
of the sugar beet which has given the arable man both a cash crop for
sale and as much good fodder for his stock as he once got from the
mangold.
Even in the early years of last century the Norfolk four-course
rotation was by no means unchallenged, and the five-course system of
Yorkshire and other regional rotations had a wide following. The
Norfolk rotation broke down by reason of its inflexibility; it was
difficult, or impossible, to adapt cropping to the changing needs of the
market after the arrival of the flood of cheap food from the New World;
men also found it difficult to get a take of clover every fourth year. An
early modification was the insertion of a catchcrop of rye for feeding off
between the August-cut cereal and the sowing of turnips the following
June.
But until the seventies wheat continued to be the pivot around
which the farm world revolved. Official statistics date only from 1866,
but the then wheat acreage of 3,161,431 probably represented a fair
average of the area that had been under the crop for some decades
before. It rose to its peak, 3,417,054 acres, in 1869 but thereafter
declined rapidly under the impact of cheap foreign imports until by 1892
no more than 2,102,969 acres were under wheat in England and Wales.
In the ten years before, five counties in the north and west had lost half
or more of their wheat acreage, and with the thirteen more that lost one-
third became the predominantly grazing counties they have remained
until this day, in spite of the ploughing up campaign of the last war.
Only in East Anglia and the adjacent counties was the fall comparatively
little pronounced. In 1893 wheat acreages fell below the two million
mark, and reached the pre-1914 war nadir of 1,302,404 in 1904. The
First World War was a temporary stimulant and brought the wheat
acreage up to 2,460,695 in 1918, but by 1931, with world over-
production and a world slump, it was back to 1,180,903, and it has taken
the recent war to bring it over the two million mark again, to 2,137,400
in 1948.
The actual tillage acreage has not always changed in direct ratio
with the wheat acreage, however. The greatest extent of tillage recorded
in England since official statistics have been collected was the
I
13,729,000 acres of 1870, roughly at the same time as wheat reached its
peak; but while wheat lands dropped to one-third, the total tillage
acreage fell by less than half between the wars; and the 1948 figure of
13,008,500 acres under the plough approaches the 1870 figure although
the wheat acreage stands at only two-thirds of the total of that year. The
difference comes from the change in emphasis in croppingthe rise in
popularity of temporary grass, leys of up to three or four years' duration
which to-day occupy the period of a complete rotation of the mid-
nineteenth century; the great upward surge in milk production which has
required that forage crops, of which the ley is a notable member, should
be grown in greater quantity; the vast acreage which material and
financial shortages have sent under cropping for fodder for meat
production; and the remarkable development of potato and sugar beet
production. All these factors together have gone to bring about a modern
agrarian revolution as fundamental as those of the eighteenth and earlier
centuries.
In spite of the decline in the wheat acreage, however, gross
production of the grain has not fallen in direct ratio with the fewer acres
under the crop; and one of the major factors in this higher yield has been
first the selection and then the breeding of better seed. Selection of
grains which show some or all the desirable qualities had, of course,
been the method by which nineteenth-century varieties had arisen from
the primitive wild wheats of pre-history; and one of the first well-
authenticated steps in the modern improvement of cereals was that by
Chevallier, who bred the barley that bears his name from a single
chance-found grain in 1820. Patrick Shirreff, Le Couteur, Hallet, and
others worked along lines of selection, although Shirreff at one time
directed his attention to hybridization; and his grasp of the fundamental
principles brought forth his dictum that new varieties could come from
three sourcescrossing, natural sports, and foreign imports. But in spite
of this hint and his previous work on cross-breeding, cereal
improvement continued along the line of the selection of the extreme
forms of existing stock rather than the evolution of new strainsbut
once the extreme line was isolated further improvement was impossible.
But when Mendel's theories of inheritance were rediscovered in the early
years of the present century the way was open for Rowland Biffin and
his school to proceed along a firm path of cross-breeding very different
from the empiric hybridization occasionally followed by a handful of
workers before him. It was no longer a case of making the old varieties
better; entirely new ones could now be planned and bred.
The major challenge to Biffin came in the field of wheat. Red Fife,
introduced to America from Danzig via Scotland, had proved to be the
variety par excellence for the New World, and its produce of good
milling and baking quality boomeranged back to Britain in vast
quantities to steal the home market. Biffin set himself to breed a wheat
which could meet Red Fife on equal terms of quality. His first new
variety, Little Joss, evolved from the native Squareheads Master and the
Russian Ghurka, was high yielding and resistant to rust; but Biffin did
not begin to approach the quality of Red Fife until he had used the
challenger itself to produce Yeoman. In straining after high yields,
however, the grower in the field was using more artificials, and the
tendency for the crop to lodge grew with the greater length and lesser
strength of the straw. Engledow at last solved this problem of combining
the milling and baking qualities of a hard wheat with yield and
resistance to lodging, in his Holdfast.
Shirreff's third source of improvement, from the import of foreign
varieties, has also played a great part in recent wheat history. Of the
foreign arrivals which have been naturalized the Juliana and Wilhelmina
from Holland were both half of British descent. The true spring wheats
have also largely or entirely come from overseas. For a century or more
the intermediate types like the later Red Marvel selected by Vilmorin in
France had been used for spring sowing, but true spring varieties first
came in from Russia at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, to be followed recently by the all-conquering Swedish Atle.
For many centuries barley had challenged the supremacy of wheat
as a bread corn of the poorer folk, while reigning almost alone as the
basis of the national drinkand all in addition to its ancient importance
as a fodder grain. To-day's acreage of 1,897,000 in England and Wales
(1948) compared with 2,133,961 (1871) at the peak of the arable
farming of the seventies, is evidence that barley has not had to meet the
threat of better quality to which wheat was subjected from across the
Atlantic. The barley breeder had in the main to concentrate upon the
maintenance of an already good malting quality while raising yields and
securing a more uniform sample of plump, fine-skinned, and well-
threshed grain for the maltster; and he had at his disposal both Spratt and
Archer, with long histories of English cultivation behind them. Beaven
identified Archer with the early eighteenth-century Rathripe, and Sprot
was recorded by Fitzherbert in 1523. There was also Goldthorpe bred by
Dyson of Goldthorpe in 1889, probably from a sport of Spratt, and
Chevallier's improved kind. But Archer lodged badly, Goldthorpe shed
its grain when ripe, and Spratt was the least attractive to the brewer.
Hunter's Spratt-Archer cross, made in the light of the new Mendelian
principles, combined the quality of the one and the resistance to lodging
of the other; while Beavan, working on the same lines, bred the
comparable Plumage-Archer using the Continental Plumage which was
akin to Goldthorpe. While the native sortsnative from long residence,
but almost certainly not indigenouswent into the making of these great
malting barleys, the old feeding varieties have gone down before the
Danish Kenia and Maja, although the ancient Bere and Haidd Garw
persist in the hills.
While wheat and barley improvements have been in the main the
work of the university man, better oats have principally come from the
breeding fields of the great seed merchants, and particularly that of
Garton's at Warrington, who produced Abundance in 1892 and many
