The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Short History of English Agriculture
by W. H. R.  Curtler

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net


Title: A Short History of English Agriculture

Author: W. H. R.  Curtler

Release Date: August 25, 2005 [EBook #16594]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ENGLISH AGRICULTURE ***




Produced by Million Book Project, Juliet Sutherland, Tricia
Gilbert and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net

OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1909


HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH, NEW YORK
TORONTO AND MELBOURNE

RECEIPTS.					EXPENSES.
	£	s.	d.			£	s.	d.
Fixed rents	18	3	73/4		Rents paid and allowed	0	3	21/2
Farm of market	0	2	6		Ploughs and carts	2	17	4
Chevage[67]	0	8	6		Buildings and walls	4	5	101/2
Foldage	0	3	91/2		Small necessaries	0	7	103/4
Sale of works	5	13	23/4		Dairy	0	4	31/4
Herbage	1	0	4		Threshing	1	15	51/2
Hay	2	12	11		Meadow and autumn expenses	0	1	4
Turf, &c.	1	13	61/2		Stock	0	16	7
Underwood	5	10	2		Bailiff	1	19	0
Grain	61	12	31/4		Steward	1	6	9 1/2
Cider	1	1	11 1/4		Grain	8	2	4 1/2
Stock	5	3	0		Expenses of acct.	1	0	81/2
Dairy	4	3	03/4
Pleas	14	0	0
Tallage	16	13	4
	———————					———————
	£128	2	23/4			£23	0	93/4

The manor was almost entirely self-sufficing; of necessity, for towns were few and distant, and the roads to them bad. Each would have its smith, millwright, thatcher, &c., paid generally in kind for their services. There was little trade with the outside world, except for salt—an invaluable article when meat had to be salted down every autumn for winter use, since there were no roots to keep the cattle on—and iron for some of the implements. Nearly everything was made in the village.

The mediaeval system of tillage was compulsory; even the freeholders could not manage their plots as they wished, because all the soil of the township formed one whole and was managed by the entire village. Even the lord[68] had to conform to the customs of the community. Any other system than this, which must have been galling to the more enterprising, was impossible, for as the various holdings lay in unfenced strips all over the great common fields, individual initiative was out of the question. As may be imagined, the great number of strips all mixed together often led to great confusion, sometimes 2 or 3 acres could not be found at all, and disputes owing to careless measurement were frequent.

It is not surprising that the services by which the villeins paid rent for their holdings to the lord very early began to be commuted for money; it was much more convenient to both parties; and with this change from a 'natural economy' to a 'money economy' the destruction of the manorial system commenced, though it was to take centuries to effect it.

The first money payments apparently date from as early as 900,[69] but must then have been very few, and services were the rule in the thirteenth and earlier centuries, though at the beginning of the twelfth we find a great number of rent-paying tenants.[70] In the fourteenth century money began to be more generally available, and the process of commutation grew steadily; a process greatly accelerated by the destruction of large numbers of tenants who paid rent in services by the Black Death of 1348-9, which forced lords of manors to let their lands for money or work them themselves with hired labour. Before that visitation, however, it appears that commutation of labour services for fixed annual payments had made very little progress.[71]

When these services were commuted for money in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries they were put at 1d. a day in winter, and 2d. a day in summer, and rather more in harvest[72]; and we may put the ordinary agricultural labourers' wages from 1250-1350 all the year round at 2d. a day, and from 1350-1400 at 3d., but few were paid in this way. Many were paid by the year, with allowances of food besides and sometimes clothes, and many were in harvest at all events paid by the piece. At Crondal in Hampshire in 1248 a carter by the year received 4s., a herdsman 2s. 3d., a day a or dairymaid, 2s.[73] The change to money payments was beneficial to both parties; it stopped many of the dishonest practices of the lord's bailiff, apart from the fact that farming by officials was an expensive method. It meant, too, that religious festivals and bad weather would no longer diminish the lord's profits; on the other hand, the tenant could devote himself entirely to his holding free from annoying labour services.[74]

The state of agriculture at the time of Domesday was apparently very low, judging by the small returns of manors,[75] but by the time of Edward I it had made considerable progress. During the reign of Henry III England had grown in opulence, and continued to do so under his great son, who found time from his manifold tasks to encourage agriculture and horticulture. Fruit and forest trees, shrubs and flowers, were introduced from the continent, and we are told that the hop flourished in the royal gardens.[76] At his death England was prosperous, the people progressing in comfort, the population advancing, the agricultural labourers were increasing in numbers, the value of the land had risen and was rising. Then came a reaction from which England did not recover for two centuries, and Harrison, who wrote his description of England at the end of the sixteenth century, says that many of the improvements began to be neglected in process of time, so that from Henry IV till the latter end of Henry VII there was little or no use for them in England, 'but they remained unknown.'

The Hundred Rolls of Edward I, which embody the results of the labours of a commission appointed by that monarch to inquire into encroachments on royal lands and royal jurisdiction, show clearly that there had been since the Domesday Survey a very great growth in the rural population, a sure sign that agriculture was flourishing; and on some estates the number of free tenants had increased largely, but the burdens of the villeins were not less onerous than they had been.

It was in the thirteenth century that the practice of keeping strict and minute accounts became general, and the accounts of the bailiff of those days would be a revelation to the bailiff of these.

At the same time we must not forget that the earliest improvements in English agriculture were largely due to the monks, who from their constant journeys abroad were able to bring back new plants and seeds; while it is well known that many of the religious houses, the Cistercians especially, who always settled in the remote country, were most energetic farmers, their energy being materially assisted by their wealth. It is said that the great Becket when he visited a monastery did not disdain to labour in the field.

Among other benefits that the landed interest gained at this time was the more easy transference of land provided, inter alia, by the statute of Quia Emptores, which led to many tenants selling their lands, provided the rights of the lord were preserved, and to a great increase consequently of free tenants, many of whom had quite small holdings.[77] The amalgamation of holdings by the more industrious and skilful has, as we should expect, been a well-marked tendency all through the history of English agriculture, and began early. For instance, according to the records of S. Paul's Cathedral, John Durant, whose ancestor in 1222 held only one virgate in 'Cadendon', had in 1279 eight or ten at least. At 'Belchamp', Martin de Suthmere, one of the free tenants, held 245 acres by himself and his tenants, twenty-two in number, who rendered service to him; one of them being de Vere, Earl of Oxford, who held 17 acres under Martin. To such a position had the abler of the small holders of a century or so before already pushed their way, in spite of the heavy hand of feudalism, which did much to hinder individual initiative. At this period and until Tudor times England, as regards the cultivated land, was essentially a corn-growing country; the greater part of the lord's demesne was arable, and the tillage fields of the villeins largely exceeded their meadows. For instance, in 1285 the cultivated lands at Hawsted in Suffolk were nearly all under the plough; in seven holdings there were 968 acres of arable and only 40 of meadow, a proportion of 24 to 1. No doubt there was plenty of common pasture, but we cannot call this cultivated land. The seven holdings were as follows:[78]

These were the larger tenants; among the smaller several had no meadow at all.

We must not forget that the grazing of the tillage fields after the crops were off was of great assistance to those who kept stock; for there was plenty to eat on the stubbles. The wheat was cut high, the straw often apparently left standing 18 inches or 2 feet high; weeds of all kinds abounded, for the land was badly cleaned; and often only the upper part of the high ridges, into which the land was thrown for purposes of drainage, was cultivated, the lower parts being left to natural grass.[79]

The greatest authority for the farming of the thirteenth century is Walter of Henley, who wrote, about the middle of it, a work which held the field as an agricultural textbook until Fitzherbert wrote in the sixteenth century, and much of his advice is valuable to-day. There was from his time until the days of William Marshall, who wrote five centuries afterwards, a controversy as to the respective merits of horses and oxen as draught animals, and it is a curious fact that the later writer agreed with the earlier as to the superiority of oxen. 'A plough of oxen', says Walter, 'will go as far in the year as a plough of horses, because the malice of the ploughman will not allow the plough of horses to go beyond their pace, no more than the plough of oxen. Further, in very hard ground where the plough of horses will stop, the plough of oxen will pass. And the horse costs more than the ox, for he is obliged to have the sixth part of a bushel of oats every night, worth a halfpenny at least, and twelve pennyworth of grass in the summer. Besides, each week he costs more or less a penny a week in shoeing, if he must be shod on all four feet;' which was not the universal custom.

'But the ox has only to have 3¹/₂ sheaves of oats per week (ten sheaves yielding a bushel of oats), worth a penny, and the same amount of grass as the horse.[80] And when the horse is old and worn out there is nothing but his skin, but when the ox is old with ten pennyworth of grass he shall be fit for the larder.'[81]

The labourer of the Middle Ages could not complain of lack of holidays; Walter of Henley tells us that, besides Sundays, eight weeks were lost in the year from holidays and other hindrances.[82]

He advises the sowing of spring seed on clay or on stony land early, because if it is dry in March the ground will harden too much and the stony ground become dry and open; therefore fore sow early that corn may be nourished by winter moisture. Chalky and sandy ground need not be sown early. At sowing, moreover, do not plough large furrows, but little and well laid together, that the seed may fall evenly. Let your land be cleaned and weeded after S. John's Day, June 24, for before that is not a good time; and if thistles are cut before S. John's Day 'for every one will come two or three.' Do not sell your straw; if you take away the least you lose much; words which many a landlord to-day doubtless wishes were fixed in the minds of his tenants.

Manure should be mixed with earth, for it lasts only two or three years by itself, but with earth it will last twice as long; for when the manure and the earth are harrowed together the earth shall keep the manure so that it cannot waste by descending in the soil, which it is apt to do.

'Feed your working oxen before some one, and with chaff. Why? I will tell you. Because it often happens that the oxherd steals the provender.'

The oxen were also to be bathed, and curried when dry with a wisp of straw, which would cause them to lick themselves.

'Change your seed every year at Michaelmas; for seed grown on other ground will bring more profit than that which is grown on your own.'

Apparently the only drainage then practised was that of furrow and open ditch; and we find him saying that to free your lands from too much water, let the marshy ground be well ridged, and the water made to run, and so the ground may be freed from water.

Here is his estimate of the cost of wheat growing[83]:

The return was wretched: 'at three times your sowing you ought to have 6 bushels, worth 3s.' The total cost is thus 3s. 1¹/₂d.; and without debiting anything for rent and manure, the loss would be 1¹/₂d. an acre.

The anonymous Treatise on Husbandry of about the same date says, however, that 'wheat ought to yield to the fifth grain, oats to the fourth, barley to the eighth, beans and peas to the sixth.'[84] In the years 1243-8 the average yield of wheat at Combe, Oxfordshire, was 5 bushels per acre, of barley a little over 5, oats 7. In the Manor of Forncett, in various years from 1290 to 1306, wheat yielded about 10 bushels, oats from 12 to 16, barley 16, and peas from 4 to 12 bushels per acre.[85]

As for the dairy, 2 cows, says Walter, should yield a wey, (2 cwt) of cheese annually, and half a gallon of butter a week, 'if sorted out and fed in pasture of salt marsh;' but 'in pasture of wood or in meadows after mowing, or in stubble, it should take 3 cows for the same.' Twenty ewes, which it was then the custom to milk, fed in pasture of salt marsh, ought to yield the same as the 2 cows. A gallon of butter was worth 6d., and weighed 7 lb. And the anonymous treatise says each cow ought to yield from the day after Michaelmas until the first kalends of May, twenty-eight weeks, 10d. more or less; and from the first kalends of May till Michaelmas, twenty-four weeks, the milk of a cow should be worth 3s. 6d.; and she should give also 6 stones (14 lb. per stone) of cheese, and 'as much butter as shall make as much cheese.'[86] It was a common practice all through the Middle Ages, and survives in localities to-day, to let out the cows by the year, at from 3s. to 6s. 8d. a head, often to the daya or dairymaid, the owner supplying the food, and the lessee agreeing to restore them in equal number and condition at the end of the term.[87] The anonymous treatise tells us that 'if you wish to farm out your stock you can take 4s. 6d. clear for each cow and the tithe, and for a sheep 6d. and the tithe, and a sow should bring you 6s. 6d. a year and acquit the tithe, and each hen 9d. and the tithe; and Walter says, 'When I was bailiff the dairymaids had the geese and hens to farm, the geese at 12d. and the hens at 3d.'

Among other information conveyed by these two treatises we learn that the poor servants or labourers were accustomed to be fed on the diseased sheep, salted and dried; but Walter adds, 'I do not wish you to do this.' Nor can we point the finger of scorn at this: for in the disastrous season of 1879 numbers of rotten sheep were sold to the butcher and consumed by the unsuspecting public without even being salted and dried.

He further tells us that 'you can well have 3 acres weeded for 1d., and an acre of meadow mown for 4d., and an acre of waste meadow for 3¹/₂d. And know that 5 men can well reap and bind 2 acres a day of each kind of corn, and where each takes 2d. a day then you must give 5d. an acre.'[88] 'One ought to thresh a quarter of wheat or rye for 2d. and a quarter of oats for 1d. A sow ought to farrow twice a year, having each time at least 7 pigs; and each goose 5 goslings a year and each hen 115 eggs and 7 chicks, 3 of which ought to be made capons; and for 5 geese you must have one gander, and for 5 hens one cock.' The laying qualities of the hen, in spite of the talk of the 200-egg bird, were evidently as good then as to-day. In those days of self-supporting farms it was the custom to put together the farm implements at home, and the farmer is advised that it will be well if he can have carters and ploughmen who should know how to work all their own wood, though it should be necessary to pay them more.[89] The village smith, however, seems, as we should expect, to have done most of the iron work that was needed.[90]

These extracts have given the reader some insight into thirteenth-century prices, prices which in the case of grain altered very little for nearly 300 years: for instance, the average price of wheat from 1259 to 1400 was 5s. 10³/₄d. a quarter, and from 1401 to 1540 5s. 11³/₄d.; of barley, 4s. 3³/₄d. from 1259 to 1400, 3s. 8³/₄d. from 1401 to 1540; of oats, 2s. 5³/₄d. and 2s. 2¹/₄d. in the same two periods respectively; of rye, 4s. 5d. and 4s. 7³/₄d.; and of beans, 4s. 3¹/₂d. and 3s. 9¹/₄d.[91] Wheat fluctuated considerably, being as we have seen 2s. a quarter at Hawsted in 1243 and in 1290 14s. 10d., a most exceptional price. Oxen, which were chiefly valued as working animals, were about 13s. apiece[92]; cows, 9s. 5d. Farm horses were of two varieties: the 'affer' or 'stott', a rough small animal, generally worth about 13s. 5d., and the cart-horse, probably the ancestor of our shire horses, whose average price was 19s. 4d. A good saddle-horse fetched as much as £5. Sheep were from 1s. 2d. to 1s. 5d. each. In Hampshire in 1248 shoeing ten farm horses for the plough for a year cost 5s.; making a gate cost 12d. As Walter of Henley said, it cost a penny a week to shoe a horse on all four feet; these horses must have been very roughly shod.[93] It is evident, from what Walter of Henley says, that horses were not always shod on all four feet, and their shoes were generally very light. The roads were mere tracks without any metalling, so that there was little necessity for heavy shoes; and as Professor Thorold Rogers suggests, it is quite possible that the hoofs of our horses have become weaker by reason of the continual paring and protection which modern shoeing involves.[94] They weighed usually less than half a pound, and cost about 4s. a hundred.