other good sorts since. Amelioration of this ancient fodder crop probably
began with the introduction of the Poland variety in the early eighteenth
century, and from it were derived in the same century Tarn Finlay,
White and Black Tartary, and Potato, all still in use. The grower also
owes a debt to the Aberystwyth Plant Breeding Station for the great
S147 and S172 varieties. Improvement in oat quality, however, has not
been entirely governed by the condition of the grain; the feeding quality
of the straw has been an almost equal factor, while inherited resistance
to frit-fly attack has also had to be borne in mind.
The almost complete use of oats for fodderwith the notable
Scottish exception recorded by Dr. Johnsonand the need to increase
the production of feeding stuff at home in the face of war and financial
crisis has actually led to an increase in the oat acreage, from 1,707,816
in 1871 to 1,991,000 in 1948. Rye, now largely a pioneer crop on newly
broken rough grazings, has declined slightly in acreage from a mere
60,113 to 57,000 over the same period. At the same time the eclipse of
the pure stand of peas and beans for stock feed has become almost a
total one; fodder peas have fallen in the three-quarters of a century
from 386,000 acres to 44,000 and beans from 517,000 to 80,000,
although the decline in the pea acreage has been partly offset by the
76,000 acres now grown (1948) for the canning industry and for human
consumption in the green state.
The old root cropsthe mangolds and swedes and turnipsare also
becoming rapidly superseded as fodder by processed grass and the
leafier brassicas, of which kale is the principal. Combined acreages have
fallen from 2,021,000 in 1871 to 627,000 in 1948, or by nearly three-
quarters. The turnip has served its great purpose and may go into semi-
retirement in honour; the swede of eighteenth-century introduction still
maintains a hold in the remoter regions; but the mangold which arrived
here somewhat later seems to be having an even shorter stay. The
mangold was probably first brought to England in 1786 from France and
was popularized by J. C. Lettsom who, as Mr. Fussell has pointed out,
deserves at least as well of mankind as Turnip Townshend but has never
been commemorated as Mangold Lettsom. It seems first to have been
regarded as the potato was, as an ultimate insurance of the poor against
starvation (it was known as the 'root of scarcity'), but the cachet of
Coke's patronage won its entry into agricultural favour. The value of all
these roots as a cleaning crop has lessened with the rise of potatoes and
sugar beet, both allowing of equal inter-row cultivation; and the final
blow was delivered by Professor Boutflour when he pointed out that in
carting roots to stock men were largely carting water.
The potato and the sugar beet, in their way, have been responsible
for as great a revolution in English agriculture as was the turnip in its
day. It has been seen that by the end of the eighteenth century a
specialized potato-growing industry had developed in Lancashire and
around the bigger towns, and the crop had already been subject to the
first of the great epidemics of disease which had become almost a
chronic condition before chemical means of control were evolved. Early
nineteenth-century depression among the working classes led to the
rapid expansion of the potato acreage, and nowhere more so than in the
gardens and allotments of the poor, where it stood as an insurance
against starvation to incite the wrath of Cobbett against the 'root of
misery'. But the tuber was steadily winning a large and permanent place
in the British dietary. Gaut, writing of Worcestershire, quotes the wide
growth of potatoes in the Bromsgrove district in the second quarter of
the eighteenth century. Here the yield was commonly about ten tons
from cut sets; but in Herefordshire in 1833 crops lifted from uncut six-
ounce sets reached twenty-three tons an acre. Were these claims
exaggerated, or has the virility of our stock so declined? At any rate, by
1866 more than 355,000 acres of potatoes were grown, and the acreage
has expanded with the population until in 1948 England and Wales had
1,117,000 acres, sufficient to meet the entire national need, apart from a
few first earlies from kindlier climes.
Until the end of the eighteenth century it was quite impossible to
distinguish varieties with any certainty, but those that then appeared
the Howard, the Irish Apple, the Manby, the White Kidney, the Ox
noble, the Yam, the Lumper and the Cup, the Ashleaf and the Lapstone
Kidneyhave all gone except for a few which persist in remoter Eire.
The Lancashire industry had in the 1770's been threatened with
extinction by leaf roll and kindred infections; the great blight of the
1840's which starved a million Irish men and women to death attacked
all varieties impartially; and the new sorts that were beginning to arrive
from the breeders in growing numbers were coming to be bred with at
least one eye on their powers of disease resistance. Of them probably
Sutton's Magnum Bonum is the only one now familiar; it was bred by
James Clarke, a Hampshire gardener, in 1876 and he followed it with
Epicure in 1897, still the frost-hardiest and heaviest cropper of all the
earlies. Archibald Findlay had in the meantime put the fine culinary Up-
to-Date on the market in 1891, British Queen succeeded it in 1894, and
the universal Majestic in 1911, a year after the appearance of the King
Edward. Varietal names were accumulating until they were almost
infinite in number, but blight, curl, and the new wart disease that first
assumed serious proportions in 1907 swept many sorts off the market;
and the Potato Synonym Committee has now tidied matters upit
discovered, among other duplications, that Abundance was marketed
under two hundred different names. More recently the names of Arran
and Ulster have been attached to the varieties bred by McKelvie and
John Clarke, between them responsible for many of the best sorts now
grown. The attention of the scientist has, however, for some decades
been too firmly fixed on the most important problems of disease control,
and particularly in the great aphis-free seed-producing areas of Scotland
and Ulster, to give adequate attention to quality. Public taste has
demanded a good-looking tuber, smooth-skinned and free from deep
eyes, and has forgotten the gourmetic virtue of the less handsome but
floury cookers.
The potato, too, is a labour-extravagant crop and under war and
post-war conditions has raised labour questions which are on the way to
solution by the mechanization of planting but which in the harvest field
seem still far from an efficient mechanical solution. Labour may also be
saved by the adoption of methods of bulk storage in place of the old
system of clamping, which has held the field for two centuries at least.
Mechanization has also made slow progress towards full efficiency
in the handling of the other great new crop, the sugar beet, a close
relative of the mangold. Its potentialities were not realized until the
German scientist Marggraf extracted sugar from the beet in 1747. Early
Continental stock was highly mixed, but some years after the discovery
of the methods of sugar extraction the White Silesian type was fixed and
has since become the source of all modern varieties; and the first factory
was also built in Silesia. Here the great modern sugar beet industry,
which has so modified English arable husbandry, which now provides
the whole domestic sugar supply of the country, and which has become
so popular with the grower as to have its acreage restricted by quota, got
away slowly from a shaky start. On the Continent the crop developed
rapidly; in the last two decades of the nineteenth century both France
and Germany each had some 400 sugar beet factories drawing upon an
average production of between eleven and twelve tons to the acre, and
with a sugar content of something under twelve per cent. In England,
long after the failure of the first factory at Maldon in 1832, the second
factory was established by James Duncan at Lavenham in Suffolk in
1869; it was closed in 1873 from lack of supportfarmers would only
grow 7,000 tons of the 30,000 needed to make a success of the venture,
and too often retained the crop themselves for fodder. Rothamsted also
initiated some sugar beet experiments which seem to have fallen into
abeyance, although Lawes and Gilbert in about 1897 brought in some of
the best seed which Vilmorins of Paris had bred to produce a root with
double the sugar content of many of the older sorts.








The first of the modern processing factories was established under
Dutch control at Cantley in Norfolk in 1912, but it was not until the Beet
Sugar Subsidy Act of 1925 encouraged capital to enter the new plants
that the depressed arable man could find an adequate outlet for the new
and modestly profitable crop. In addition to the three factories
established before the Act of 1925 fifteen others were later set up under
five companies, and in 1936 all the concerns were amalgamated by
statute into the British Sugar Corporation, with limited profits and State
nominated or approved directors. The 390,000 acres of beet grown in
1948 gave the housewife all her sugar, fed the stock with the pulp from
the factory and with the tops eaten green in the field or preserved for late
winter use, and, by encouraging the proper feeding and cultivation of a
profitable cash crop, put much of the land of England into better heart.
For more than a century before the recent war the English stock-
keeper had relied upon imported concentrates, the oil cakes and meals,
for his high-protein fodder. But war and dollar shortage have forced the
nation back upon its own resources, with the result that such protein-rich
exotics as the oilseed poppy and the sunflower have reared their blooms
in English fields. A third plant from which vegetable oil is extracted and
a protein-high residue for stock feed remains is linseed, the ancient flax
writ new. Flax linen production has, after at least two thousand years in
England, largely migrated to Ireland, leaving behind in the Linleys and
Flaxtons of the English countryside the only reminders of its mediaeval
importance. Much of its decline came from the fact that flax cultivation
was particularly frowned upon by the landlords, who believed the crop
to be a notoriously exhausting one; and even the bounty of fourpence a
stone offered by the government in 1781 was not sufficient to stay the
decline in the acreage. But seed of the botanically similar linseed has
been brought in from the ends of the earthArgentine, Canada, Russia,
and Bombayto meet the needs of an oil-starved nation, and
government encouragement brought nearly one hundred thousand acres
under the crop in 1948.
But the greatest contribution to British self-sufficiencythat
blessed word which at bottom means that the nation is reaching closer to
the ideal circle of land use without subsidies from the starvation of
foreign soilshas come from British grasslands; and the potentialities of
this source are still far from being fully exploited, or even apprehended.
The use of grass for the nourishment of the domestic animal is of
immemorial antiquitynaturally so, because the stock upon which
mankind mainly depends for meat and milk is herbivorousand the
realization of the importance of quality in the sward must be nearly as
old. But little could be done in the way of improvement before new
strains were available, before land productivity could be fully released
by efficient drainage, and before the better plant could be stimulated into
full growth by mineral fertilizers.
The seventeenth-century introduction of red clover, and the rise of
rape, sainfoin, lucerne, and perennial ryegrass as temporary pasture and
hay crops raised from specially grown seed, first gave rise to the system
of ley-farminga ley being definable as grass which fills a certain
position in an arable rotation, be it the one-year ley of the Norfolk four-
course or the twenty-year ley of the eighteenth-century sainfoin
enthusiast. Very early in the history of the ley it was realized, first, that
initial productivity was high but declined after a term of years which
largely depended for its length on management, and that the ley was
finally converted into permanent pasture by the invasion of indigenous
species of grasses; and secondly, that the ley not only 'rested' land but
restored its fertility, although the latter process (the two were really the
same) remained inexplicable until modern science showed that clover, of
which the wild white type always enters the ley by intent or invasion,
fixes nitrogen from the air and eventually transfers it to the soil. Ellis of
Gaddesden in 1744 noted that good Hertfordshire farming was due to
'resting the ground with sown grasses'. The importance of leguminous
seed quality had also been early recognized, certainly from the time of
Blith, but it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that
the indigenous grasses came in for attention. Stillingfleet in his
collection of natural history tracts of 1760 had finally fixed the names of
many of the types, and at the same time the Society for the
Encouragement of the Arts was awarding premiums for collections of
'hand-gathered, native seeds' of vernal grass, meadow foxtail, crested
dogstail, meadow fescue, and fine bent. At the end of the century Coke
was encouraging children to procure stocks of pure grass seed for him
by scouring the countryside, and was rejecting the still universal method
of putting down straight grass from the sweepings of the hay barn floor.
The first major contributions to the store of other than natural grasses
since the clovers of the seventeenth century were the cocksfoot and
timothy which arrived from America in the 1760's, followed by Italian
ryegrass in 1834. Thomson of Banbury bought a stock of the last at the
Munich Exhibition of that year and, after experimenting with it,
communicated his results to the seedsmen of the Highland Society.
The most rapid development in grassland acreage in modern times
followed upon the collapse of corn growing in the last quarter of the
nineteenth century. The permanent grassland of England and Wales
increased by leaps and boundsit was 10,255,748 acres in 1866 and
15,097,549 in 1891and the grass under rotation rose only from
2,552,809 acres to 3,086,765 in the same period: in other words, while
five million acres of arable fell down to grass, only half a million were
carefully laid down to productive mixtures. The challenge was met by a
number of men, of whom Robert H. Elliot at Clifton Park and
Somerville and Gilchrist at Cockle Park were the leaders. Elliot was
something of a pioneer in thought as well as practice, for he realized that
the future of a British agriculture faced with cheap foreign competition
depended upon the cheapening of its own production: his corollary was
that Britain must turn to good grass, for 'the cheapest food for stock is
grass; the cheapest manure for soil is a turf composed largely of deep-
rooting plants; the cheapest and best tillers, drainers and warmers of soil
are roots'. Elliot's methods, published in his Clifton Park System of
Farming in 1898, made many converts to his practice of taking a four-
year ley of special seeds mixtures round the farm. The year before this
Somerville at Cockle Park had experimented with a wild white clover
sward dressed with the basic slag which was just beginning to issue in
quantity from factories where the basic process of making steel had been
introduced. The results were nothing short of phenomenal: poor pasture
with a little clover so increased its leguminous population that where
grazing sheep had given a liveweight increase of 37 pounds before, now
with the slagged pastures they were returning a liveweight increase of
117 pounds over the same period and area. It was these experiments
which again drew the attention of the farmer to the fundamental part
which wild white clover plays in the long ley, although seventeenth-
century comment upon its encouragement from heavy marling shows
that its value had first been appreciated long before.
Gilchrist, following on at Cockle Park, evolved the long ley seeds
mixture which, bearing the name of that station, has held sway for so
long. The later history of the ley is largely the story of the incomparable
work of Sir George Stapledon in selecting the best of the native varieties
and breeding from them and from others the great Aberystwyth S strains
of grasses and clovers, work in which he has been followed by Dr.
William Davies and Professor T. J. Jenkin, and in inspiring the British
farmer, by practical precept and by preaching, with his own vision of a
ley farming which can raise the good farm and poor one alike to new
heights of productivity.
To-day, permanent pastureand permanent pasture is mostly poor
pasture except in Leicestershire, Romney Marsh, the Somerset Plains,
and a few other favoured placesoccupies 10,265,400 acres in England
and Wales (1948), compared with the fifteen million acres of 1891 and
the 1935-9 average of about the same figure; and temporary grass covers
3,455,000 acres or nearly half a million acres more than in 1891 and one
and a half million more than the pre-war average. But the ten million
acres of permanent grass of low productivity that remain are a measure
of the task with which British farming is faced in reaching full
production; although it must be remembered that reseeding is a highly
expensive process and that great faith must be had in the future in order
to face the cost of fencing and watering new leys.
Side by side with this task runs the problem of the full use of the
temporary grass now growing. Utilization has been immemorially in two
ways, by hay from the meadows and by grazing stock upon the pasture.
In both new avenues are opening. The British farmer is traditionally a
maker of hay; it is a craft of which long-inherited art has made him a
supreme master, and modern machinery has accelerated the rate but not
altered the methods which Fitzherbert practised more than four hundred
years ago. But in too many seasons he fights a losing battle with the
weather. The new processes of ensilage and green crop drying make him
independent of the elements, but neither is yet universal. The earlier
history of both is obscure. In 1882 the Royal Agricultural Society held a
drying trial at the Reading Royal Show, with one machine blowing
heated air upon the windrowed grass in the field, six having their
exhaust gases fanned into the stack, and one forcing hot air through the
stack. The judges not only withheld the prizes; they also felt impelled to
withhold any verbal encouragement as 'any smooth words would
misrepresent the opinions which we entertain'. Some slight interest had
been taken in ensilage from 1840 onwards, and a few years later than the
first drying trials French methods were described and the R.A.S.E. tried
out a shredder-elevator for silage crops; again, no award was made. The
process, by which grass or other green crop is packed into an airtight
container where acid formed by fermentation preserves it with little loss
of nutrient value, went ahead in America and Scandinavia; but it was
infrequently practised in Britain until the late war saw the initiation of
official propaganda and the gradual spread of silage making. The
Scandinavian A.I.V. process, by which mineral acid is added to the
green crop, has been little used here, where the production of a
preservative lactic acid by the addition of molasses or by the unaided
fermentation of the grass alone is preferred. Not only grass but kale,
arable silage crops, beet tops, and other nutritive green matter can be and
are ensiled.
Slow as has been the spread of the practice of silage, by which
summer's grass can be preserved for winter use without all the risks from
weather and without much of the labour of haymaking, the alternative of
grass drying by artificial heat has expanded even more slowly. The
reason is not difficult to find. Silage can be made with only the addition
of a buckrake to the farm implement range; grass drying means the
installation of a plant costing many hundreds, or thousands, of pounds,
and the cost of processing in addition makes the product an apparently
costly one in relation to hay or silage, although its feeding value may be
comparably higher. The interest which the agricultural engineer and
scientist of the 1880's took in grass drying was revived in the 1920's and
Wood and Woodman's work at Cambridge made clear the possibilities
of the practice. The early 1930's saw the first of the British driers on the
market, and later development has not only varied the type but also
included the introduction of mobile driers which go to the crop, instead
of the grass being brought to the processing plant.
A third method of preserving the grass crop is that of barn hay-
drying or mow-drying recently introduced from America, in which hay,
after some hours' wilting in the field, is stacked in a slatted floor barn
and is there slowly dried in a stream of forced air. Of these three
processes, the future of ensilage seems assured when once the English
farmer has reoriented his practice; grass drying may have a great future
if the teething troubles of this new branch of agriculture can be
overcome and if the international situation makes it necessary for the
stock-keeper to continue to rely upon home-grown protein; but mow-
drying has no very obvious advantage.
Elliot's dictum that 'the cheapest food for stock is grass' envisaged
the consumption of the herbage by the grazing animalthe most
economical method in the world of feeding the herbivorous beast. The
grazing season was once confined to the period from April to late
Septemberhence the need for haymakingbut it is now being
extended at both ends by the inclusion in the seeds mixture of early-
growing and late-persisting grasses; and the practice of grazing the row-
drilled seeds grasses is even giving a bite in mid-winter on land which
does not poach under the treading of stock.
This closing of the gap between the cessation of autumn grazing and
the time when the first spring bite appears is one of the two major
problems of grassland. The other is the economic use of pasture in situ
so that all waste may be avoided. Anderson in 1778 pointed the way
towards the answer of controlled grazing, but only recently has interest
in the matter reawakened. Commonindeed, almost universalpractice
is for stock to use the whole of a pasture field not only as dining-room
but as living-room and bedroom as well: the consequent waste from
spoilage of the herbage and from selective grazing of only the more
succulent grasses is prodigious. Methods of full use of the sward are
being worked out along two lines: the control of use by restriction of
grazing area, in which the movable electric fence confines stock to such
a parcel of grass as will give them sufficient food for one day but no
more, and which by taking stock round the field from division to
division as Anderson had visualized ensures that all the herbage is
grazed down evenly; and control by time, in which grazing stock are
removed to the living room of a bare pasture immediately they are
replete.
New seeds mixtures designed for every combination of soil,
climate, and use; new methods of achieving full grazing efficiency; new
ways of preserving summer grass for winter's fodderall are
revolutionizing English stock management. But all new ways bring new
problems in their train, as the new clovers brought bloat to the
seventeenth-century grazier and to every grazier ever since; the ley's
particular problems are the sterility and grass tetany among animals
pastured upon it, due probably to some mineral deficiency absent in the
old permanent pasture with its almost infinite mixture of grasses and
deep-rooting herbs. When this, and some minor problems, have been
solved new vistas hitherto undreamt of lie before the ley farmer. 'Doe
but you looke', wrote Blith, 'into and upon much of your new layd-down
Land to Graze, which being continually grazed . . . both breed better,
feed faster, milketh fruitfuller than old Pasture.' It is a lesson that has
taken three hundred years to learn.