The most striking fact about agricultural prices at this date is the low price of land compared with that of its products. The annual rent of land was from 4d. to 6d.[95] an acre, and it was worth about ten years' purchase. Consequently, a quarter of wheat was often worth more than an acre of land, a good ox three times as much, a good cart-horse four times, while a good war-horse was worth the fee-simple of a small farm. A greater breadth of wheat was sown than of any other crop; but it seems that none was ever stored except in the castles and monasteries, for in spite of successive abundant harvests a bad season would send the price up at once. Barley was, as now, chiefly used for making beer, which was also made from oats and wheat, of course without hops, which were not used till the fifteenth century; and sometimes it was made of oats, barley, and wheat, a concoction worth ³/₄d. a gallon in 1283.[96] Cider was also drunk, and was sold at Exminster in Devonshire in 1286 at ¹/₂d. a gallon, and apples fetched 2d. a bushel. Thorold Rogers[97] says that wheat was the chief food of the English labourer from the earliest times until perhaps the seventeenth century, when the enormous prices were prohibitive; but this statement must be taken with reserve, as must that of Mr. Prothero[98] that rye was the bread-stuff of the peasantry. Where the labourer's food is mentioned as part of his wages, wheat, barley, and rye all occur, wheat and rye being often mixed together as 'mixtil'; and it is most probable that in one district wheat, in another one of the other cereals, formed his chief bread-stuff, according to the crop best adapted to the soil of the locality.

Walter of Henley mentions wheat as if it was the chief crop, for he selects it as best illustrating the cost of corn-growing[99]; and from the enormous number of entries enumerated by Thorold Rogers in his mediaeval statistics it was apparently more grown than other cereals. The chief meat of the lower classes then, as to-day, was bacon from the innumerable herds of swine who roamed in the woods and wastes, but in bad years, when food was scarce, the poor ate nuts, acorns, fern roots, bark, and vetches.[100]

As the cattle of the Middle Ages were like the mountain cattle of to-day, so were the sheep like many of the sheep to be seen in the Welsh mountains; yet, unlike the cattle, an attempt seems to have been made, judging by the high price of rams, to improve the breed; but they were probably poor animals worth from 1s. to 1s. 6d. each, with a small fleece weighing about a pound and a half, worth 3d. a lb. or a little more.

---

CHAPTER III

THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.—DECLINE OF AGRICULTURE.—THE BLACK DEATH.— STATUTE OF LABOURERS

After the death of Edward I in 1307 the progress of English agriculture came to a standstill, and little advance was made till after the battle of Bosworth in 1485. The weak government of Edward II, the long French War commenced by Edward III and lasting over a hundred years, and the Wars of the Roses, all combined to impoverish the country. England, too, was repeatedly afflicted during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by pestilences, sometimes caused by famines, sometimes coming with no apparent cause; all probably aggravated, if not caused, by the insanitary habits of the people. The mention of plagues, indeed, at this time is so frequent that we may call them chronic.

At this period corn and wool were the two main products of the farmer; corn to feed his household and labourers, and wool to put money in his pocket, a somewhat rare thing.

English wool, which came to be called 'the flower and strength and revenue and blood of England', was famous in very early times, and was exported long before the Conquest. In Edgar's reign the price was fixed by law, to prevent it getting into the hands of the foreigner too cheaply; a wey, or weigh, was to be sold for 120d.[101] Patriotic Englishmen asserted it was the best in the world, and Henry II, Edward III, and Edward IV are said to have improved the Spanish breed by presents of English sheep. Spanish wool, however, was considered the best from the earliest times until the Peninsular War, when the Saxon and Silesian wools deposed it from its pride of place. Smith, in his Memoirs of Wool,[102] is of the opinion that England 'borrowed some parts of its breed from thence, as it certainly did the whole from one place or another.' Spanish wool, too, was imported into England at an early date, the manufacture of it being carried on at Andover in 1262.[103] Yet until the fourteenth century it was not produced in sufficient quantities to compete seriously with English wool in the markets of the Continent; and it appears to have been the long wools, such as those of the modern Leicester and Lincoln, from which England chiefly derived its fame as a wool-producing country.

Our early exports went to Flanders, where weaving had been introduced a century before the Conquest, and, in spite of the growth of the weaving industry in England, to that country the bulk of it continued to go, all through the Middle Ages, though in the thirteenth century a determined effort was made to divert a larger share of English wool to Italy.[104] During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the export of wool was frequently forbidden,[105] sometimes for political objects, but also to gain the manufacture of cloth for England by keeping our wool from the foreigner; but these measures did not stop the export, they only hampered it and encouraged much smuggling. It commanded what seems to us an astonishing price, for 3d. a lb. in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is probably equal to nearly 4s. in our money. Its value, and the ease with which it could be packed and carried, made it an object of great importance to the farmer. In 1337[106] we have a schedule of the price of wool in the various counties of England, for in that year 30,000 sacks of the best wool was ordered to be bought in various districts by merchants for Edward III, to provide the sinews of war against France. The price for the best wool was to be fixed by the king, his council, and the merchants; the 'gross' wool being bought by agreement between buyer and seller. Of the former the highest price fixed was for the wool of Hereford, then and for long afterwards famous for its excellent quality, 12 marks the sack of 364 lb.; and the lowest for that of the northern counties, 5 marks the sack.

Somewhat more than a century afterwards we have another similar list of wool prices, when in 1454 the Commons petitioned the king that 'as the wools growing within this realm have hitherto been the great commodity, enriching, and welfare of this land, and how of late the price is greatly decayed so that the Commons were not able to pay their rents to their lords', the king would fix certain prices under which wools should not be bought. The highest price fixed was for the wool of 'Hereford, in Leominster', £13 a sack; the lowest for that of Suffolk, £2 12s.[107]; the average being about £4 10s.

The manorial accounts of the Knights' Hospitallers, who then held land all over England, afford valuable information as to agriculture in 1338.[108] From these we gather that the rent of arable land varied from 2d. to 2s. an acre; but the latter sum was very exceptional, and there are only two instances of it given, in Lincolnshire and Kent. Most of the tillage rented for less than 1s. an acre, more than half being at 6d. or under, and the average about 6d. On the other hand, meadow land is seldom of less value than 2s. an acre, and in Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and Norfolk rose to 3s. This is one of the numerous proofs of the great value of meadow land at a time when hay was almost the sole winter food of stock; in some places it was eight or ten times as valuable as the arable.[109] The pasture on the Hospitallers' estates was divided into several and common pasture, the former often reaching 1s. an acre and sometimes 2s., the latter rarely exceeding 4d. The most usual way, however, of stating the value of pasture was by reckoning the annual cost of feeding stock per head, cows being valued at 2s., oxen at 1s., a horse at a little less than an ox, a sheep at 1d. The reign of Edward III was a great era for wool-growers, and the Hospitallers at Hampton in Middlesex had a flock of 2,000 sheep whose annual produce was six sacks of wool of 364 lb. each, worth £4 a sack, which would make the fleeces weigh a little more than 1 lb. each. The profit of cows on one of their manors was reckoned at 2s. per head, on another at 3s.; and the profit of 100 sheep at 20s.[110] The wages paid to the labourers for day work were 2d. a day, and we must remember that when he was paid by the day his wages were rightly higher than when regularly employed, for day labour was irregular and casual. The tenants about the same date obtained the following prices[111] for some of their stock:—

In the middle of the fourteenth century occurred the famous Black Death, the worst infliction that has ever visited England. Its story is too well known for repetition, and it suffices to say that it was like the bubonic plague in the East of to-day: it raged in 1348-9, and killed from one-third to one-half of the people.[113] It is said to have effected more important economic results than any other event in English history. It is probable that the prices of labour were rising before this terrible calamity; the dreadful famine of 1315-6,[114] followed by pestilence, when wheat went up to 26s. a quarter, and according to the contemporary chroniclers, in some cases much higher, destroyed a large number of the population, and other plagues had done their share to make labour scarce, but after the Black Death the advance was strongly marked. It also accelerated the break-up of the manorial system. A large number of the free labourers were swept away, and their labour lost to the lord of the manor; the services of the villeins were largely diminished from the same cause; many of the tenants, both free and unfree, were dead, and the land thrown on the lord's hands. Flocks and herds were wandering about over the country because there was no one to tend them. In short, most manors were in a state of anarchy, and their lords on the verge of ruin. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, that they immediately adopted strong measures to save themselves and their property and, no doubt they thought, the whole country. Englishmen had by this time learnt to turn to Parliament to remedy their ills, but as the plague was still raging a proclamation was issued of which the preamble states that wages had already gone up greatly. 'Many, seeing the necessity of masters and great scarcity of servants, will not serve unless they get excessive wages', and it is, therefore, hard to till the land. Every one under the age of 60, it was ordered, free or villein, who can work, and has no other means of livelihood, is not to refuse to work for any one who offers the accustomed wages; no labourer is to receive more wages than he did before the plague, and none are to give more wages under severe penalties. But besides regulating wages, the proclamation also insists on reasonable prices for food and the necessaries of life: it was a fair attempt not only to protect the landlords but the labourers also, by keeping both wages and prices at their former rate, so that its object was not tyrannous as has been stated.[115] It was at once disregarded, a fate which met many of the proclamations and statutes of the Middle Ages, which often seem to have been regarded as mere pious aspirations.

Accordingly, the Statute of 1351, 25 Edw. III, Stat. 2, c. 1, states that the servants had paid no regard to the ordinance regulating wages, 'but to their ease and singular covetise do withdraw themselves unless they have livery and wages to the double or treble of that they were wont to take'. Accordingly, it was again laid down that they were to take liveries and wages as before the Black Death, and 'where wheat was wont to be given they shall take for the bushel 10d. (6s. 8d. a quarter),[116] or wheat at the will of the giver. And that they be hired to serve by the whole year or by other usual terms, and not by the day, and that none pay in the time of sarcling (weeding) or hay-making but a penny a day, and a mower of meadows for the acre 5d., or by the day 5d., and reapers of corn in the first week of August 2d., and the second 3d., without meat or drink.' And none were to take for the threshing of a quarter of wheat or rye more than 2d., and for the quarter of beans, peas, and oats more than 1d. These prices are certainly difficult to understand. Hay-making has usually been paid for at a rate above the ordinary, because of the longer hours; and here we find the price fixed at half the usual wages, while mowing is five times as much, and double the price paid for reaping, though they were normally about the same price.[117]

It is interesting to learn from the statute that there was a considerable migration of labourers at this date for the harvest, from Stafford, Lancaster, Derby, Craven, the Marches of Wales and Scotland, and other places.

Such was the first attempt made to control the labourers' wages by the legislature, and like other legislation of the kind it failed in its object, though the attempt was honestly made; and if the rate of wages fixed was somewhat low, its inequity was far surpassed by the exorbitance of the labourers' demands.[118] It was an endeavour to set aside economic laws, and its futility was rendered more certain by the depreciation of the coinage in 1351, which led to an advance in prices, and compelled the labourers to persevere in their demands for higher wages.[119]

Both wages and prices, except those of grain, continued to increase, and labour services were now largely commuted for money payments,[120] with the result that the manorial system began to break up rapidly.

Owing to the dearth of labourers for hire, and the loss of many of the services of their villeins, the lords found it very hard to farm their demesne lands. It should be remembered, too, that an additional hardship from which they suffered at this time was that the quit rents paid to them in lieu of services by tenants who had already become free were, owing to the rise in prices, very much depreciated. Their chief remedy was to let their demesne lands. The condition of the Manor of Forncett in Norfolk well illustrates the changes that were now going on. There, in the period 1272-1307, there were many free tenants as well as villeins, and the holdings of the latter were small, usually only 5 acres. It is also to be noticed that in no year were all the labour services actually performed, some were always sold for money. Yet in the period named there was not much progress in the general commutation of services for money payments, and the same was the case in the manors, whose records between 1325 and 1350 Mr. Page examined for his End of Villeinage in England.[121] The reaping and binding of the entire grain crop of the demesne at Forncett was done by the tenants exclusively, without the aid of any hired labour.[122]

However, in the period 1307-1376 the manor underwent a great change. The economic position of the villeins, the administration of the demesne, and the whole organization of the manor were revolutionized. Much of the tenants' land had reverted to the lord, partly by the deaths in the great pestilence, partly because tenants had left the manor; they had run away and left their burdensome holdings in order to get high wages as free labourers. This of course led to a diminution of labour rents, so the landlord let most of the demesne for a term of years,[123] a process which went on all over England; and thus we have the origin of the modern tenant farmer. A fact of much importance in connexion with the Peasants' Revolt, soon to take place, was that the average money rent of land per acre in Forncett in 1378 was 10d., while the labour rents for land, where they were still paid by villeins who had not commuted or run away, were, owing to the rise in the value of labour, worth two or three times this. We cannot wonder that the poor villeins were profoundly discontented.