12. Modern Times:
Mechanization

he past century and a half has seen the change-over almost
completed from near-mediaeval implements powered by oxen or
horses to the mechanization of every farming operation; but it is a
generalization that must be modified in this, that while machinery has
completely replaced animal power on the large lowland arable farms,
animal traction is only slowly disappearing from the holdings in the
hills. Since the first half of the nineteenth century saw the rise of the
threshing machine and the evolution of steam cultivation the tempo of
mechanization has increased until to-day new machines follow each
other at a bewildering speed.
But the immemorial time lag between invention and general use has
only recently shortened: the combine was patented in America in 1836,
the first 'combined threshing machine' was shown here in 1843, it came
into common use in California in 1860, but was unseen again in Britain
until 1926. To-day the old ways have changed, and reports of new
appliances in the farming Press are studied by a generation of men
which has become mechanically minded to a high degree. It is, indeed,
common to meet the farmer who is a better engineer than he is a
stockman. The momentum of mechanical change has especially been
speeded by the growth of the great implement firms during the past
century. The Royal Agricultural Society's engineer reported of the 1842
Royal Show: 'The manufacture even of the common implements has
already to a great extent passed out of the hands of the village
ploughwright and hedge-side carpenter, and become transferred to
makers possessed of great intelligence, skill and capital.' This one
sentence epitomizes a great and fundamental change in the character of
English farm implements.
The beginning of the displacement of the horse and the ox as prime
movers dates from 1859, when Clayton and Shuttleworth evolved the
first practicable traction engine, which had an almost immediate
application to steam cultivationthe hauling of a cable-drawn plough
across the arable fieldand in the same year at least one man, Ruck at
Cricklade, replaced his fourteen four-ox teams with one steam tackle set.
But the new technique for which high hopes were at first held never
became really popular for two reasons: while the traction engines were
working the horses or oxen which normally drew the plough were idle,
but they could not be dispensed with for they were needed for every
other unmechanized job on the farm; and the greater depth of ploughing
which was practised with the steam plough raised, with the subsoil,
problems of soil nutrition which could not be readily solved.
Meanwhile, the internal combustion engine was developing and
Daniel Pidgeon in 1892 forecast that 'there will be an increased use of
petroleum motors for agricultural purposes'. He was prophesying better
than he knew. The first application of the internal combustion engine to
the purposes of traction had already been made in America three years
before, where the Burger tractor of 1889 incorporated a single-cylinder
engine in a traction-engine chassis. The first oil-engined tractor built in
Britain won a silver medal at the 1897 Royal Show for Hornsbys, but in
T
spite of the appearance of many new and better types it was not until the
Fordsons began to cross the Atlantic in large numbers in 1917 that the
tractor made any very deep impression on British practice. After 1918
interest lapsed again, particularly when the events of 1921 sent much
arable down to grass again, but by 1931 Britain's tractor population had
grown to 20,000, by 1938 to 60,000 and by 1949 to 260,000. Between
1938 and 1948 the number of horses fell from 650,000 to 458,000 but
the loss of animal power was more than offset by the gain in tractors;
and it has been calculated that the nation increased its gross agricultural
traction power in these years by 68 per cent. Other developments have
extended the range of use of the tractor by adding the tracklayer to give
a more evenly distributed load on the soil and greater tractive power, the
power-take-off for the operation of trailed mechanical implements, the
hydraulic lift to give greater ease in the manipulation of tools, and light
two-wheeled models for market garden and other use.
But in spite of all modern developments the plough still remains the
primary implement of tillage, and the principles laid down by Blith, by
Small, and by Arbuthnot, and notably put into effect by Foljambe and
Stanyforth in the Rotherham plough of 1730, still hold good. In 1800
Plenty patented an iron frame to which all other parts of the plough
could be bolted, thus tolling the death knell of the heavy wooden
implement; and the modern plough has developed under the new
influence of tractor power into a multi-furrow implement of long-
breasted ley type or into a short-breasted digger, with a multitude of
designs for every other conceivable type of cultivation. The new minor
implements of tillage have descended from Finlayson's grubber
cultivator of 1824; from Armstrong's zigzag harrow and Smith of
Deanston's chain harrow of 1842 which replaced the ancient gate-stuck
bush and tined baulk of wood; and from the serrated disc roller of 1841
which made the clod beetle obsolete.
The seed drill evolved on lines first conceived by Plattes, Worlidge,
and pre-eminently by Tull, modified by Cooke in 1783; and it developed
into the Suffolk type by the work of Smyth of Peasenhall and others.
Hornsbys took out a patent for a spacing drill for roots in 1839, but
many decades were still to pass before the drill finally usurped the
ancient role of the broadcaster, the fiddler, and the dibbler. Pusey said of
his contemporary agriculture in 1839 that the plough, the harrow, the
threshing machine, and the turnip cutter were the only implements in
common use; and that 'the use of the drill-machine . . . has lately become
frequent in southern as well as in northern England, although it has
established itself so slowly that for a long time travelling machines of
this kind have made yearly journeys from Suffolk as far as Oxfordshire
for the use of those distant farmers by whom their services are required'.
One of the most valuable of all modern implements, the combine
drill sowing both seed and fertilizer, owes its first conception to
Worlidge. One of its more original but least practical predecessors was
Chandler's liquid manure drill of 1847, in which the liquid was dredged
from a tank into the seed funnel by cups on an endless chain. Swing-
steerage of the drill, giving greater accuracy of placement to the horse-
drawn drill, was also introduced by Smyths of Peasenhall, although the
great but little-known inventive genius of Salmon, agent to the Dukes of
Bedford, had evolved by 1800 'a drill so contrived that if the horse went
crooked the man guiding the machine could keep it straight'.
For at least four thousand years the sickle, and later the scythe, had
been the only implements with which either the corn or hay harvest
could be cut in Britain, unless the Gallic reaper of Roman times had ever
worked here. During the eighteenth century agricultural thought had
been considering ways of mechanizing the operations, but an offer of a
gold medal made by the Society of Arts in 1780 for the invention of a
reaper drew no bids until a William Pitt of Pendeford responded to a
suggestion from Arthur Young that the Gallic reaper might be applied to
modern use. Pitt designed a 'rippling' machine of circular saws which cut
off the heads of the corn when they were engaged in a comb, and then
threw the ears into a collecting box. It had many imitators but none met
with any great success. But a Northumberland millwright, John
Common of Denwick, was also inspired by the offer of the Society of
Arts and laid before them in 1812 a reaper which embodied the
reciprocating knife in a finger bar and the eccentric drive of the modern
mowing machine. So angry were local farm labourers at the prospect of
losing their employment in hand-reaping through the long late summer
days that Common was forced to abandon his work. But an Alnwick
family of ironfounders who had helped Common with the construction
of his machine emigrated to America, and from them McCormick
obtained Common's design, patented it, and brought his reaper in an
improved form back to England for the Great Exhibition of 1851, when
it met with probably the greatest instantaneous success of any farm
implement. In the meantime the Rev. Patrick Bell of Forfar had brought
out in 1826 a reaper which included an endless canvas for the reception
of the crop and its side delivery in swathes. Sheafing and wire-binding
inventions followed, and in 1878 Deerings marketed a self-binding
attachment. The modern binder was virtually complete, and the only
improvement which the present century has been able to add has been
the direct drive of the mechanism from the tractor power-take-off.
The mowing machine has had a largely similar history to that of the
binder. And of the auxiliary implements of the hayfield the tedder was
invented by Robert Salmon in 1814 but did not make much headway
against the traditional pitchfork until the middle of the century, shortly
before which the first horse rake had appeared; but it was not until 1896
that the modern swathe-turner made its bow. Hayloaders, the first shown
at the Royal Show of 1876, also made slow progress into popular favour.
The reason for the tardy adoption of all these haysel implements is not
far to seek: labour was cheap and new machines were dear, unreliable,
and foreign to the ancient usages of the countryside. The same was true
of the slow spread of the baler, although the first came in from America
in 1881.
Although the threshing of the corn crop by flail was a task which,
though tedious and lengthy, could be done during the slack winter
months, the threshing machine seems, curiously, to have been more
readily taken to the agrarian heart than other labour-saving devices. A
vivid word picture was painted by Pell of threshing after the invention of
the drum but before the application to it of steam power. 'One saw four,
or even six, splendid mares . . . going round and round, with a very small
boy and an over-balancing whip revolving on a little stage in the centre
of the circle, whose duty it was to flick the horses' backs in turn and to
keep up a perpetual litany of injunction.' This horse gear drove the drum,
but when the horses had been stabled at night 'the rattle of the threshing
might be heard in the great barn and the gleam of candle-light could be
seen through the cracks in the door. Inside is a treadwheel geared to the
drum. Six or eight honest men toil up it, a relay of the same number are
sitting on the straw . . . and heavy men are at a premium.'
The first attempts to substitute power threshing for the flail had
come in 1636 when Van Berg designed a series of crank-operated flails,
and in 1735 when Michael Menzies published designs of another
mechanical flail. A somewhat similar threshing machine was in use in
Lancashire at the end of the eighteenth century. Into it the unthreshed
straw was drawn between rollers, and the grain was beaten out by twelve
revolving beaters. The whole, worked by a two-horse wheel, had an
output of thirty-two quarters of oats a day. The inventor, Harper, said
that it worked at half the cost of a team of flailsmen with a similar
output, and he announced his intention of fitting attachments for
grinding, chaff-cutting, clothes washing, churning, and pumping water!
In 1753 Michael Stirling embodied in his thresher the earliest form of
drum, and thirty-five years later Andrew Meikle designed the first really
popular threshing machine in which a sparred drum revolved in a
sparred concave, a shaker screen separated the grain still remaining in
the straw, and two fans successively winnowed out the chaff and, after
hummelling, dressed the grain. The modern straw shaker did not follow
until fifty years later; the elevator, designed by Comes of Market
Drayton in 1847, was added to the thresher by Nalders in 1879; and in
1883 Howards of Bedford adapted the sheaf binder of the reaper to the
thresher straw delivery.
As has already been indicated, the travelling combination of the
threshing machine and the reaper which has come to be known as the
combine harvester did not gain a foothold in Britain until 1926. By 1941
a thousand combines were in use here, and for the 1950 harvest the
number had risen to eleven thousand. The speed at which the corn crop
can be cut, threshed, sacked or delivered into lorries has made the
harvest an expeditious business very largely independent of the weather,
but it has raised almost as many problems as it has solved. Once British
oats, barley, and wheat dried in the stook and were stored in the stack;
now the combine has brought in its train the need for providing a drier as
a substitute for the stook in wet seasons when the grain is too damp for
safe storage, and silos or other stores in place of the stack. And after all
this the straw still remains in the field, to be harvested by pick-up baler
burnt or disced and ploughed in.
The twentieth century has been so fertile in ideas that many of the
accepted implements of to-day are entirely new conceptions and have no
roots in the past, and which, although of great intrinsic importance, have
little of history behind them. The manure loader and distributor have
taken the backache out of the handling and spreading of muck; the
potato planter, the brassica transplanter, and the root harvesters do the
work once performed by seasonal labour; sheep shearers have replaced
the hand clippings that were the occasion of so much neighbourly co-
operation; excavators and pipelayers make light work of drainage;
mobile sprayers apply the newest insecticides and weedkillers;
haymaking is being gradually replaced by grass-drying for which the
grass is cut and loaded in one operation, or by silage gathered by the
buck-rake; and the auto-recording milking outfit, the cooler and the
bottling machine, allow the milk to flow from the cow's udder to the
consumer untouched by hand. The list of twentieth-century innovations
is almost as long and as important as is that of the new improvements
upon the old ideas; and indeed the principal need of the day is not yet
more new machinery but the standardization of the many models now
available.
With the horse has gone the old functional beauty of which Stanley
Baldwin wrote so nostalgically, the team breasting the hill homeward
with the last load in the early autumn twilight. But a new functional
beauty is in the eye of the young beholderthe effortless and
superlative efficiency of tractor and combine where once man's body
sweated and grew bent over plough handle, scythe, and flail; and the
regularly rectangular parturitions of the pick-up baler where only a few
decades ago women and children threw the pitiful weight of under-
nourished bodies into hay rake and fork.

13. Modern Times: Milk

o-day some 1,200 million gallons of milk are drunk each year in
England and Wales. Two hundred years ago the liquid
consumption of milk was infinitesimal by comparison with this
huge figure, and a century ago it was small. Even before the last war the
nation drank only 700 million gallons a year. Many factors have worked
to bring about this remarkable change both in national habit and
agricultural production: the scientific demonstration and growing
popular appreciation of the value of clean milk as a safe and nourishing
food, and cheap milk schemes for children and pregnant women on the
one hand; and on the other the conversion of almost the whole
countryside into one vast dairy by the rise of rapid transport, first by rail
and then by road, and the reorientation of much of British agriculture.
Official encouragement in the form of guaranteed prices has made the
dairy among the surest, the most regular, and the highest sources of
profit on the farm; and competition from overseas has been absent
because liquid milk is a bulky commodity expensive in transport in
comparison with its low selling price, and because of its rapid
deterioration it is one in which the producer on the spot must always
have the advantage. The result of all this has been to double the
population of our milch cattle in the last three-quarters of a century.
A realization of how profound has been the change comes from an
examination of the authorities of the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries. That Hertfordshire charlatan, William Ellis of Gaddesden,
whose pen was as powerful in its way as Arthur Young's but whose
plough had been even less competent, wrote in 1732 of cows as making
4 a year profit 'by suckling Calves for the Butchers, or by making
Butter and Cheese, or by fatting the Beast for the Butcher'. These uses
were the immemorial functions of the cow, whose product in butter and
cheese was augmented by that from ewe and goatand mankind could
drink the whey if it chose. Milk as a drink was doubtless had by the
husbandman and his family, but the great business of producing milk for
sale as milk had not begun. Probably typical of the ratio between milk
use in the liquid and the processed forms were the returns in 1618 from
Robert Loder's Berkshire dairy of a dozen beasts; here, of total receipts
from the dairy of 22 os. 4d., only 1 13s. 3d. came from the sales of
whole milk, while butter accounted for 6 18s. 11d., cheese for 13 12s.
3d., and whey and buttermilk for the balance.
The divorce of the former countryman from the family cow on the
common and his migration into the town in the course of the industrial
revolution saw the first small beginning of a now great industry, but
dairying for the liquid milk market had of necessity to be conducted on
the outskirts of each town; ten miles, perhaps, was the limit of distance
which slow road transport placed between producer and consumer. The
Shorthorn was the almost universal town dairyman's cow, and the larger
London dairies at least ran to three to five hundred head apiece, bought
as three- or four-year-old down-calvers at the Islington Thursday
market. All available grassland around the metropolis was brought into
service as pasture in summer, and in winter stock was stalled by night
and yarded by day. The cow-keeper usually let his herd to the retailer,
who milked in the morning between four and half past six and again in
T
the afternoon from half past one to three. Average yields throughout a
milking life of up to seven years were claimed to be in the region of 820
gallons, but the retailer's 'Black Cow'the pump in the dairy yard
yielded best of all. This figure of 820 gallons is that given by John
Middleton in his Middlesex survey for the Board of Agriculture (2nd
edition, 1807), and there is no reason why his figure should have been
deliberately inaccurate. It is a high one in relation to the present national
average of less than six hundred gallons, but it probably came from
some of the best of the nation's dairy stock. Conditions in the town dairy
varied, but the worst were unspeakable and the ranks of retailers were
filled by the lowest grades of society who, lacking a 'Black Cow', did not
hesitate to adulterate the milk with a pailful of water from a horse
trough, or worse. 'No delicate person', said Middleton, 'could possibly
drink the milk were they fully acquainted with the filthy manners of the
dealers in it.'
Demand in the other industrial regions was growing. Holt wrote of
Lancashire in 1795: 'Milk is the cheapest food, and probably the
healthiest that can at this day be purchased. It is no wonder then that the
demand for this article should be great in this populous county.' Here
average yields were estimated at 640 gallons, and the more advanced,
and honest, dairymen were beginning to test quality by specific gravity
with the aid of Dicas's new lactometer.
But better things than the dark, dank, draughty byres of London,
with a complete absence of cleanliness and widespread
unscrupulousness, were on the way. The greatest innovator of all, a man
to whom due credit has never been given, was the Glasgow dairyman
William Harley. Harley's ideas, drawn from the Netherlands like so
much else that was best in British farming, became as the Harleian Dairy
System the model for the progressive milk producer of the 1830's, and
long after. They were founded upon the three great modern precepts of
regularity, order, and cleanliness, and practised upon the herd of
Ayrshires at Harley's model cowsheds at Willowbank. Buildings were
light and clean, with head passages for feeding and dung channels.
Fodder was steam-cookedroots, potatoes, cake, and alland fed as
individual rations to each animal and withdrawn at the first signs of
repletion. Feed also included hay from young grass from meadows
sprayed with cattle urine by a fire engine and cut at monthly intervals;
and brewers' grains were ensiled in pits, in which they were packed and
rendered air-tight. Every week the quantity of milk produced by each
cow on one day was measured and recordedone of the first, if not the
first, instance of routine milk recording.
The first great impetus to milk production in the liquid form came
from the establishment of the railways in the middle years of the
nineteenth century, for they opened distant urban markets to the country
dairyman. Three-quarters of a century later road transport was to bring
even more remote producers into the liquid market. And in the interval,
during the bad times of the 1880's, Scotsmen and West Countrymen
came in their thousands from their family smallholdings to lay down the
bankrupt arable farms of the Home Counties to grass for milk. They
added appreciably to the stream of production which Rew in 1892
estimated at 1,400 million gallons from the United Kingdom. Of this,
some 570 million gallons were sold as whole milk, 617 million were
made into butter, and 224 million into cheese. To London at this time
there came by rail 110,000 gallons a day to supplement the yields of the
8,500 cows in the city dairies, now becoming greatly depleted by the
growing competition of the country cow.
Although reliable statistics are absent, estimates of yields at the end
of the nineteenth century show that in the few recorded herds, well
above the average in management and quality, output ran at 666 gallons
a cow over a period of several years. High yielders were not uncommon;
the Duke of Westminster had ten thousand-galloners among the forty-
eight cross-Shorthorns in milk at his Grange Farm in 1894. But a cross-
section of the herds of the whole country seemed to indicate a national
average of about four hundred gallons, and that was generally agreed to
be higher than it had been in previous decades when the pedigree craze
had sacrificed dairy performance to fashionable type. Better rations were
now contributing to rising yields, and oil cake was in wide use. In the
absence of general recording, however, fodder could be related to output
in only the vaguest way, and a balanced production ration was still in the
future. So also was the steaming up of the calving cow; Spearing in 1892
was recommending that three weeks before calving she should receive
nothing but medium-quality hay.
These years at the close of the nineteenth century saw the patenting
of a multitude of milking machines, most of them miracles of misplaced
ingenuity such as that of Murchland in 1890, in which the vacuum which
drew the milk from the udder was created by an ordinary farmyard pump
coupled to the teat-cups by pipe. One, however, came out at the 1895
Darlington Royal Show which contained the germs of the modern
machine: it was the Thistle Mechanical Milking Machine, to which a
double valve gave the intermittent suction effect of the suckling calf. On