On this manor, as on others, some of the villeins, in spite of the many disadvantages under which they lay, managed to accumulate some little wealth. In 1378 and in 1410 one bond tenant had two messuages and 78 acres of land; in 1441 another died seized of 5 messuages and 52 acres; some had a number of servants in their households, but the majority were very poor. There are several instances of bondmen fleeing from the manor; and the officers of the manor failed to catch them. This was common in other manors, and the 'withdrawal' of villeins played a considerable part in the disappearance of serfdom and the break-up of the system.[124] The following table shows the gradual disappearance of villeins in the Manor of Forncett:

There is no event of greater importance in the agrarian history of England, or which has led to more important consequences, than the dissolution of this community in the cultivation of the land, which had been in use so long, and the establishment of the complete independence and separation of one property from another.[125] As soon as the manorial system began to give way, and men to have a free hand, the substitution of large for small holdings set in with fresh vigour, for we have already seen that it had begun. It was one of the chief causes of the stagnation of agriculture in the Middle Ages that it lay under the heavy hand of feudalism, by which individualism was checked and hindered. Every one had his allotted position on the land, and it was hard to get out of it, though some exceptional men did so; as a rule there was no chance of striking out a new line for oneself. The villein was bound to the lord, and no lord would willingly surrender his services. There could be little improvement in farming when the custom of the manor and the collective ownership of the teams bound all to the same system of farming.[126] In fact, agriculture under feudalism suffered from many of the evils of socialism.

But, though hard hit, the old system was to endure for many generations, and the modern triumvirate of landlord, tenant, and labourer was not completely established in England until the era of the first Reform Bill.

---

CHAPTER IV

HOW THE CLASSES CONNECTED WITH THE LAND LIVED IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The castles of the great landowners have been so often described that there is no need to do this again. The popular idea of a baron of the Middle Ages is of a man who when he was not fighting was jousting or hunting. Such were, no doubt, his chief recreations; so fond was he of hunting, indeed, that his own broad lands were not enough, and he was a frequent trespasser on those of others; the records of the time are full of cases which show that poaching was quite a fashionable amusement among the upper classes. But among the barons were many men who, like their successors to-day, did their duty as landlords. Of one of the Lords of Berkeley in the fourteenth century, it was said he was 'sometyme in husbandry at home, sometyme at sport in the field, sometyme in the campe, sometyme in the Court and Council of State, with that promptness and celerity that his body might have bene believed to be ubiquitary'. Many of them were farmers on a very large scale, though they might not have so much time to devote to it as those excellent landlords the monks.

Thomas Lord Berkeley, who held the Berkeley estates from 1326 to 1361, farmed the demesnes of a quantity of manors, as was the custom, and kept thereon great flocks of sheep, ranging from 300 to 1,500 on each manor.[127] The stock of the Bishop of Winchester, by an inquisition taken at his death in 1367, amounted to 127 draught horses, 1,556 head of black cattle, and 12,104 sheep and lambs. Almost every manor had one or two pigeon houses, and the number of pigeons reared is astonishing; from one manor Lord Berkeley obtained 2,151 pigeons in a single year. No one but the lord was allowed to keep them, and they were one of the chief grievances of the villeins, who saw their seed devoured by these pests without redress. Their dung, too, was one of the most valued manures. Lord Berkeley, like other landlords, went often in progress from one of his manors and farmhouses to another, making his stay at each of them for one or two nights, overseeing and directing the husbandry. The castle of the great noble consumed an enormous amount of food in the course of the year; from two manors on the Berkeley estate came to the 'standinghouse' of the lord in twelve months, 17,000 eggs, 1,008 pigeons, 91 capons, 192 hens, 288 ducks, 388 chickens, 194 pigs, 45 calves, 315 quarters of wheat, 304 quarters of oats; and from several other manors came the like or greater store, besides goats, sheep, oxen, butter, cheese, nuts, honey, &c.[128] Even the lavish hospitality of the lords, and the great number of their retainers, must have had some difficulty in disposing of these huge supplies.

The examining of their bailiff's accounts must have taken a considerable portion of the landlord's time, for those of each manor were kept most minutely, and set forth, among other items, 'in what sort he husbanded' the demesne farms, 'what sorts of cattle he kept in them, and what kinds of graine he yearly sowed according to the quality and condition of the ground, and how those kinds of graine each second or third yeare were exchanged or brought from one manor to another as the vale corne into an upland soyle, and contrarily'. And we are told incidentally he 'set with hand, not sowed his beanes'. He was also accustomed to move his live stock from one manor to another, as they needed it.

The accounts also stated what days' works were due from each tenant according to the season of the year, and at the end of each year there was a careful valuation of live and dead stock.[129]

The difference between the smaller gentry and the more important yeomen[130] who farmed their own land must have been very slight. No doubt both of them were very rough and ignorant men, who knew a great deal about the cultivation of their land and very little about anything else. We may be sure that the ordinary house of both was generally of wood; as there is no stone in many parts of England, and bricks were not reintroduced till the fourteenth century and spread slowly. Even in Elizabeth's reign, Harrison[131] tells us that 'the ancient houses of our gentry are yet for the most part of strong timber', and he even thinks that houses made of oak were luxurious, for in times past men had been contented with houses of willow, plum, and elm, but now nothing but oak was good enough; and he quaintly says that the men who lived in the willow houses were as tough as oak, and those who lived in the oak as soft as willow. There are very few mansions left of the time before Edward III, for being of timber they naturally decayed.

In a lease, dated 1152, of a manor house belonging to S. Paul's Cathedral,[132] is a description of a manor house which contained a hall 35 feet long, 30 feet broad, and 22 feet high; that is, 11 feet to the tie beam and 11 feet from that to the ridge board; showing that the roof was open and that there were no upper rooms. There was a chamber between the hall and the thalamus or inner room which was 12 feet long, 17 feet broad, and 17 feet high, the roof being open as in the hall; and the thalamus was 22 feet long, 16 feet broad, and 18 feet high. About the same date the Manor house of Thorp was larger, and contained a hall, a chamber, tresantia (apparently part of the hall or chamber separated by a screen to form an antechamber), two private rooms, a kitchen, brew-house, malt-house, dairy, ox shed, and three small hen-houses.

The ordinary manor house of the Middle Ages contained three rooms at least, of mean aspect, the floor even of the hall, which was the principal eating and sleeping room, being of dirt; and when there was an upper room or solar added, which began to be done at the end of the twelfth century,[133] access to it was often obtained by an outside staircase.

If the manor house belonged to the owner of many manors, it was sometimes inhabited by his bailiff.

The barns on the demesnes were often as important buildings as the manor houses; one at Wickham, belonging to the canons of S. Paul's[134] in the twelfth century, was 55 feet long, 13 feet high from the floor to the principal beam, and 10¹/₂ feet more to the ridge board; the breadth between the pillars was 19¹/₂ feet, and on each side it had a wing or aisle 6¹/₂ feet wide and 6¹/₂ feet high. The amount of corn in the barn was often scored on the door-posts.[135] In the manor houses chimneys rarely existed, the fire being made in the middle of the hall. Even in the early seventeenth century in Cheshire there were no chimneys in the farmhouses, and there the oxen were kept under the same roof as the farmer and his family.[136] When chimneys did come in they were not much thought of. 'Now we have chimneys our tenderlings complain of rheums, catarrhs, and poses (colds);' for the smoke not only hardened the timbers, but was said by Harrison to be an excellent medicine for man. Instead of glass there was much lattice, and that made either of wicker or fine rifts of oak in checkerwise, and horn was also used. Beds, of course, were a luxury, the owner of the manor, his guests, and retainers flung themselves down on the hall floor after supper and all slept together, though sometimes rough mattresses were brought in.

Furniture was rude and scanty. In 1150 the farm implements and household furniture on the Manor of 'Waleton' was valued and consisted of 4 carts, 3 baskets, a basket used in winnowing corn, a pair of millstones, 10 tubs, 4 barrels, 2 boilers of lead with stoves, 2 wooden bowls, 3 three-legged tables, 20 dishes or platters, 2 tablecloths worth 6d., 6 metal bowls, half a load of the invaluable salt, 2 axes, a table with trestles (the usual form of table), and 5 beehives made of rushes.[137] These articles were handed down from one generation to another, and in a lease made 150 years afterwards of the same manor most of them reappear. The greater part of the furniture, until the fifteenth century, was most likely made by migratory workmen, who travelled from village to village; for except the rudest pieces it was beyond the village carpenter, and shops there were none.

It is not to be expected that when the master lived in this manner the lot of the labourer was a very good one. His home was miserably poor, generally of 'wattle and dab', sometimes wholly of mud and clay; many with only one room for all purposes. A bill is still in existence for a house, if it can be called one, built in 1306 for two labourers by Queen's College, Oxford, which cost 20s. in all, and was a mere hovel without floor, ceiling, or chimney.[138] Their wretched houses appear to have been built on the bare earth, and unfloored. Perhaps as time went on a rude upper storey was added, the floor of which was made of rough poles or hurdles and was reached by a ladder. The furniture was miserably poor; a few pots and pans, cups and dishes, and some tools would exhaust the list.[139] The goods and chattels of a landless labourer in 1431 consisted of a dish, an adze, a brass pot, 2 plates, 2 augers, an axe, a three-legged stool, and a barrel.[140] Englishmen of all classes were hopelessly dirty in their habits; even till the sixteenth century they were noted above other countries for the profuseness of their diet and their unclean ways. Erasmus spoke of the floor of his house as inconceivably filthy. To save fuel, the labourer's family in the cold season all lay huddled in a heap on the floor, 'pleasantly and hot', as Barclay the poet tells us; and if he ever had a bed it was a bundle of fern or straw thrown down, with his cloak as a coverlet, though thus he was just as well off as his social superiors, for with them the loose cloak of the day was a common covering for the night. He was constantly exposed to disease, for sanitary precautions were ignored; at the entrance of his hovel was a huge heap of decaying refuse, poisoning air and water. Even in the sixteenth century a foreigner noticed that 'the peasants dwell in small huts and pile up their refuse out of doors in heaps so high that you cannot see their houses'.[141] Diseased animals were constantly eaten, vegetables were few, and in the winter there was no fresh meat for any one, except game and rabbits and, for the well-to-do, fish, but we may doubt if the peasant got any but salt fish. The consequence was that leprosy and kindred ailments were common; and we do not wonder that plagues were frequent and slew the people like flies. The peasants' food consisted largely of corn. In the bailiff's accounts of the Manor of Woodstock in 1242, six servants at Handborough received 41¹/₂ bushels of corn each, 2 ox herds at Combe received the same, and 4 servants at Bladon had 36 bushels each. In 1274 at Bosham, and in 1288 at Stoughton in Sussex, the allowance was the same.[142] The writer of the anonymous Treatise on Husbandry says that in his time, the thirteenth century, the average annual allowance of corn to a labourer was 36 bushels.[143] Fish, too, seem to have formed a large portion of his diet; all classes ate enormous quantities of fish, before the Reformation, in Lent and on fast days, and the labourer was constantly given salt herrings as part of his pay. In 1359, at Hawsted, the villeins when working were allowed 2 herrings a day, some milk, a loaf, and some drink.[144] Eden[145] says his food consisted of a few fish, principally herrings, a loaf of bread, and some beer; but we must certainly add pork, which was his stand-by then as now.[146] In the fourteenth century, at all events, there were three kinds of bread in use—white bread, ration bread, and black bread; and it was no doubt the latter that the peasant ate.[147] Clothing was dear and cloth coarse, the most valuable personal property consisting of clothing and metal vessels. Shirts were the subject of charitable gifts.[148] By 37 Edw. III, c. 14, labourers were not to wear any manner of cloth but 'blanket and russet wool of 12d.' and girdles of linen. If they wore anything more extravagant it was forfeited to the king.

To the labourer of modern times the life of his forefathers would have seemed unutterably dull. No books, no newspapers, no change of scene by cheap excursions, no village school, no politics. The very cultivation of the soil by the old three-course system was monotonous. But there were bright spots in his existence: the village church not only afforded him the consolations of religion but also entertainments and society. Religion in the Middle Ages was a part of the people's daily life, and its influence permeated even their amusements. Miracles and mystery plays, played in the churches and churchyards, were a common feature in village life; as were the church ales or parish meetings held four or five times a year, where cakes and beer were purchased from the churchwarden and consumed for the good of the parish. Indeed, there can be no doubt that there was much more sociability than to-day, in the country at least. Labour was lightened by the co-operation of the common fields; common shepherds and herdsmen watched the sheep and cattle of the different tenants, 'a common mill ground the corn, a common oven baked the bread, a common smith worked at a common forge.' His existence, moreover, was enlivened by a considerable number of sports. A statute at the end of the fourteenth century (12 Ric. II, c. 6) says he was fond of playing at tennis(!), football, quoits, dice, casting the stone, and other games, which this statute forbad him, and enacted that he should use his bow and arrows on Sundays and holidays instead of such idle sport. This is a foretaste of the modern sentiment that seeks to wean him from watching football matches and take to miniature rifle clubs. He was also, like some of his successors, fond of poaching, though he appears to have been rash enough to indulge in it by day. 13 Ric. II, c. 13, says he was prone on holidays, when good Christian people be in church hearing divine service, to go hunting with greyhounds and other dogs, in the parks and warrens of the lord and of others, and sometimes these hunts were turned into conferences and conspiracies,' for to rise and disobey their allegiance', such as preceded the Peasants' Revolt of 1381; and accordingly no one who did not own lands worth 40s. a year was to keep a dog to hunt, or ferrets other 'engines': the first game law on the English statute book.

---

CHAPTER V

THE BREAK-UP OF THE MANOR.—SPREAD OF LEASES.—THE PEASANTS' REVOLT.—FURTHER ATTEMPTS TO REGULATE WAGES.—A HARVEST HOME.— BEGINNING OF THE CORN LAWS.—SOME SURREY MANORS

We have seen that the landlords' profits were seriously diminished by the Black Death, and they cast about them for new ways of increasing their incomes. Arable land had been until now largely in excess of pasture, the cultivation of corn was the chief object of agriculture, bread forming a much larger proportion of men's diet than now. This began to change. Much of the land was laid down to grass, and there was a steady increase in sheep farming; thus commenced that revolution in farming which in the sixteenth century led Harrison to say that England was mainly a stock-raising country. The lords also let a considerable amount of their demesne land on leases for years. 'Then began the times to alter' says Smyth of the Lord Berkeley of the end of the fourteenth century, 'and hee with them, and he began to tack other men's cattle on his pasture by the week, month, and quarter, and to sell his meadow grounds by the acre. And in the time of Henry IV still more and more was let, and in succeeding times. As for the days' works of the copyhold tenants, they also were turned into money.'[149] Such leases had been used long before this, but this is the date of their great increase. In the thirteenth century a lease of 2 acres of arable land in Nowton, Suffolk, let the land at 6d. an acre per annum for a term of six years.[150] It contains no clauses about cultivation; the landlord warrants the said 2 acres to the tenant, and the tenant agrees to give them up at the end of the term freely and peaceably. The deed was indented, sealed, and witnessed by several persons. The impoverished landlords also let much of their land on stock and land leases. The custom of stocking the tenants' land was a very ancient one: the lord had always found the oxen for the plough teams of the villeins. In the leases of the manors of S. Paul's in the twelfth century the tenant for life received stock both live and dead, which when he entered was carefully enumerated in the lease, and at the end of the tenancy he had to leave behind the same quantity.[151] It was a common practice also, before the Black Death, for the lord to let out cows and sheep at so much per head per annum.[152] The stock and land lease therefore was no novelty. In 1410 there is a lease of the demesne lands at Hawsted by which the landlord kept the manor house and its appurtenances in his own hands, the tenant apparently having the farm buildings, which he was to keep in repair. He was to receive at the beginning of the term 20 cows and one bull, worth 9s. each; 4 stotts, worth 10s. each; and 4 oxen, worth 13s. 4d. each; which, or their value in money, were to be delivered up at the end of the term. The tenant was also to leave at the end of the lease as many acres well ploughed, sown, and manured as he found at the beginning. Otherwise the landlord was not to interfere with the cultivation. If the rent or any part thereof was in arrear for a fortnight after the two fixed days for payment, the landlord might distrain; and if for a month, he might re-enter: and both parties bound themselves to forfeit the then huge sum of £100 upon the violation of any clause of the lease.[153] There is a lease[154] of a subsequent date (the twentieth year of Henry VIII), but one which well illustrates the custom now so prevalent, granted by the Prior of the Monastery of Lathe in Somerset to William Pole of Combe, Edith his wife, and Thomas his son, for their lives. With the land went 360 wethers. For the land they paid 16 quarters of best wheat, 'purelye thressyd and wynowed,' 22 quarters of best barley, and were to carry 4 loads of wood and fatten one ox for the prior yearly; the ox to be fattened in stall with the best hay, the only way then known of fattening oxen. For the flock of wethers they paid £6 yearly. The tenants were bound to keep hedges, ditches, and gates in repair. Also they were bound by a 'writing obligatory' in the sum of £100 to deliver up the wether flock whole and sound, 'not rotten, banyd,[155] nor otherwise diseased.' The consequence of the spread of leases was that the portion of the demesne lands which the lords farmed themselves dwindled greatly, or it was turned from arable into grass. Stock and land leases survived in some parts till the beginning of the eighteenth century, when it was still the custom for the landlord to stock the land and receive half the crop for rent.[156] According to the Domesday of S. Paul, in the thirteenth century, a survey of eighteen manors containing 24,000 acres showed three-eighths of the land in demesne, the rest in the hands of the tenants. In 1359 the lord of the principal manor at Hawsted held in his own hand 572 acres of arable land, worth 4d. to 6d. an acre rent, and 50 acres of meadow, worth 2s. an acre.[157] He had also pasture for 24 cows, which was considered worth 36s. a year, and for 12 horses and 12 oxen worth 48s. a year, with 40 acres of wood, estimated at 1s. an acre. In 1387, however, the arable land had decreased to 320 acres, but the stock had increased, and now numbered 4 cart horses, 6 stotts or smaller horses, 10 oxen, 1 bull, 26 cows, 6 heifers, 6 calves, 92 wethers, 20 hoggerells or two-year-old sheep, 1 gander, 4 geese, 30 capons, 26 hens, and only one cock. The dairy of 26 cows was let out, according to the custom of the time, for £8 a year; and we are told that the oxen were fed on oats, and shod in the winter only.

But if the position of the lords was severely affected by the great pestilence that of the villeins was also. The villein himself was becoming a copyholder; in the thirteenth century the nature of his holding had been written on the court roll, before long he was given a copy of the roll, and by the fifteenth century he was a copyholder.[158] There was, too, a new spirit abroad in this century of disorganization and reform, which stirred even the villeins with a desire for better conditions of life. These men, thus rising to a more assured position and animated by new hopes, saw all round them hired labourers obtaining, in spite of the Statute of Labourers, double the amount of wages they had formerly received, while they were bound down to the same services as before. The advance in prices was further increased by the king's issuing in 1351 an entirely new coinage, of the same fineness but of less weight than the old; so that the demands of the labourers after the Black Death were largely justified by the depreciation in the currency.[159] There had also arisen at this time, owing to the increase in the wealth of the country, a new class of landlords who did not care for the old system[160]; and it is probably these men who are meant by the statute I Ric. II, c. 6, which complains that the villeins daily withdrew their services to their lords at the instigation of various counsellors and abettors, who made it appear by 'colour of certain exemplifications made out of the Book of Domesday' that they were discharged from their services, and moreover gathered themselves in great routs and agreed to aid each other in resisting their lords, so that justices were appointed to check this evil. But there were other 'counsellors and abettors' of the Peasants' Revolt than the new landlords. One of its most interesting features to modern readers is its thorough organization. Travelling agents and agitators like John Ball were all over the country, money was subscribed and collected, and everything was ripe for the great rising of 1381, which was brought to a head by the bad grading of the poll tax of King Richard. It has been said that the chief grievance of the villeins was that the lords of manors were attempting to reimpose commuted services, but judging by the petition to the King when he met them at Mile-end there can be no doubt that the chief grievance was the continuance of existing services. 'We will', said they, 'that ye make us free for ever, and that we be called no more bond, or so reputed.' Also, as Walsingham says,[161] they were careful to destroy the rolls and ancient records whereby their services were fixed, and to put to death persons learned in the law.

As every one knows, the revolt was a failure; and whether it ultimately helped much to extinguish serfdom is doubtful. It probably, like the pestilence, accelerated a movement which had been for some time in progress and was inevitable. There is ample evidence to prove that there was a very general continuance of predial services after the revolt, though they went on rapidly decreasing. One of the chief methods adopted by the villeins to gain their freedom was desertion, and so common did this become that apparently the mere threat of desertion enabled the villein to obtain almost any concession from his lord, who was afraid lest his land should be utterly deserted. The result was that by the middle of the fifteenth century the abolition of labour services was approaching completion.[162] It lingered on, and Fitzherbert lamented in Elizabeth's reign the continuance of villeinage as a disgrace to England; but it had then nearly disappeared, and was unheard of after the reign of James I.[163]

Seven years after the Peasants' Revolt another attempt was made to regulate agricultural wages by the statute 12 Ric. II, c. 4, which stated that 'the hires of the said servants and labourers have not been put on certainty before this time', though we have seen that the Act of 1351 tried to settle wages. In the preamble it is said that the statute was enacted because labourers 'have refused for a long season to work without outrageous and excessive hire', and owing to the scarcity of labourers 'husbands' could not pay their rents, a sentence which shows the general use of money rents.

The wages were as follows, apparently with food:—

The farm servants' food would be worth considerably more than the actual cash he received; a quarter of wheat, barley, and rye mixed every nine weeks was no unusual allowance, which at 4s. 4d. would be worth about 25s. a year. He would also have his harvest allowance, though the statute above forbids any perquisites, worth about 3s., and sometimes it was accompanied by the gift of a pig, some beer, or some herrings.[164] His wife also, at a time when women did the same work as the men, could earn 1d. a day, and his boy perhaps ¹/₂d. If his wages were wholly paid in money, we may say that in the last half of the fourteenth century the ordinary labourer earned 3d. a day, so that as corn and pork, his chief food, had not risen at all, he was much better off than in the preceding 100 years.

Cullum, in his invaluable History of Hawsted, gives us a picture of harvesting on the demesne lands in 1389 which shows an extraordinarily busy scene. There were 200 acres of all kinds of corn to be gathered in, and over 300 people took part; though apparently such a crowd was only collected for the two principal days of the harvest, and it must be remembered that the towns were emptied into the country at this important season. The number of people for one day comprised a carter, ploughman, head reaper, cook, baker, brewer, shepherd, daya (dairymaid); 221 hired reapers; 44 pitchers, stackers, and reapers (not hired, evidently villeins paying their rents by work); 22 other reapers, hired for goodwill (de amore); and 20 customary tenants. This small army of men consumed 22 bushels of wheat, 8 pennyworth of beer, and 41 bushels of malt, worth 18s. 9¹/₂d.; meat to the value of 9s. 11¹/₂d.; fish and herrings, 5s. 1d.; cheese, butter, milk, and eggs, 8s. 3¹/₂d.; oatmeal, 5d. salt, 3d.; pepper and saffron, 10d., the latter apparently introduced into England in the time of Edward III, and much used for cooking and medicine, but it gradually went out of fashion, and by the end of the eighteenth century was only cultivated in one or two counties, notably Essex where Saffron Walden recalls its use; candles, 6d.; and 5 pairs of gloves 10d.[165]

The presentation of gloves was a common custom in England; and these would be presented as a sign of good husbandry, as in the case of the rural bridegroom in the account of Queen Elizabeth's visit to Kenilworth who wore gloves to show he was a good farmer. Tusser bids the farmer give gloves to his reapers. The custom was still observed at Hawsted in 1784, and in Eden's time, 1797, the bursars of New College, Oxford, presented each of their tenants with two pairs, which the recipients displayed on the following Sunday at church by conspicuously hanging their hands over the pew to show their neighbours they had paid their rent. In this account of the Hawsted harvest the large number of hired men and the few customary tenants is noteworthy as a sign of the times, for before the Black Death the harvest work on the demesne was the special work of the latter.

In the fourteenth century the long series of corn laws was commenced which was to agitate Englishmen for centuries, and after an apparently final settlement in 1846 to reappear in our day.[166] It was the policy of Edward III to make food plentiful and cheap for the whole nation, without special regard to the agricultural interest: and by 34 Edw. III, c. 20, the export of corn to any foreign part except Calais and Gascony, then British possessions, or to certain places which the king might permit, was forbidden. Richard II, however, reversed this policy in answer to the complaints of agriculturists whose rents were falling,[167] and endeavoured to encourage the farmer and especially the corn-grower; for he saw the landlords turning their attention to sheep instead of corn, owing to the high price of labour. Accordingly, to give the corn-growers a wider market, he allowed his subjects by the statute 17 Ric. II, c. 7, to carry corn, on paying the duties due, to what parts they pleased, except to his enemies, subject however to an order of the Council; and owing to the interference of the Council the law probably became a dead letter, at all events we find it confirmed and amended by 4 Hen. VI, c. 5.

The prohibition of export must have been a serious blow to those counties near the sea, for it was much easier to send corn by ship to foreign parts than over the bad roads of England to some distant market.[168] Indeed, judging by the great and frequent discrepancy of prices in different places at the same date, the dispatch of corn from one inland locality to another was not very frequent. Richard also attempted to stop the movement, which had even then set in, of the countrymen to the growing towns, forbidding by 12 Ric. II, c. 5, those who had served in agriculture until 12 years of age to be apprenticed in the towns, but to 'abide in husbandry'.

One of the most unjust customs of the Middle Ages was that which bade the tenants of manors, except those who held the jus faldae, fold their sheep on the land of the lord, thus losing both the manure and the valuable treading.[169] However, sometimes, as in Surrey, the sheepfold was in a fixed place and the manure from it was from time to time taken out and spread on the land.[170]

In the same district horses had been hitherto used for farm work, as it was considered worthy of note that oxen were beginning to be added to the horse teams. The milk of two good cows in twenty-four weeks was considered able to make a wey of cheese, and in addition half a gallon of butter a week; and the milk of 20 ewes was equal to that of 3 cows.

On the Manor of Flaunchford, near Reigate, the demesne land amounted to 56 acres of arable and two meadows, but there must have been the usual pasture in addition to keep the following head of stock: 13 cows, who in the winter were fed from the racks in the yard; 4 calves, bought at 1s. each; 12 oxen for ploughing, whose food was oats and hay—a very large number for 56 acres of arable, and they were probably used on another manor; 1 stott, used for harrowing; a goat, and a sow.

On the Manor of Dorking the harvest lasted five weeks as a rule; the fore feet only of oxen used for ploughing, and of heifers used for harrowing, were shod. For washing and shearing sheep 10d. a hundred was the price; ploughing for winter corn cost 6d. an acre, and harrowing ¹/₂d. 30¹/₂ acres of barley produced 41¹/₂ quarters; 28 acres of oats produced 38¹/₂ quarters; 13 cows were let for the season at 5s. each. In the same reign, at Merstham, the demesne lands of 166¹/₂ acres were let on lease with all the live and dead stock, which was valued at £22 9s. 3d., and the rent was £36 or about 4s. 4d. an acre, an enormous price even including the stock.

---

CHAPTER VI

1400-1540

THE SO-CALLED 'GOLDEN AGE OF THE LABOURER' IN A PERIOD OF GENERAL DISTRESS

In this period the average prices of grain remained almost unchanged until the last three decades, when they began slowly and steadily to creep up, this advance being helped to some extent by defective harvests. In 1527, according to Holinshed it rained from April 12 to June 3 every day or night; in May thirty hours without ceasing; and the floods did much damage to the corn. In 1528 incessant deluges of rain prevented the corn being sown in the spring, and grain had to be imported from Germany. The price of wheat was a trifle higher than in the period 1259-1400; barley, oats, and beans lower; rye higher.[171] Oxen and cows were dearer, horses about the same, sheep a little higher, pigs the same, poultry and eggs dearer, wool the same, cheese and butter dearer. The price of wheat was sometimes subject to astonishing fluctuations: in 1439 it varied from 8s. to 26s. 8d.; in 1440 from 4s. 2d. to 25s. The rent of land continued the same, arable averaging 6d. an acre,[172] though this was partly due to the fact that rents, although now generally paid in money, were still fixed and customary; for the purchase value of land had now risen to twenty years instead of twelve.[173] The art of farming hardly made any progress, and the produce of the land was consequently about the same or a little better than in the preceding period.[174]

At the end of the fourteenth century the ordinary wheat crop at Hawsted was in favourable years about a quarter to the acre, but it was often not more than 6 bushels; and this was on demesne land, usually better tilled than non-demesne land.[175] As for the labourer, it is well known that Thorold Rogers calls the fifteenth century his golden age, and seeing that his days' wages, if he 'found himself', were now 4d. and prices were hardly any higher all round than when he earned half the money in the thirteenth century, there is much to support his view. As to whether he was better off than the modern labourer it is somewhat difficult to determine; as far as wages went he certainly was, for his 4d. a day was equal to about 4s. now; it is true that on the innumerable holidays of the Church he sometimes did not work,[176] but no doubt he then busied himself on his bit of common. But so many factors enter into the question of the general material comfort of the labourer in different ages that it is almost impossible to come to a satisfactory conclusion. Denton paints a very gloomy picture of him at this time[177]; so does Mr. Jessop, who says, the agricultural labourers of the fifteenth century were, compared with those of to-day, 'more wretched in their poverty, incomparably less prosperous in their prosperity; worse clad, worse fed, worse housed, worse taught, worse governed; they were sufferers from loathsome diseases, of which their descendants know nothing; the very beasts of the field were dwarfed and stunted; the disregard of to sell their corn at low prices to the detriment of the whole kingdom: a typical example of the political economy of the time, which considered the prosperity of agriculture indispensable to the welfare of the country, even if the consumer suffered. Accordingly, it was enacted that wheat could be exported without a licence when it was under 6s. 8d. a quarter, except to the king's enemies. On imports of corn there had been no restriction until 1463, when 3 Edw. IV, c. 2 forbade the import of corn when under 6s. 8d. a statute due partly to the fear that the increase of pasture was a danger to tillage land and the national food supply, and partly to the fact that the landed interest had become by now fully awake to the importance of protecting themselves by promoting the gains of the farmer.[178] It may be doubted, however, if much wheat was imported except in emergencies at this time, for many countries forbade export. These two statutes were practically unaltered till 1571,[179] and by that of 1463 was initiated the policy which held the field for nearly 400 years.