test it clean-milked ten cows in from three to five minutes each, taking
nineteen gallons from the ten and leaving only two and a half pints for
the strippers. The judges' comment was a shade ingenuous: that the cows
were quickly and thoroughly milked, 'although any self-respecting cow
might object on principle to having her teats tugged by a hydra-headed
monster'.
Cheese production was by now entering upon its last phase in those
areas where, at least from mediaeval days, it had been the staple product.
In the south-west, Gloucester was making its half-cream single and full-
cream double cheeses, and manufacture ranged westward into the
Somerset dairy country around Cheddar, where there had been an early
rise in co-operative manufacture, and north-eastwards into
Warwickshire. The long-maturing Cheshire cheeseof which to-day
only a few score of makers survive of the many thousands even of pre-
war dayswas matched in the east by the Derbyshire products and
southwards by the great Stilton of Melton Mowbray. While cheese ran in
well-defined areas, butter was universally made, and by the end of the
century the centrifugal separator was almost everywhere replacing the
old gravity methods, with hand-skimming of the cream from the wide
shallow pans of milk.
By the beginning of the twentieth century liquid milk production
had definitely established itself as one of the major branches of British
farming, but the years between the opening of the century and 1914 saw
little progress over previous decades in dairy technique, although more
efficient cooling methods and notably the corrugated internal water
coolerwere spreading, and the dairy farmer was moving slowly
towards the use of specially designed buildings for his milch stock. A
major factor in improvement was the new knowledge disseminated from
the British Dairy Institute, founded in 1888 and since become the
National Institute for Research in Dairying. Legislation was also setting
new standards of quality by the 1901 Sale of Milk Regulations which
laid down the still existing minima for fats and solids-not-fat, and of
cleanliness through central regulations administered by the local
authorities. The period also saw the beginnings of a more general use of
milk recording under local schemes sponsored by agricultural colleges
and county councils The rate of progress towards more economic and
cleaner methods of milk production was accelerated by the First World
War, and the milch population also rose from 2,172,000 cows and
heifers in milk or in calf in 1914 in England and Wales to a figure of
2,193,000 in 1918.
State assistance for milk-recording societies was forthcoming in
1919, and shortly afterwards progeny recording methods were initiated
by the N.I.R.D. to determine the best milking strains in stock. Designs
for milking machines, which had been tested by the Royal Agricultural
Society from 1882 onwards, improved and to the few machines that
were on farms before 1914 there were added many more under the stress
of war-time labour shortage; but keeping quality suffered somewhat
until the adoption of steam sterilization of the machine parts became
general. Rewards for cleanliness had been urged for some decades, but it
was not until the First World War that differential prices for graded milk
were adopted, and when price regulation ended after the war the
Ministry of Health took the matter a stage further by the recognition of
peace-time grades by the Milk (Special Designations) Orders of 1922
and 1923. A nation-wide supply of completely safe milk was visualized
under the 1935 attested herds scheme, with premium payments for milk
from herds from which all tuberculosis had been eradicated. The
progress of the scheme has not been great, for in thirteen years only 13
per cent of the milk-selling herds of the country had been attested.
The great depression of the 1930's forced many farmers into the
ranks of milk producersthe 'cow-keepers' upon whom the Victorian
yeoman corn-grower had so greatly looked down. Milk production, in
actual sales of milk off farms, was 856 million gallons in 1933-4, at the
moment when the National Farmers' Union sponsored the Milk
Marketing Scheme which led to the formation of the Milk Marketing
Board. An historic day dawned when co-operation within the industry
for the first time gave both a guaranteed price and a guaranteed market
for all the milk from the farm, of which the Board became the sole
purchaser. The need for such an organization had long been felt, because
before this the complete lack of combination among producers of
supplies which ran always slightly ahead of demand put the dairy
farmers into the hands of the distributors; and the Permanent Joint Milk
Committee of 1922, formed for the negotiation of prices to be
voluntarily observed, had virtually broken down.
To its duties as a price-regulating wholesaler the board added work
in propaganda which did much to stimulate demand for the product it
had to sell, and services in the form of unified milk recording, artificial
insemination, and economic and financial advice which have been of
inestimable benefit to the producer. The measure of the board's success
is the 1948 production figure of 1,379 million gallons of milk sold off
the farm, 1,237 million gallons of it for liquid consumption.
The yardsticks of the task which still lies ahead are the facts that the
national average yield is estimated to be in the region of only 550
gallons a cow a year at a time when the best animals are exceeding 3,000
gallons in a lactation; and that still only 19 per cent of the nation's dairy
cows (2,782,000 in 1946) are recorded under the National Milk Records
scheme into which the Milk Marketing Board co-ordinated the local
recording societies in 1943. Without records there can be neither an
economic use of fodder nor a constructive breeding policy based on
milking propensity.
Dairying technique has seen some deep-reaching developments
under the stimuli of the guaranteed markets and prices which have been
available since 1933, often almost the only lifebelts in a sea of economic
uncertainty. Perhaps this has been most marked in the sphere of the
variations upon the cowshed, the modern descendant of Harley's model,
which have been evolved in conjunction with the improvement of the
milking machine which now extracts about one-third of the nation's
milk. Most of them have been attemptsand successful onesto meet
the growing shortage and rising cost of labour: Mr. A. J. Hosier's
movable bail permits stock to be milked in the field all the year round,
with a saving on the capital cost of buildings, their maintenance and
cleaning; and a logical successor to the bail has been the stationary
milking parlour which, in conjunction with a yard for the wintering of
milch stock, allows a large herd to be handled by only a few workers.
But the greatest single factor in the improvement of both British
dairy stock and of milk yields is likely to be the chain of artificial
insemination stations set up by the Milk Marketing Board and a few co-
operative organizations and private firms in the main dairying areas.
Where the small milk producer was once largely restricted to the use of
such a scrub bull as he could afford to buy, now he has available semen
from high-quality sires; and in 1948-9 some quarter of a million cows
were artificially impregnated. Milking capacity is held to be mainly
inherited from the sire, and where one milk-bred bull can inseminate
15,000 cows a year the result can only be a remarkable rise in the
milking capacity of the national herd. Sir John Russell has said, 'We may
yet live to see bulls, other than a small select aristocracy, become
unwanted anachronisms'. Parallel work is also proceeding on the female
side, where it has been shown that the fertilized ova from pedigree high-
performance cows may be transplanted into scrub foster mothers for
rearing and birth. As one cow may produce 75,000 ova in her lifetime
the prospect is a staggering one.
Intensification of management is also proceeding on lines largely
laid down by Professor Robert Boutflour at the Royal Agricultural
College, with the closely regulated steaming up of calving cows
accompanied by pre-milkingmilking before calving to stimulate the
activity of the mammary glandsand close attention to the relation
between food intake and milk output. Another development of great
potentiality is the American method, still in the experimental stage, of
determining the future milking powers of the heifer calf by examination
of its mammary gland development, thus obviating the culling of
unproductive milch stock after the expenditure of three years' food and
management upon them. A recent suggestion that higher yields from
better-managed herds could increase national production of milk by one-
half without any rise in the milch cattle population may not be an over-
estimate.