Thorold Rogers denounces the landlords for legislating with the object of keeping up rents, but, as Mr. Cunningham has pointed out, this ignores the fact that the land was the great fund of national wealth from which taxation was paid; if rents therefore rose it was a gain to the whole country, since the fund from which the revenue was drawn was increased.[180]

In spite of the high wages of agricultural labourers, the movement towards the towns noticed by Richard II continued. The statute 7 Hen. IV, c. 17, asserts that there is a great scarcity of labourers in husbandry and that gentlemen are much impoverished by the rate of wages; the cause of the scarcity lying in the fact that many people were becoming weavers,[181] and it therefore re-enacted 12 Ric. II, c. 5, which ordained that no one who had been a servant in husbandry until 12 years old should be bound apprentice, and further enacted that no person with less than 20s. a year in land should be able to apprentice his son. Like many other statutes of the time this seems to have been inoperative, for we find 23 Hen. VI, c. 12 (1444), enacting that if a servant in husbandry purposed leaving his master he was to give him warning, and was obliged either to engage with a new one or continue with the old. It also regulated the wages anew, those fixed showing a substantial increase since the statute of 1388. By the year:—

By the day, in harvest, wages were to be:—

In the next reign the labourer's dress was again regulated for him, and he was forbidden to wear any cloth exceeding 2s. a yard in price, nor any 'close hosen', apparently tight long stockings, nor any hosen at all which cost more than 14d.[182] Yeomen and those below them were forbidden to wear any bolsters or stuff of wool, cotton wadding, or other stuff in their doublets, but only lining; and somewhat gratuitously it was ordered that no one under the degree of a gentleman should wear pikes to his shoes.

In 1455 England's Thirty Years' War, the War of the Roses, began, and agriculture received another set back. The view that the war was a mere faction fight between nobles and their retainers, while the rest of the country went about their business, is somewhat exaggerated. No doubt, the mass of Englishmen, as in the civil war of the seventeenth century, preferred to 'sit still', as Clarendon said, but the business of many must have been very much upset. The various armies were compelled to obtain their supplies from the country, and with the lawless habits of the times plundered friend and foe alike, as Cavalier and Roundhead did afterwards; and many a farmer must have seen all his stock driven off and his grain seized to feed the combatants. For instance, it was said before the battle called Easter Day Field that all the tenants of Abbot's Ripton in Huntingdonshire were copyholders of the Abbot of Ramsey, and the northern army lay there so long that they impoverished the country and the tenants had to give up their copyholds through poverty.[183] The loss of life, too, must have told heavily on a country already suffering from frequent pestilence. It is calculated that about one-tenth of the whole population of the country were killed in battle or died of wounds and disease during the war; and as these must have been nearly all men in the prime of life, it is difficult to understand how the effect on the labour market was not more marked. The enclosing of land for pasture farms, which we shall next have to consider, was probably in many cases an absolute necessity, for the number of men left to till the soil must have been seriously diminished.

---

CHAPTER VII

ENCLOSURE

We have now reached a time when the enclosure question was becoming of paramount importance,[184] and began to cause constant anxiety to legislators, while the writers of the day are full of it. Enclosure was of four kinds:

It is the first mainly, and to a less degree the third of these, which were so frequent a source of complaint in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; for the first, besides displacing the small holder, threw out of employment a large number of people who had hitherto gained their livelihood by the various work connected with tillage, and the third deprived a large number of their common rights.

The first Enclosure Act was the Statute of Merton, passed in 1235, 20 Henry III, c. 4, which permitted lords of manors to add to their demesnes such parts of the waste pasture and woods as were beyond the needs of the tenants. There is evidence, however, that enclosure, probably of waste land, was going on before this statute, as the charter of John, by which all Devonshire except Dartmoor and Exmoor was deforested, expressly forbids the making of hedges, a proof of enclosure, in those two forests.[185] We may be sure that the needs of the tenants were by an arbitrary lord estimated at a very low figure. At the same time many proceeded in due legal form. Thomas, Lord Berkeley, about the period of the Act reduced great quantities of ground into enclosures by procuring many releases of common land from freeholders.[186] His successor, Lord Maurice, was not so observant of legality. He had a wood wherein many of his tenants and freeholders had right of pasture. He wished to make this into a park, and treated with them for that purpose; but things not going smoothly, he made the wood into a park without their leave, and then treated with his tenants, most of whom perforce fell in with his highhanded plan; those who did not 'fell after upon his sonne with suits, in their small comfort and less gaines.'[187] Sometimes the rich made the law aid their covetousness, as did Roger Mortimer the paramour of the 'She Wolf of France'. Some men had common of pasture in King's Norton Wood, Worcestershire, who, when Mortimer enclosed part of their common land with a dike, filled the dike up, for they were deprived of their inheritance. Thereupon Mortimer brought an action of trespass against them 'by means of jurors dwelling far from the said land', who were put on the panel by his steward, who was also sheriff of the county, and the commoners were convicted and cast in damages of £300, not daring to appear at the time for fear of assault, or even death.[188] Neither dared they say a word about the matter till Mortimer was dead, when it is satisfactory to learn that Edward III gave them all their money back save 20 marks. We are told that Lord Maurice Berkeley consolidated much of his demesne lands, throwing together the scattered strips and exchanging those that lay far apart from the manor houses for those that lay near; trying evidently to get the home farms into a ring fence as we should term it.[189] In this policy he was followed by his successor Thomas the Second, who during his ownership of the estate from 1281 to 1320, to the great profit of his tenants and himself, encouraged them to make exchanges, so as to make their lands lie in convenient parcels instead of scattered strips, by which he raised the rent of an acre from 4d. and 6d. to 1s. 6d.[190] There is a deed of enclosure made in the year 1250, preserved, by which the free men of North Dichton 'appropriated and divided between them and so kept for ever in fee all that place called Sywyneland, with the moor,' and they were to have licence to appropriate that place, which was common pasture (the boundaries of which are given), 'save, however, to the grantor William de Ros and his heirs' common of pasture in a portion thereof named by bounds, with entry and exit for beasts after the wheat is carried. The men of North Dichton were also to have all the wood called Rouhowthwicke, and to do what they liked with it.[191] In return they gave the lord 10 marks of silver and a concession as regards a certain wood. It has been noticed that the Black Death, besides causing many of the landlords to let their demesnes, also made them turn much tillage into grass to save labour, which had grown so dear. We have also seen that the statutes regulating wages were of little effect, and they went on rising, so that more land was laid down to grass. The landowners may be said to have given up ordinary farming and turned to sheep raising.

English wool could always find a ready sale, although Spanish sheep farming had developed greatly; and the profitable trade of growing wool attracted the new capitalist class who had sprung up, so that they often invested their recently made fortunes in it, buying up many of the great estates that were scattered during the war.[192]

The increase of sheep farming was assisted by the fact that the domestic system of the manufacture of wool, which supplanted the guild system, led, owing to its rapid and successful growth, to a constant and increasing demand for wool. At the same time this development of the cloth industry helped to alleviate the evils it had itself caused by giving employment to many whom the agricultural changes wholly or partially deprived of work. 'It is important to remember, that where peasant proprietorship and small farming did maintain their ground it was largely due to the domestic industries which supplemented the profits of agriculture.'[193]

Much of the land laid down to grass was demesne land, but many of the common arable fields were enclosed and laid down. John Ross of Warwick about 1460 compares the country as he knew it with the picture presented by the Hundred Rolls in Edward I's time, showing how many villages had been depopulated; and he mentions the inconvenience to travellers in having to get down frequently to open the gates of enclosed fields.[194]

Enclosure was really a sure sign of agricultural progress; nearly all the agricultural writers from Fitzherbert onwards are agreed that enclosed land produced much more than uninclosed. Fitzherbert, in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, said an acre of land rented for 6d. uninclosed was worth 8d. when enclosed. Gabriel Plattes, in the seventeenth century, said an acre enclosed was worth four in common. In fact, the history of enclosures is part of the history of the great revolution in agriculture by which the manorial system was converted into the modern system as we know it to-day of several ownership and the triumvirate of landlord, tenant farmer, and labourer. No one could have objected to the enclosure of waste; it was that of the common arable fields and of the common pasture that excited the indignation of contemporaries. They saw many of the small holders displaced and the countryside depopulated; many of the labourers were also thrown out of employment, for there was no need in enclosed fields of the swineherd and shepherd and oxherd who had tended the common flocks of the villagers in the old unfenced fields. But much of the opposition was founded on ignorance and hatred of change; England had been for ages mainly a corn-growing land, and, many thought, ought to remain so. As a matter of fact, what much of the arable land wanted was laying down to grass; it was worn out and needed a rest. The common field system was wasteful; the land, for instance, could never be properly ploughed, for the long narrow strips could not be cross-ploughed, and much of it must have suffered grievously from want of manure at a time when hardly any stock was kept in the winter to make manure. The beneficial effect of the rest is shown by the fact that at the end of the sixteenth century, when some of the land came to be broken up, the produce per acre of wheat had gone up largely.[195] Marling and liming the land, too, which had been the salvation of much of it for centuries, had gone out partly because of insecurity of tenure, partly because in the unsettled state of England men knew not if they could reap any benefit therefrom; and partly because, says Fitzherbert, men were lazier than their fathers. There can be no doubt that enclosures were often accompanied with great hardships and injustice. Dugdale, speaking of Stretton in Warwickshire,[196] says that in Henry VII's time Thomas Twyford, having begun the depopulation thereof, decaying four messuages and three cottages whereunto 160 acres of 'errable' land belonged, sold it to Henry Smith; which Henry, following that example, enclosed 640 acres of land more, whereby twelve messuages and four cottages fell to ruins and eighty persons there inhabiting, being employed about tillage and husbandry, were constrained to depart thence and live miserably. By means whereof the church grew to such ruin that it was of no other use than for the shelter of cattle. A sad picture, and true of many districts, but much of the depopulation ascribed to enclosures was due to the devastation of the Civil Wars.

In spite of these enclosures, which began to change the England of open fields into the country we know of hedgerows and winding roads, great part of the land was in a wild and uncultivated state of fen, heath, and wood, the latter sometimes growing right up to the walls of the towns.[197] An unbroken series of woods and fens stretched right across England from Lincoln to the Mersey, and northwards from the Mersey to the Solway and the Tweed; Warwickshire, Northamptonshire, and Leicestershire were largely covered by forests, and Sherwood Forest extended over nearly the whole of Notts. Cannock Chase was covered with oaks, and in the forest of Needwood in Camden's time the neighbouring gentry eagerly pursued the cheerful sport of hunting. The great forest of Andredesweald, though much diminished, still covered a large part of Sussex, and the Chiltern district in Bucks and Oxfordshire was thick with woods which hid many a robber. The great fen in the east covered 300,000 acres of land in six counties, in spite of various efforts to reclaim the land, and was to remain in a state of marsh and shallow water till the seventeenth century.

North and west of the great fen was Hatfield Chase, 180,000 acres mostly swamp and bog, with here and there a strip of cultivated land, much of which had been tilled and neglected; a great part too of Yorkshire was swamp, heath, and forest, and of Lancashire marshes and mosses, some of which were not drained till recent times. The best corn-growing counties were those lying immediately to the north of London, stretching from Suffolk to Gloucestershire, and including the southern portions of Staffordshire and Leicestershire; Essex was a great cheese county; Hants, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, and Bedfordshire were famous for malt, and Leicestershire for peas and beans. The population of England in 1485 was probably from two to two and a half millions. At the time of Domesday it was under two millions, and from that date increased perhaps to nearly four millions at the time of the Black Death in 1348-9, which swept away from one-third to one-half of the people, and repeated wars and pestilences seem to have kept it from increasing until Tudor times. Of the whole population no fewer than eleven-twelfths were employed in agriculture.[198]

It was sought to remedy enclosure and depopulation by legislation, and the statute of 4 Hen. VII, c. 19, was passed, which stated in its preamble that where in some towns (meaning townships or villages) 200 persons used to be occupied and lived by their lawful labours, now there are occupied only two or three herdsmen, so that the residue fall into idleness, and husbandry is greatly decayed, churches destroyed, the bodies there buried not prayed for, the parsons and curates wronged, and the defence of this land enfeebled and impaired; the latter point being wisely deemed one of the most serious defects in the new system of farming. Indeed, the encouragement of tillage was largely prompted by the desire to see the people fed on good home-grown corn and made strong and healthy by rural labour for the defence of England. It therefore enacted that houses which within three years before had been let for farms with 20 acres of tillage land should be kept in that condition, under a penalty of forfeiting half the profits to the king or the lord of the fee. Soon after Henry VIII ascended the throne came another statute, 6 Hen. VIII, c. 5, that all townships, villages, &c., decayed and turned from husbandry and tillage into pasture, shall by the owner be rebuilt and the land made mete for tillage within one year; and this was repeated and made perpetual by a law of the next year.[199]

But legislation was in vain; the price of wool was now beginning to advance so that the attraction of sheep farming was irresistible, and laws, which asked landowners and farmers to turn from what was profitable to what was not, were little likely to be observed, especially as the administration of these laws was in the hands of those whose interest it was that they should not be observed.

Their ill success, however, did not deter the Parliament from fresh efforts. 25 Hen. VIII, c. 13, sets forth the condition of affairs in its preamble: as many persons have accumulated into few, great multitude of farms and great plenty of cattle, especially sheep, putting such land as they can get into pasture, and enhanced the old rents and raised the prices of corn, cattle, wool, and poultry almost double, 'by reason whereof a mervaylous multitude and nombre of the people of this realme be not able to provide drynke and clothes necessary for themselves, but be so discoraged with myserie and povertie that they fall dayly to thefte and robberye or pitifully dye for hunger and colde.' So greedy and covetous were some of these accumulators that they had as many as 24,000 sheep; and a good sheep, that was used to be sold for 2s. 4d. or 3s. at the most, was now from 4s. to 6s.; and a stone of clothing wool, that in some shires was accustomed to be sold for 18d. or 20d., is now 3s. 4d. to 4s.; and in others, where it was 2s. 4d. to 3s. it is now 4s. 8d. to 5s.

It was therefore enacted that no man, with some exceptions, was to keep more than 2,000 sheep at one time in any part of the realm, though lambs under one year were not to count. The frequency of these laws proves their inefficacy, and the conduct of Henry VIII was the chief cause of it; for while Parliament was complaining of the decrease of tillage he gave huge tracts of land taken from the monasteries to greedy courtiers, who evicted the tenants and lived on the profits of sheep farming.[200] For the dissolution of the monasteries was now taking Place,[201] and the best landowners in England, some of whom farmed their own land long after most of the lay landlords had given it up or turned it into grass, and whose lands are said to have fetched a higher rent than any others, were robbed and ruined. Including the dissolution of the monasteries and the confiscation of the chantry lands in 1549 by Edward VI, about one-fifteenth of the land of England changed hands at this time. The transfer of the abbey lands to Henry's favourites was very prejudicial to farming; it was a source of serious dislocation of agricultural industry, marked by all the inconvenience, injustice, and loss that attends a violent transfer of property. It is probable also that many of the monastic lands were let on stock and land leases; and the stock was confiscated, with inevitable ruin to the tenant as well as the landlord.[202] And not only was a serious injury wrought to agriculture by the spoliation of a large number of landlords generally noted for their generosity and good farming, but with the religious houses disappeared a large number of consumers of country produce, the amount of which may be gathered from the following list of stores of the great Abbey of Fountains at the dissolution: 2,356 horned cattle, 1,326 sheep, 86 horses, 79 swine, and large quantities of wheat, oats, rye, and malt, with 392 loads of hay.[203] It must indeed have seemed to many as if the poor farmer was never to have any rest; no sooner were the long wars over and pestilences in some sense diminished, than the evils of enclosure and the dissolution of the monasteries came upon him. Many ills were popularly ascribed to the fall of the monasteries; in an old ballad in Percy's Reliques one of the characters says, in western dialect:—

NOTE.—If any further proof were needed of the constant attention given by Parliament to agricultural matters, it would be furnished by the Acts for the destruction of vermin.[204] Our forefathers had no doubt that rooks did more harm than good, yearly destroying a 'wonderfull and marvelous greate quantitie of corne and graine'; and destroying the 'covertures of thatched housery, bernes, rekes, stakkes, and other such like'; so that all persons were to do their best to kill them, 'on pain of a grevous amerciament'.

---

CHAPTER VIII

FITZHERBERT.—THE REGULATION OF HOURS AND WAGES

The farming of this period is portrayed for us by Fitzherbert, the first agricultural writer of any merit since Walter of Henley in the thirteenth century. He was one of the Justices of Common Pleas, and had been a farmer for forty years before he wrote his books on husbandry, and on surveying in 1523, so that he knew what he was writing about; 'there is nothing touching husbandry contained in this book but I have had experience thereof and proved the same.' In spite of the increase of grazing in his time he says the 'plough is the most necessarie instrument that an husbandman can occupy', and describes those used in various counties; in Kent, for instance, 'they have some go with wheeles as they do in many other places'; but the plough of his time is apparently the same as that of Walter of Henley, and altered little till the seventeenth century. The rudeness of it may be judged from the fact that in some places it only cost 10d. or 1s. though in other parts they were as much as 6s. or even 8s. He says[205] it was too costly for a farmer to buy all his implements, wherefore it is necessary for him to learn to make them, as he had done in the Middle Ages before the era of ready-made implements, when he always bought the materials and put them together at home. On the vexed question of whether to use horses or oxen for ploughing, he says it depends on the locality; for instance, oxen will plough in tough clay and upon hilly ground, whereas horses will stand still; but horses go faster than oxen on even ground and light ground, and are 'quicke for carriages, but they be far more costly to keep in winter.'

According to him, oxen had no shoes as horses had.[206] Here is his description of a harrow: it is 'made of six final peeces of timber called harow bulles, made either of ashe or oke; they be two yardes long, and as much as the small of a man's leg; in every bulle are five sharpe peeces of iron called harow tyndes, set somewhat a slope forward.' This harrow, drawn by oxen, was good to break the big clods, and then the horse harrow came after to break the smaller clods. It differed slightly from the former, some having wooden tines. For weeding corn the chief instrument 'is a pair of tongs made of wood, and in dry weather ye must have a weeding hoke with a socket set upon a staffe a yard long.'[207]

He recommends that grass be mown early, for the younger and greener the grass is the softer and sweeter it will be when it is hay, and the seeds will be in it instead of fallen out as when left late; advice which many slovenly farmers need to-day. He does not approve of the custom of reaping rye and wheat high up and mowing them after, but advises that they be cut clean; barley and oats, however, should be commonly mown. Both wheat and rye were to be sown at Michaelmas, and were cast upon the fallow and ploughed under, two London bushels of wheat and rye being the necessary amount of seed per acre. In spite of his praise of the plough he allows that the sheep 'is the most profitablest cattel that a man can have', and he gives a list of their diseases, among the things that rot them being a grass called sperewort, another called peny grass, while marshy ground, mildewed grass, and grass growing upon fallow and therefore full of weeds were all conducive to rot. The chief cause, however, is mildew, the sign of whose presence is the honeydew on the oak leaves. In buying cattle to feed the purchaser is to see that the hair stare not, and that the beast lacks no teeth, has a broad rib, a thick hide, and be loose skinned, for if it stick hard to his ribs he will not feed[208]; it should be handled to see if it be soft on the forecrop, behind the shoulder, on the hindermost rib upon the huck bone, and at the nache by the tail. Among other diseases of cattle he mentions the gout, 'commonly in the hinder feet'; but he never knew a man who could find a remedy. He was a great advocate of enclosures; for it was much better to have several closes and pastures to put his cattle in, which should be well quick-setted, ditched, and hedged, so as to divide those of different ages, as this was more profitable than to have his cattle go before the herdsman (in the common field).

It will be seen from the above that Fitzherbert made no idle boast in saying he wrote of what he knew, and much of his advice is applicable to-day, though the time is past for the farmer's wife to 'wynowe all manner of cornes, to make malte, to shere corne, and in time of nede to helpe her husbande to fyll the mucke wayne or dounge carte, dryve the plough, lode heye, corne, and such other'; though she may go or ride to the market 'to sel butter, cheese, milke, eggs, chekyns, hennes, and geese.'[209] It appears that the horses of England at this time had considerably deteriorated, for the statute 27 Hen. VIII, c. 6, mentions the great decay of the breed, the cause it is stated being that 'in most places of this Realme little horsis and naggis of small stature and valeu be suffered to depasture and also to covour marys and felys of very small stature'; therefore owners and farmers of deer parks shall keep in every such park two brood mares of 13 'hand fulles' (hands) at least. Another statute, 32 Hen. VIII, c. 13, strove to remedy this evil by enacting that no entire horse under 15 hands was to feed on any forest, chase, waste, or common land.

This statute was a useful one, so also was 21 Hen. VIII, c. 8, which forbade for three years the killing of calves between January 1 and May 1, under a penalty of 6s. 8d., because so many had been killed by 'covetous persons' that the cattle of the country were dwindling in number. Others, however, were merely meddlesome, and directed against that unpopular man the dealer. For instance, owners refusing to sell cattle at assessed prices were to answer first in the Star Chamber (25 Hen. VIII, c. 1); and by 3 and 4 Edw. VI, c. 19, no cattle were to be bought but in open fair or market, and not to be resold then alive, though a man might buy cattle anywhere for his own use. No person, again, was to resell cattle within five weeks after he bought them (5 Edw. VI, c. 14); and a common drover had by the same Act to have a licence from three justices before he could buy and sell cattle. We may be sure that these laws were more honoured in the breach than in the observance, as they deserved to be.

Hops were said to have been introduced from the Low Countries about the middle of Henry VIII's reign; but there can be no doubt that this is a mistake. It has been mentioned that they flourished in the gardens of Edward I, and a distinguished authority[210] says the hop may with probability be reckoned a native of Britain; but it was first used as a salad or vegetable for the table, the young sprouts having the flavour of asparagus and coming earlier. Hasted, the historian of Kent, states[211] that a petition was presented to Parliament against the hop plant in 1428 wherein it was called a 'wicked weed'. Harrison says, 'Hops in time past were plentiful in this land, afterwards their maintenance did cease, and now (cir. 1580) being revived where are anie better to be found?'[212] Even then growers had to face foreign competition, as the customs accounts prove that considerable quantities were imported into England. In 1482 a cwt. was sold for 8s. and 1 cwt. 21 lb. for 19s. 6d., an early example of that fluctuation in price which has long characterized them.[213] Their average price about this time seems to have been 14s. ¹/₂d. a cwt.

During the Tudor period the number of day labourers increased, largely owing to the enclosures having deprived the small holder and commoner of their land and rights. But judging by the statutes those paid yearly and boarded in the farm house were still most numerous.

In 1495 the hours of labourers were first regulated by law. The statute II Hen. VII, c. 22, says that 23 Hen. VI, c. 12,[214] was insufficiently observed; and besides increasing wages slightly set forth the following hours for work on the farm: the labourer was to be at his work from the middle of March to the middle of September before 5 a.m., and have half an hour for breakfast and an hour and a half for dinner and sleep, when sleep was allowed, that is from the middle of May to the middle of August; when sleep was not allowed, an hour for dinner and half an hour for his nonemete or lunch; and he was to work till between 7 and 8 p.m. During the rest of the year he was to work from daylight to dark. The attempt to regulate hours, which seem fair and reasonable, no doubt met with better success than that to regulate wages, for 6 Hen. VIII, c. 3 (1514), says the previous statutes had been very much disregarded, and sets down the rates once more:—

By the day, except in harvest, a common labourer from Easter to Michaelmas was to have 2d. with food and drink, 4d. without; and from Michaelmas to Easter 1¹/₂d. with food and drink, and 3d. without. In harvest:—

---

CHAPTER IX

1540-1600

PROGRESS AT LAST.—HOP-GROWING.—PROGRESS OF ENCLOSURE.—HARRISON'S 'DESCRIPTION'

The period we have now reached was one of steady growth in the value of land and its products. In 1543 Henry VIII, who had given away or squandered, in addition to the great treasure left him by his thrifty father, all the wealth obtained from the dissolution of the monasteries, debased the coinage in order to get more money into his insatiable hands, and prices went up in consequence. But there were other causes: the influx of precious metals from newly discovered America into Europe had commenced to make itself felt, and the population of the country began to grow steadily. Also, it must not be forgotten that the seasons, which in the early part of the century had been normal, were for the next sixty years frequently rainy and bad. It is unnecessary to say that this must have largely helped to raise the price of corn. The average price of wheat from 1540-1583 was 13s. 10¹/₂d. a quarter; from 1583-1702, 39s. 0¹/₂d. Corn was still subject to extraordinary fluctuations: in 1557, Holinshed says before harvest wheat was 53s. 4d. a quarter, malt 44s. After harvest wheat was 5s., malt 6s. 8d., the former prices being due to a terrible drought in England. Oxen in the period 1583-1703 were worth 75s. instead of under £1 in the period 1400-1540. Wool was from 9d. to 1s. a lb. instead of about 3¹/₂d., and all other farm products increased with these.[215] Hops were from 1540-1582 about 26s. 8d. a cwt., and from 1583-1700, 82s. 9¹/₂d. In 1574 Reynold Scott published the first English treatise on hops,[216] in which he says, 'one man may well keep 2,000 hils, upon every hil well ordered you shall have 3 lb. of hoppes at the least, one hundred pounds of these hoppes are commonly worth 26s. 8d., one acre of ground and the third part of one man's labour with small cost beside, shall yield unto him that ordereth the same well, fortie marks yearly and that for ever,' an optimistic estimate that many growers to-day would like to see realized. 'In the preparation of a hop garden', says the same writer, 'if your ground be grasse, it should be first sowen with hempe or beanes which maketh the ground melowe, destroyeth weedes, and leaveth the same in good season for this purpose.[217] At the end of Marche, repayre to some good garden to compound with the owner for choice rootes, which in some places will cost 5d. an hundredth. And now you must choose the biggest rootes you can find, such as are three or four inches about, and let every root be nine or ten inches long, and contain three joints.' Holes were then to be dug at least 8 feet apart, one foot square, and one foot deep, and in each two or three roots planted and well hilled up. Tusser, however, recommended them much closer:

Three or four poles were to be set to each hill 15 or 16 feet long, unless the ground was very rich, the poles 9 or 10 inches in circumference at the butt, so as to last longer and stand the wind well. After they were put up, the ground round the poles was to be well rammed. Rushes or grass were used for tieing the hops. During the growth of the hops, not more than two or three bines were to be allowed to each pole; and after the first year the hills were to be gradually raised from the alleys between the rows until, according to the illustrations in Scott's book, they were 3 or 4 feet high, the 'greater you make your hylles the more hoppes you shall have upon your poals'. When the time for picking came, the bines when cut were carried to a 'floore prepared for the purpose', apparently of hardened earth, where they were stripped into baskets, and Scott thought that 'it is not hurtfull greatly though the smaller leaves be mingled with the hoppes'. In wet weather the hops were to be stripped in the house. The fire for drying hops was of wood, and some dried their hops in the sun, both processes to us appearing very risky; as the first would be too quick, and the latter next to impossible in September in England. They were sometimes packed in barrels, as Tusser tells us, 'Some close them up drie in a hogshead or vat, yet canvas or sontage (coarse cloth) is better than that.'