Epilogue

he path of English farming history has led us through more than
four thousand years. For three thousand of the journey the picture
of native agriculture can barely be recaptured in the dim dawn
the first faint beginnings when Neolithic man scratched a living from
rude arable plots upon the moors; the nomadic livestock husbandry
centred in the great downland camps; the hint of better things to come
which new immigrants brought with them in their hoe ploughs, to
imprint the lines of their square fields on these same downs; and the
heavy implement which the Belgae bequeathed to the Roman villa, and
with which the Saxon settler drew the intricate network of open fields of
which the shadowy tracery can still be discerned.
But however faint the picture, the subject is plain. All this farming,
except for the Roman interlude, was one which nourished the peasants
who practised it and fed the kings, the lords, the great men of the
Church, who owned the soil that was tilled. But when the great
mediaeval wool trade opened an international market for the produce of
the land it also opened the door to a great new problem. An older
generation had grown the crops that fed it, and starved when they failed:
the farm generations of the future were to live by the sale of their grain
and meat to the teeming millions of non-producers in the cities, and
again to starve when the apparently uncontrollable forces of
international finance, of urban-dictated politics, of a regional surplus that
marched with want in other lands, closed home and foreign markets
against their produce.
If history has any virtue it is this, that it adds the fourth dimension
of time to the study of the present and gives a sounder perspective to the
consideration of the future. Any man of any century before the middle of
the nineteenth could have applied the precedent of the past with some
confidence to the discovery of the shape of things to come. But two wars
and the opening up of new continents have made national agriculture
only part of a world entity; precedent has lost its validity as a prophet;
and the old farming has disappeared so completely into the melting-pot
that no man, historian or statesman, townsman or countryman, can
predict what will emerge.
But history can still use its knowledge of the past to pose the
questions of the present and the future, even if it cannot now answer
them. And in the small world of English farming which we have been
considering it may ask how statesmanship can bring the competence
which new science has added to the old crafts, into every English field;
and how men with sound training but without capital can enter through
the door of an industry to which the key has for six hundred years been
depth of purse and not depth of knowledge and competence. Will the
State be forced to fall back upon nationalization, with the great
inheritance of empiric art with stock and crop sacrificed at the altar of a
new army of bureaucracy; or will easier access to capital, some degree
of ownership by public corporation with a return to a new form of the
ancient stock-and-land lease, or the extension of workers' co-partnership
schemes, suffice to give the answer?
T
Will the lessons of history this time prove false; or will the new
security of the Agriculture Act of 1947 be swept away in a flood of
financial retrenchment, as in 1921? If planned cropping survives a
coming slump, or even national bankruptcy, to what ends will it be
directed when world supplies of cheap grain again make it unprofitable
to grow so much of our own wheat? To yet more milk? Or will not the
falling standards of life already have imposed a reduction in
consumption here? To meat from our supreme pastures, but again so
dependent for its sale upon a full purse in the pocket of the housewife?
To capturing the great pig, butter, and cheese export trade which the
Danes built up for themselves? Or to what?
Or if the Act goes, will English farming again become a rudderless
and sinking ship in a sea of foreign produce flooding the nation's shops
and mills at the behest of the urban voter and his cry of cheap food? Or
can the English farmer so reduce his costs of production by
mechanization, by the application of economic methods of labour use on
the land, by raising yields by a more adequate use of artificial fertilizers,
that he can face such foreign competition with equanimity?
Or does not the key to the door of agricultural prosperity lie in the
hands of the men and women in the towns, with their preponderance of
voting power; and if their goodwill be won will not the ship of English
farming be able to weather the worst storms ahead? Can such work as
that which the Association of Agriculture is sponsoring bring to the clerk
and the miner, to the surburban housewife and the girl behind the
counter, the knowledge that in this land of England they have a heritage
which, if cherished in time of peace, can feed them in adversity. Is not
this the ultimate answer to a great and urgent problem?

Bibliography

he list of books that follows is intended to serve a threefold
purpose: as a guide to further reading by fellow students; to
indicate the extent of my own indebtedness; and to take the place
of source references in the preceding pages. These references were
jettisoned only after much thought and more misgiving, for the student
rightly requires chapter and verse for statements of fact; but to the
general reader textual notes are both forbidding and distractingand the
claims of the general reader won.
The first section includes those works which are of value for more
than one of the chapters. Thereafter books pertinent to each period are
listed. The bibliography does not profess to be complete, but it does
contain those books which I have found most useful myself, and most of
the modern ones themselves include full bibliographies of their own
periods or subjects.


GENERAL

Ernie: English Farming Past and Present, 5th ed. (London, 1936).
Clapham and Power (ed): Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol.
1, The Agrarian Life of the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1942),
particularly Parain's chapter on the evolution of agrarian technique,
Marc Bloc on the rise of seigneurial institutions, and Neilson on
mediaeval agrarian society in England.
H. C. Darby (ed.): Historical Geography of England before A.D. 1800
(Cambridge, 1936).
F. Seebohm: English Village Community (London, 1915).
H. L. Gray: English Field Systems (Harvard, 1915).
C. S. and C. S. Orwin: The Open Fields (Oxford, 1938).
J. B. Passmore: The English Plough (Oxford, 1930).
J. E. Thorold Rogers: History of Agriculture and Prices in England
(Oxford, 1866-92).
E. Lipson: Economic History of England (London, 1935).
W. G. Hoskins (ed.): Studies in Leicestershire Agrarian History
(Leicester, 1949).
Sir John Clapham: Concise Economic History of Britain (Cambridge,
1949).
Ruston and Whitney: Hooton Pagnell, the Agricultural Evolution of a
Yorkshire Village (London, 1934).
R. C. Gaut: A History of Worcestershire Agriculture and Rural
Evolution (Worcester, 1939).
G. Slater: The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of the Common
Fields (London, 1907).
A. H. Johnson: The Disappearance of the Small Landowner (Oxford,
1909)-E. C. K. Gonner: Common Land and Enclosure (London, 1912).
M. K. Bennett: 'British Wheat Yield per Acre for Seven
Centuries' (Economic Journal, 1937). J. A. Venn: Foundations of
Agricultural Economics (Cambridge, 2nd ed., 1933).
W. H. R. Curtler: A Short History of English Agriculture (Oxford,1909).
T. B. Franklin: History of Agriculture (London, 1948).
T
C. S. Orwin: History of English Farming (London, 1949).
D. Macdonald: Agricultural Writers from Sir Walter Henley to A. Young,
1200-1800 (London, 1908).
W. F. Perkins, British and Irish Writers on Agriculture (Lymington, 3rd
ed., 1939).
G. E. Fussell: Old English Farming Books (London, 1947); and More
Old English Farming Books, 1731-93 (London, 1950).