By this time England had largely changed from a corn-growing to a stock-raising country; Harrison, writing in the middle of Queen Elizabeth's reign, says, 'the soile of Britaine is more inclined to feeding and grazing than profitable for tillage and bearing of corne ... and such store is there of cattle in everie place that the fourth part of the land is scarcely manured for the provision of graine.' But this statement seems exaggerated. We know that by Harrison's time enclosures had affected but a small area, and the greater part of the cultivated land was in open arable fields. The yield of corn was now much greater than in the Middle Ages; rye or wheat well tilled and dressed now produced 15 to 20 bushels to the acre instead of 6 or 8, barley 36 bushels, oats 4 or 5 quarters[218], though in the north, which was still greatly behind the rest of England, crops were smaller. No doubt this was partly due to the much-abused enclosures: the industrious farmer could now do what he liked with his own, without hindrance from his lazy or unskilful neighbour. Tusser's preference for the 'several' field is very decided; comparing it with the 'champion' or common field he says:—

But the rich graziers boasted that they did not grow corn because they could buy it cheaper in the market; and they are said to have traded on the necessity of the poor farmer to sell at Michaelmas in order to pay his rent, and when they had got the corn into their hands they raised the price. The corn-dealers of the time were looked upon with dislike by every one; many of the dearths then so frequent, and nearly always caused by bad seasons, were ascribed to 'engrossers buying of corn and witholding it for sale'. By a statute of 1552 the freedom of internal corn trade was entirely suppressed, and no one could carry corn from one part of England to another without a licence, and any one who bought corn to sell it again was liable to two months' imprisonment and forfeited his corn. Although we shall see that this policy was reversed in the next century, the feeling against corn-dealers survived for many years and was loudly expressed during the Napoleonic war; indeed, we may doubt if it is extinct to-day.

Many of the fruits and garden produce, which had been neglected since the first Edward, had by now come into use again, 'not onlie among the poor commons, I meane of melons, pompions, gourds, cucumbers, radishes, skirets (probably a sort of carrot), parsneps, carrots, cabbages, navewes (turnip radishes (?)), turnips,[219] and all kinds of salad herbes, but also at the tables of delicate merchants, gentlemen, and the nobilitie.'[220]

'Also we have most delicate apples, plummes, pears, walnuts, filberts, &c., and those of sundrie sorts, planted within fortie years past, in comparison of which most of the old trees are nothing worth: so have we no less store of strange fruite, as abricotes, almonds, peaches, figges, cornetrees (probably cornels) in noblemen's orchards. I have seen capers, orenges, and lemmons, and heard of wild olives growing here, besides other strange trees.'[221]

As a proof of the growth of grass in proportion to tillage between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries, Eden gives several examples,[222] of which the following are significant:—

'Our sheepe are very excellent for sweetness of flesh, and our woolles are preferred before those of Milesia and other places.'[223] So thought Harrison and many English landowners and farmers too, so that legislation was powerless to stop the spread of sheep farming. In 1517 a commission of inquiry instigated by Wolsey held inquisition on enclosures and the decay of tillage, and it seems to have been the only honest effort to stop the evil. It was to inquire what decays, conversions, and park enclosures had been made since 1489, but the result even of this attempt was small. In 1535 a fresh statute, 27 Hen. VIII, c. 22, stated that the Act limiting the number of sheep to be kept had only been observed on lands held of the king, whereon many houses had been rebuilt and much pasture reconverted to tillage; but on lands holden of other lords this was not the case, therefore the king was to have the moiety of the profits of such lands as had been converted from tillage to pasture since 4 Hen. VII until a proper house was built and the land returned to tillage; but the Act only applied to fourteen counties therein enumerated. The enclosing for sheep-runs still went on, however, often with ruthless selfishness; houses and townships were levelled, says Sir Thomas More, and nothing left standing except the church, which was turned into a sheep-house:

said a contemporary ballad.

Latimer wrote, 'where there were a great many householders and inhabitants there is now but a shepherd and his dog.' 'I am sorie to report it,' says Harrison,[224] 'but most sorrowful of all to understand that men of great port and countenance are so far from suffering their farmers to have anie gaine at all that they themselves become graziers, butchers, tanners, sheepmasters, and woodmen, thereby to enrich themselves.' The Act against pulling down farmhouses was evaded by repairing one room for the use of a shepherd; a single furrow was driven across a field to prove it was still under the plough; to avoid holding illegal numbers of sheep flocks were held in the names of sons and servants.[225] The country swarmed with heaps of miserable paupers, 'sturdy and valiant' beggars, and thieves who, though hanged twenty at a time on a single gallows, still infested all the countryside, their numbers being swollen by the dissolution of the monasteries and the breaking up of the bands of retainers kept by the great nobles.

Rents also were rising rapidly. Latimer's account of his father's farm is too well known to be again quoted; his opinions were shared by all the writers of the day. Sir William Forrest, about 1540, says that landlords now demand fourfold rents, so that the farmer has to raise his prices in proportion, and beef and mutton were so dear that a poor man could not 'bye a morsell'. 'Howe joyne they lordshyp to lordshyppe, manner to manner, ferme to ferme. How do the rych men, and especially such as be shepemongers, oppresse the king's people by devourynge their common pastures with the shepe so that the poore are not able to keepe a cowe, but are like to starve. And yet when was beef ever so dere or mutton, wool now 8s. a stone.

'Now', says another, later in the century, 'I can never get a horse shoed under 10d. or 12d., when I have also seen the common pryce was 6d. And cannot your neighbour remember that within these thirty years I could bye the best pigge or goose that I could lay my hand on for four pence which now costeth 12d., a good capon for 3d. or 4d., a hen for 2d., which now costeth me double and triple.'[226]

Parliament, of course, tried to regulate the price of food; an Act of 1532, 24 Hen. VIII, c. 3, ordained that beef and pork should be ¹/₂d. a lb. and mutton and veal ⁵/₈d. a lb. The decrease in the number of cows also received its attention; 2 and 3 Philip and Mary, c. 3, states that forasmuch of late years a great number of persons have fed in their pastures sheep and cattle with no regard to breeding, so that there was great scarcity of stock, therefore for every 60 sheep kept one milk cow shall be kept, and for every 120 sheep one calf shall be bred, and for every 10 head of horned cattle shall be kept one milk cow, and for every two cows so kept one calf shall be bred. The Act was to last seven years, but 13 Eliz. c. 25 made it perpetual.

In 1549 came the rising of Robert Kett in Norfolk, the last attempt of the English labourer to obtain redress of his wrongs by force of arms, though Kett himself belonged to the landlord class and took the side of the people probably by accident. The petition of grievances drawn up by his followers aimed at diminishing the power of lords of manors as regards enclosures, the keeping of dove-cots, and other feudal wrongs. 'We pray', said the insurgents, 'that all bondmen may be made free, for God made all free with His precious blood-shedding.' The rebellion came to nothing, and some of the abuses at which it was aimed were dying a natural death, though enclosure often acted hardly on the poor man.

The manorial system went on steadily decaying, and by this time the demesne lands had much diminished in area on most manors. Many parcels had been sold to the new landlord class, who had made their fortunes in the towns and, like most Englishmen, desired to become country gentlemen.

Much of the demesne had been sold in small lots to well-off tradesmen, and as the villeins had become copyholders a large part of the land was owned or occupied by yeomen or tenant farmers, who cultivated from 20 to 150 acres. Many of the labourers also owned or rented cottages with 4 or 5 acres attached to them. Such was the rural society at the end of the Tudor period. The progress of enclosures helped to destroy this, for the labourers gradually ceased to own or occupy land, farms increased in size, the ownership of land came to be more and more the privilege of the rich, and people flocked in increasing numbers to the towns.[227a] In five Norfolk manors in Elizabeth's time only from one-seventh to one-tenth was in demesne, and little of what was left was farmed by the lord, but let to farmers on leases.[227b] On some manors the demesne land lay in compact blocks near the manor house; on others it was in scattered strips of various size; in others it lay in blocks and strips. The following particulars of a manor in Norfolk give a good picture of an estate in 1586-8, the tenants on it, their rank, and the size of their holdings:—

There were also 12 tenants without houses, holding from 1 to 20 acres; the demesne was 230 acres; there were two glebes containing 84 acres, and town lands of 7 acres. The waste amounted to 350 acres, which by 1599 had all disappeared.

On this manor the houses were not collected together in a village as usual in most parts of England, but scattered about the estate. In two other manors the amount of waste remaining at this period was very small, but in three others little had been 'approved' and much consequently remained; most of the 'approvements', where made, seem to have been of long standing, and all the enclosures made were for tillage, not for grass as we should expect. The 350 acres of waste that remained at Horstead in 1586-8 was enclosed in 1599 by agreement between the lords of the manor and the tenants on the following terms:—

Before a man enclosed he consolidated his holding by exchange, so as to bring it into a compact parcel instead of scattered strips, a very lengthy process; then he ploughed up the bounds between the strips; after which he changed the direction of the ploughing, ploughing the land crossways, a very necessary change, as it had all been ploughed lengthways for centuries; and lastly he erected his fences: the bounds of the strips, however, were sometimes left to show which were freehold and which copyhold. On the other hand, there were exceptions to the curtailment of the demesne: on an Oxfordshire manor of the sixteenth century the greater part of the 64 yard-lands of which it consisted had by then passed from the possession of the peasants to the private use of the lord of the manor.[228] To each yard-land belonged a house and farmyard, 24 to 28³/₄ acres of arable land, a share in the commonable meadows which for each occupier came to some 8 acres, also the right to turn out 8 oxen or cows, or 6 horses and 40 sheep on to the common pasture. Probably, as in other manors in ancient times, each occupier had a right to as much firewood as was necessary, and timber for building purposes and fences. The arable land lay in numerous small plots of half an acre each and less, mingled together in a state of great confusion, and was farmed on the four-field system—wheat, beans, oats, fallow—though 200 years before the three-field system had been most common in the district. Many of the common arable fields evidently often contained, in those days of poor cultivation and inefficient drainage, patches of boggy and poor land which were left uncultivated.[229] In the rolls of the Manor of Scotter in Lincolnshire, in the early part of the sixteenth century, no one was to allow his horses to depasture in the arable fields unless they were tethered on these bad spots to prevent them wandering into the growing corn.[230] Many of the other regulations of this manor throw a flood of light on the farming of the day. In 1557 it was ordered that no man should drive his cattle unyoked through the corn-field under a penalty of 3s. 4d. Every man shall keep a sufficient fence against his neighbour under the same penalty. No man shall make a footpath over the corn-field, the penalty for so doing being 4d. Every one shall both ring and yoke their swine before S. Ellen's Day (probably May 3), under a penalty of 6s. 8d., the custom of yoking swine to prevent them breaking fences being common until recent times. It was the custom in some manors to sow peas in a plot especially set apart for the poor. Another rule was that no one should bake or brew by night for fear of burning down the flimsy houses and buildings. The penalty for ploughing up the balks which divided the strips, or meere (marc) furrows as they were called in Lincolnshire, was 2d., a very light one for so serious an offence. In 1565 a penalty of 10s. was imposed on Thomas Dawson for breaking his hemp, i.e. separating the fibre from the bark in his large open chimney on winter nights, a habit which the manor courts severely punished owing to the risk of fire, for hemp refuse is very inflammable. It 1578 it was laid down that every one was to sow the outside portion of their arable lands, and not leave it waste for weeds to the damage of his neighbours; and that those who were too poor to keep sheep should not gather wool before 8 o'clock in the morning, in reference to the custom of allowing the poor to pick refuse wool found on bushes and thorns, and this rule was to prevent them tearing wool from the sheep at night under that pretext. No man was to keep any beasts apart from the herdsman, for if the herdsman did not know the animals he could not tell them from strays. Every one was to sweep their chimney four times a year, for fear of sparks falling on the thatch. No man was to suffer the nests of crows or magpies in his ground, but pull them down before May Day. In the meadows, before each man began to mow his grass he was to mark the exact limits of his own land with 'wadsticks' or tall rods, so that there could be no mistake as to boundaries. The health of the community and of the live stock also received attention: in 1583 one Pattynson was fined 1s. for allowing a 'scabbed' horse to go on the common; dead cattle were to be buried the day after death, and all unwholesome meat was to be buried.

Harrison praises the farmer of his day highly: 'the soyle is even now in these oure dayes growne to be much more fruitfulle; the cause is that our country men are grown more skilful and careful throwe recompense of gayne.' He was also doing well by means of his skill and care; and in spite of the raising of rents by the much-abused landlords; for in former times 'for all their frugality they were scarcely able to live and pay their rents on rent day without selling a cow or a horse'. Such also used to be their poverty, that if a farmer went to the alehouse, 'a thing greatly used in those days,' and there, 'in a braverie to show what store he had, did caste downe his purse and therein a noble or 6 shillings in silver unto them, it was very likely that all the rest could not lay downe so much against it.' And In Henry's time, though rents of £4 had increased to £40, £50, or £100, yet the farmer generally had at the end of his term saved six or seven years' rent, besides a 'fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard', and odd vessels, also 'three or four feather beds, so manie coverlids and carpets of tapestry, a silver salt, a bowle for wine, and a dozzen of spoones to furnish up the sute'. His food consisted principally of beef, and 'such food as the butcher selleth', mutton, veal, lamb, pork, besides souse, brawn, bacon, fruit, fruit pies, cheese, butter, and eggs.[231] In feasting, the husbandman or farmer exceeded, especially at bridals, purifications of women, and such other meetings, where 'it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent'. But, besides these, there were many poorer farmers who lived at home 'with hard and pinching diet'. Wheaten bread was at this time a luxury confined to the gentility, the farmer's loaf, according to Tusser, was sometimes wheat, sometimes rye, sometimes mastlin, a mixture of wheat and rye, though the poorer farmer on uninclosed land ate bread made of beans.