Chapter One: PREHISTORIC PREVIEW

E. C. Curwen: Plough and Pasture (London, 1946).
N. I. Vavilov: The Problem of the World's Agriculture in the Light of the
Latest Investigations (London, 1931).
Jessen and Helback: Cereals in Great Britain and Ireland in Prehistoric
and Early Historic Times (Copenhagen, 1944).
E. C. Curwen: 'Early Development of Agriculture in Britain' (Proc.
Prehistoric Society, 1938).
E. C. Curwen: Air Photography and the Evolution of the Cornfield
(London, 1938).
G. A. Holleyman: 'Celtic Field System in South Britain'
{Antiquity, 1935).
G. Clark: Prehistoric England (London, 1940). J. B. P. Karslake:
'Plough Coulters from Silchester (Antiquaries' Journal, 1933).
Collingwood and Myres: Roman Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Settlement
(Oxford, 1937).
M. Hilzheimer: Sheep (Antiquity, 1936); and Evolution of the Domestic
Horse (Antiquity, 1935).
F. G. Payne: 'The Plough in Ancient Britain' (Archaeological Journal,
1947).

Chapter Two: THE SAXON SCENE

Mawer and Stenton (ed.): Introduction to the Survey of English Place-
names (Cambridge, 1929).
R. H. Hodgkin: History of the Anglo-Saxons (Oxford, 1935).
F. W. Maitland: Domesday Book and Beyond (Cambridge, 1897).
F. M. Stenton: Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1943).
Anon: Rectitudines Singularum Personarum (a convenient text is in
Bland, Brown, and Tawney's English Economic History).

Chapter Three: DOMESDAY AND MANORIAL FARMING

F. M. Stenton: Types of Manorial Structure in the Northern Danelaw
(Oxford, 1910).
H. S. Bennett: Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant
Conditions, 1150-1400 (Cambridge, 1937).
Victoria County Histories: Articles on the Domesday Survey.
W. H. Hale: Domesday of St. Paul's (Camden Society, 1858).
W. J. Ashley: Bread of Our Forefathers (Oxford, 1928).
D. C. Douglas: Social Structure of Mediaeval East Anglia (Oxford,
1927).
N. S. B. and C. C. Gras: Economic and Social History of an English
Village (Cambridge, Mass., 1930).
E. Lamond (ed.): Walter of Henley's Husbandry, Together with an
Anonymous Husbandry, Seneschaucie and Robert Grosseteste's
Rules (Royal Historical Society, 1890).

Chapter Four: TENANT AND SHEEP

E. A. Kosminsky: Hundred Rolls of 1279 as a Source for English
Agrarian History (Econ. Hist. Rev., 1931).
A. E. Levett: Black Death on the Estates of the Bishopric of Winchester
(Oxford, 1916).
A. E. Levett: Studies in Manorial History (Oxford, 1938).
N. Neilson: Customary Rents (Oxford, 1910).
E. Power: Mediaeval English Wool Trade (Oxford, 1941).

Chapter Five: SIXTEENTH-CENTURY RENAISSANCE

Fitzherbert: The Boke of Husbandrye (1523) (ed. Skeat, English Dialect
Society, 1882).
R. H. Tawney: Agrarian Problem of the Sixteenth Century (London,
1912).
Tusser: Five Hundreth good pointes of husbandrie (1573) (a good
working edition is that collated from all the texts by W. Mavor,
1812).
Mascall: The first Booke of Cattell (1591).
B. Googe: Four Bookes of Husbandrie, collected by M. Conradus
Heresbachius (1577).
M. Campbell: English Yeoman under Elizabeth and the Early Stuarts
(Yale, 1942).

Chapter Six: THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

H. Plat: New and Admirable Arte of Setting of Corne (1600).
E. Maxey: New Instruction of Plowing and Setting of Corne (1601).
Markham: A Way to Get Wealth (1625) (the best collection of Markham
for general use).
S. Hartlib: Legacy (1651).
R. Weston: Discours of Husbandrie (1650).
W. Blith: English Improver Improved (1652).
A. Yarranton: Great Improvement of Lands by Clover (1663).
H. Best: Farming Book (1641) (Surtees Society, 1857).
R. Loder: Farm Accounts 1610-20 (Camden Society, 1936).
R. Lennard: Rural Northamptonshire Under the Commonwealth
(Oxford, 1916).

Chapter Seven: THRESHOLD OF GREAT THINGS

J. Worlidge: Systema Agriculturae (1669).
J. Hough ton: Collection of Letters for the Improvement of Husbandry
and Trade, 1681-3 and 1691-1703.
J. T. Nourse: Campania Foelix (1700).
J. Mortimer: Whole Art of Husbandry (1707).
W. Ellis: The Practical Farmer, or Hertfordshire Husbandman (1732).
W. Ellis: The Modern Husbandman (1731).
E. Lisle: Observations in Husbandry (1757).

Chapter Eight: NEW WAYS WITH STOCK AND CROP

J. Tull: The New Horse-Houghing Husbandry (1731).
Royal Agricultural Society of England's Journals (the period 1890-1900
is particularly rich in biographical material on eighteenth-century
farming leaders).
W. Marshall: Rural (Economies of Norfolk (1787), Yorkshire (1788),
Glocestershire (1789), Midland Counties (1790), West of England
(1796), and Southern Counties (1798).
Board of Agriculture County Reports, particularly Bailey and Culley's
Cumberland (1797), Arthur Young's Essex (1807) and
Hertfordshire (1804), J. Middleton's Middlesex (1798), N. Kent's
Norfolk (1796), and J. Billingsley's Somerset (1797).
A. Young: Tours, Southern Counties (1768), North of England (1770),
East of England (1771); Annals of Agriculture, 1784-1815.
D. Defoe: Tour Through England and Wales. p 225

Chapter Nine: THE NEW STOCK

G. Culley: Observations upon Live Stock (1786).
J. Lawrence: A General Treatise on Cattle, the Ox, the Sheep, and the
Swine (1805).
R.A.S.E. Journals.
Marshall's Rural conomies and the Board of Agriculture Reports
(above) all deal with regional breeds under their respective districts.
W. Youatt: The Horse (1834), Cattle (1834), Sheep (1837), andThe Pig
(1847).
D. Low: The Breeds of Domestic Animals of the British Isles (1840).
J. Wilson: Evolution of British Cattle and the Fashioning of Breeds
(1909).
A. Fraser: Sheep Husbandry (London, 1949).
Breed Societies: Most of the breed societies' publications contain
muchbut sometimes partisanhistorical material.
British Breeds of Livestock (Stationery Office, 1938).
'Britain Can Breed It' (Farmer and Stock-Breeder, London, 1949).

Chapter Ten: MODERN TIMES

Royal Agricultural Society of England Journals (particularly the reports
on the prize farm competitions).
Sir James Scott Watson: History of the R.A.S.E. (London, 1939).
Farmer and Stock-Breeder (London, 1843 to date).
Cobbett: Rural Rides.
Caird: English Agriculture in 1850-1 (London, 1852).
J. Johnstone: An Account of the Most Approved Mode of Draining Land
according to the System practised by Mr. Joseph
Elkington(Edinburgh, 1797).
Agriculture in the Twentieth Century: Essays Presented to Sir Daniel
Hall (Oxford, 1939).
H. Rider Haggard: Rural England (London, 1902).
Sir A. Daniel Hall: A Pilgrimage of British Farming, 1910-12 (London,
1914).
Astor and Rowntree: British Agriculture (London, 1938).
Chapter Eleven: MODERN TIMES: CROPS

J. Percival: Wheat in Great Britain (London, 1934).
E. S. Beaven: Barley (London, 1947).
G. D. H. Bell: Cultivated Plants of the Farm (Cambridge, 1948).
Sir R. G. Stapledon and W. Davies: Ley Farming (London, rev. ed.,
1948).
R. Salaman: History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge,
1949).

Chapter Twelve: MODERN TIMES: MECHANIZATION

Royal Agricultural Society of England Journals (particularly the reports
of machines and implements at the Royal Shows, and D. Pidgeon's
reviews of developments in Journals for 1890-1).
C. Culpin: Farm Machinery (London, 3rd ed., 1947).
J. C. Hawkins: Mechanical Equipment of the Farm (London, 1949).
Handbook of the Collections illustrating Agricultural Implements and
Machinery (Science Museum, London, 1930).

Chapter Thirteen: MODERN TIMES: MILK

W. Harley: The Harleian Dairy System (London, 1829). R.A.S.E.
Journals.
Milk Marketing Board: Milk Facts and Figures (London, proceeding) .