The poor ate bread of rye or barley, and in time of dearth of beans, peas, and oats, and sometimes acorns.[232] According to Tusser, the labourer was allowed roast meat twice a week,

and Latimer calls bacon 'the necessary meate' of the labourer, and it seems to have been his great stand-by then as now. The bread and bacon were supplemented largely by milk and porridge.[233] The statute, 24 Hen. VIII, c. 3, says that all food, and especially beef, mutton, pork, and veal, 'which is the common feeding of mean and poor persons.' was too dear for them to buy, and fixed the price of beef and pork at ¹/₂d. a lb. and of mutton and veal at ⁵/₈d. a lb.; but the statute, like others of the kind, was of little avail, and the price of beef was in the middle of the sixteenth century about 1d. a lb. or 8d. in our money. As the average price of wheat at the same date was 14s. a quarter, or about 112s. in our money, fresh meat was comparatively much cheaper, and it is no wonder that even the farmer could not afford wheaten bread regularly. Moryson, writing in Elizabeth's reign, says 'Englishmen eate barley and rye brown bread, and prefer it to white as abiding longer in the stomeck and not so soon digested'.[234]

A tithe dispute at North Luffenham in Rutlandshire throws considerable light on the financial position of the various classes interested in the land about 1576. At the trial several witnesses were examined, who all made statements as to the amount of their worldly wealth, and it is a noteworthy fact that even the humblest had saved something; perhaps because there was no poor law or State pension fund to discourage thrift.[235] Thomas Blackburne, a husbandman, who had served his master as 'chief baylie of his husbandrie', had at the end of a long life saved £40. Another, William Walker, eighty years of age, during forty years of service to Mr. John Wymarke had put by £10. Robert Sculthorp, who had at one time been a farmer, was worth £26 6s. 8d., but the size of his farm is unfortunately not told us. Roland Wymarke, a gentleman farmer, who had farmed for forty years at North Luffenham, was little better off than Thomas Blackburne, the baylie, for he estimated his capital at £50. £50, however, must not be taken as representing the average wealth of a 'gentleman', though a few hundred pounds was then considered a considerable fortune. In 1577 Thomas Corny, a prosperous landlord at Bassingthorpe, Lincolnshire, had a house with a hall, three parlours, seven chambers, a high garret, maid's garret, five chambers for yeomen hinds, shepherd, &c., two kitchens, two larders, milk-house, brew-house, buttery, and cellar; and it was furnished with tables, carpets, cushions, pictures, beds, curtains, chairs, chests, and numerous kitchen and other utensils, besides a quantity of plate, which was then looked upon not only as a useful luxury but as a safe form of investment. The small squire was not nearly so well off as this. In 1527 the house of John Asfordby, who was of that degree, contained a hall, parlour, small parlour, low parlour, a chamber over the parlour, gallery chamber, buttery, and kitchen, and furniture was scanty, but the plate cupboard was well filled.[236] A prosperous yeoman was often comparatively better off than the small squire. Richard Cust, of Pinchbeck in the same county, though his house was small, consisting only of a hall, parlour with chamber over, kitchen with chamber over, brew-house, milne-house (mill-house), and milk-house, was richer in furniture, possessing a folding-table, 4 chairs, 6 cushions, 27 pieces of pewter, 10 candlesticks, 4 basins, 1 laver, 6 beds, and other articles.[237]

---

CHAPTER X

1540-1600

LIVE STOCK.—FLAX.—SAFFRON.—THE POTATO. THE ASSESSMENT OF WAGES

The cattle and sheep of this period have generally been described as poor animals, and no doubt they would seem small to us. To Jacob Rathgib, a traveller, writing in 1592, they seemed worthy of praise: 'England has beautiful oxen and cows, with very large horns, low and heavy and for the most part black; there is abundance of sheep and wethers, which graze by themselves winter and summer without shepherds.' The heaviest wethers, according to him, weighed 60 lb. and had at the most 6 lb. of wool, a much heavier fleece than is generally ascribed to them; others had 4 or 5 lb. Horses were abundant, and, though low and small, were very fleet; the riding horses being geldings and generally excellent. Immense numbers of swine were in the country, 'larger than in any other.' Six years later another traveller, Hentzner, noticed that the soil abounded with cattle, and the inhabitants were more inclined to feeding than ploughing. He saw, too, a Berkshire harvest-home: 'As we were returning to our inn (at Windsor) we happened to meet some country people celebrating their harvest-home, their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed by which perhaps they would signify Ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maid-servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.' Harrison[238] tells us, no doubt with patriotic bias, that 'our oxen are such as the like are not to be found in any country of Europe both for greatness of body and sweetness of flesh, their horns a yard between the tips.' Cows had doubled in price in his time, from 26s. 8d. to 53s. 4d. 'Our horses are high, but not of such huge greatness as in other places,' yet remarkable for the easiness of their pace; and 5 or 6 cart-horses will draw 30 cwt. a long journey, and a pack-horse will carry 4 cwt. without any hurt,—a statement which is one more proof of the poorness of the roads. The chief horse fairs were at 'Ripon, Newportpond, Wolfpit, and Harborow,' where horse dealers were as great rogues as ever. Pigeons were still the curse of the farmer, and their cotes were called dens of thieves.

By the end of the sixteenth century, certainly by the first quarter of the seventeenth, the villein, who in the Middle Ages had formed the bulk of the population, had disappeared.[239] It is probable that even at the beginning of the Tudor period the great majority of the bondmen had become free, and that the serf then only formed one per cent. of the population, and many of those had left the country and become artizans in the towns, for personal serfdom had outlasted demesne farming; though even there the heavy hand of the lord was upon them and enforced the ancient customs.

In the sixteenth century flax was apparently grown upon most farms, the statutes 34 Hen. VIII, c. 4, and 5 Eliz., c. 5, obliging every person occupying 60 acres of tillage to have a quarter of an acre in flax or hemp, and Moryson says the husbandmen wore garments of coarse cloth made at home, so did their wives, and 'in generall' their linen was coarse and made at home.[240]

sings Tusser. The statute of Henry VIII enjoined the sowing of flax and hemp because of the great increase of idle people in the realm, to which the numerous imports, especially linen cloth, contributed.

Saffron also was much grown, that at Saffron Walden in Essex was said to be the best in the world, the profit from it being reckoned at £13 an acre. Its virtues were innumerable, if we may believe the contemporary writers; it flavoured dishes, helped digestion, was good for short wind, killed moths, helped deafness, dissolved gravel, and, lastly, 'drunk in wine doth haste on drunkenesse.'

The most important novelty of this century was the potato, which the colonists, sent out in 1586 by Sir Walter Raleigh, brought from Virginia to Ireland, though it had been introduced into Europe by the Spaniards before this. According to Gerard, the old English botanist, it was, on its first introduction from America, only cultivated in the gardens of the nobility and gentry as a curious exotic; and in 1606 it occurs among the vegetables considered necessary for a nobleman's household.[241] It is curious to find Gerard comparing it to what he calls the 'common potato', in reality the sweet potato brought to England by Drake and Hawkins earlier in the century. In James I's reign the root was considered a great delicacy, and was sold to the queen's household at 2s. a lb., an enormous price.

Like most agricultural novelties it spread very slowly, but about the middle of the seventeenth century began to be planted out in the fields in small patches in Lancashire, whence it spread all over the kingdom and to France.[242] At this date it was looked upon as a very second-rate article of food, if we may judge by the Spectator (No. 232), which alludes to it as the diet of beggars. About 1690, Houghton says, 'now they begin to spread all the kingdom over,' and recommends them boiled or roasted and eaten with butter and sugar.[243] Eden notes its increasing popularity during the eighteenth century, and by his time (the end of that century) in many parts it was the staple article of food for the poor; in Somerset the children mainly subsisted on it, and in Devon it was made into bread. Its cultivation on a large scale in the field did not, however, spread all over England till the Napoleonic war, and the ignorance and prejudice against it lasted for long; even Cobbett called it 'the lazy root,' and whole potatoes were used for seed regardless of the number of eyes.

In 1563 was passed the famous Act, 5 Eliz., c. 4, which Thorold Rogers has asserted to be the commencement of a conspiracy for cheating the English workman of his wages, to tie him to the soil, to deprive him of hope, and to degrade him into irremediable poverty.[244] The violence of this language is a prima facie reason for doubting the correctness of his assertion, which on examination is found to be grossly exaggerated. Under Richard II the justices were authorized to fix the rate of wages, provided they did not exceed the maximum fixed by Parliament. The Elizabethan statute abolished the maximum and left the justices to fix reasonable rates. So far from being an attempt to keep wages down it seems to have been an honest effort to regulate them according to prices,[245] whereas most previous statutes had merely reduced wages. The preamble of the Act states this clearly enough, saying that the existing laws with regard to the hiring and wages of servants were insufficient; chiefly because the wages 'are in dyvers places to small and not answerable to this time respecting the advancement of prices in all things that belong to the said servants and labourers, the said lawes cannot conveniently without the great greefe and burden of the poore labourer and hired man be put in due execution.' But as several of these Acts were still beneficial it was proposed to consolidate them into one statute in order to banish idleness, advance husbandry, and give the labourer decent wages. It was enacted therefore that all persons between the ages of twelve years and sixty, not being otherwise occupied, 'nor being a gentleman born, nor having lands of the yearly value of 40s., nor goods to the value of £10,' should be compellable to serve in husbandry with 'any person that keepeth husbandry' by the year, and the hours of work were re-enacted.

The rates of wages of artificers, husbandmen, &c., were to be ascertained yearly by the justices and the sheriff, 'if he conveniently may,' at quarter sessions, 'calling unto them such discrete and grave persons as they shall thinck meete and conferring together respecting the plentie or scarcitie of the tyme and other circumstances necessary to be considered,' and the wages fixed were to be certified into Chancery. Then proclamations of the wages thus determined were to be made in the cities and market towns. Every person who gave higher wages than those established by the proclamation was to be imprisoned for ten days and fined £5, every receiver to be imprisoned twenty-one days. The importance still attached to the harvest season is shown by the section that all artificers and others were compellable to work in harvest or be put in the stocks two days and a night. For the better advancement of husbandry and tillage every householder farming 60 acres of tillage or more might receive an apprentice in husbandry, but no tradesman or merchant might take an apprentice save his own son, unless his parents had freehold of the annual value of 40s.; and no person was to use 'any art mistery or manual occupation now in use' unless he had served seven years' apprenticeship to it. There can be no doubt that the clauses last quoted confined a large portion of the population to agricultural work, but as we know that the people were deserting the country and flocking to the towns, this must have seemed to the framers of the law very desirable.

This method of fixing wages was in force until 1814, and its repeal then was entirely contrary to the opinion of the artizan class; but it may be doubted if the magistrates extensively used the powers given them by the Act, and wages seem to have been settled generally by competition. Several instances remain, however, of wages drawn up under this Act. Almost immediately after it was passed, in June 1564, the Rutland magistrates met under the Act, and stated that the prices of linen, woollen, leather, corn, and other victuals were great, so they drew up the following list of wages[246]:—

The chief shepherd is only to receive 20s. and 5s. for his livery; but this must be an error, as in the statutes 6 Hen. VIII, c. 3, and 23 Hen. VI, c. 12, he was placed next the bailiff as we should expect.

These wages were evidently 'with diet', and show a considerable advance on those fixed by 6 Hen. VIII, c. 3.[247] By the day the ordinary labourer was to have 6d. in winter, 7d. in summer, and 8d. to 10d. in harvest time, 'finding himself.' A mower with meat earned 5d., without meat 10d. a day; a man reaper with meat 4d., without 8d.; a woman reaper 3d., and 6d.

As the price of corn and meat was three times what it had been in the fifteenth century, and the labourers' wages, taking into consideration his harvest pay, not quite double, the Rutland magistrates hardly observed the spirit of the Act. Rutland, moreover, judging by the assessments of the time, was a county where agriculture was very flourishing; and thirty years after we find in Yorkshire that the winter wages of the labourer were 4d. and the summer 5d. a day: that is, he had little more wages than in the fifteenth century, with provisions risen threefold. At Chester at the same date his day's wages were to be 4d. all the year round.[248] In 1610 the Rutland magistrates at Oakham[249] decreed that an ordinary labourer was to have 6d. a day in winter and 7d. in summer, the same wages as in 1564, yet wheat in that year averaged 32s. 7d. a quarter. A bailiff by the year was now advanced to 52s., a manservant of the best sort, equal no doubt to the chief servant in husbandry, to 50s., a 'common servant' to 40s., and a 'mean servant' to 29s., but all without livery. At Chelmsford, in 1651, there was a very different rate fixed, the ordinary labourer getting from 1s. to 1s. 2d. a day; but this seems to have been exceptional, as at Warwick in 1684 he was only to have 8d., and as late as 1725 in Lancashire 9d. to 10d. a day.[250] In 1682, by the Bury St. Edmunds assessment, a common labourer got 10d. a day in winter and 1s. in summer, and a reaper in harvest 1s. 8d. By the year a bailiff was paid £6, a carter £5, and a common servant £3 10s., of course with food.[251] These figures clearly prove that the wages fixed by the magistrates were often terribly inadequate, though it must be said in their defence that the great rise in prices probably struck them as abnormal and not likely to last. It should be remembered, too, that besides his wages the labourer and his family had often bye industries such as weaving to fall back upon, and in most parts of England still a piece of common land to help him.

---

CHAPTER XI

1600-1700

CLOVER AND TURNIPS.—GREAT RISE IN PRICES. MORE ENCLOSURE.—A FARMING CALENDAR

The seventeenth century was one of considerable progress in English agriculture. The decay of common-field farming was enabling individual enterprise to have its way. The population was rapidly growing; by 1688 the returns of the hearth tax prove that the northern counties were nearly as thickly populated as the southern, and prices during the first half were continually rising, though after that they remained almost stationary, since the effect of the influx of precious metals from the New World was exhausted. In the first half of the century John Smyth ascribes the advance of rents to the Castilian voyages opening the New World, whereby such floods of treasure have flowed into Europe that the rates of Christendom are raised near twentyfold'.

But the greatest agricultural event of the century was the introduction of clover and the encouragement of turnips as grown in Holland, by Sir Richard Weston, about 1645. No doubt the turnip was already well known in England. Tusser and Fitzherbert both mention it, apparently as a garden root only; but Gerard in his Herbal, 1597, says it grew in fields 'and divers vineyards or hoppe gardens in most places of England', which certainly points to an effort having been made generally to use it as a field crop whenever an enclosed space gave it some protection from the depredations of the common herds. However, its cultivation must have declined, as long after this it was regarded as a novelty as a field crop in most parts of England.[252] In Holland it had been used in the field universally, and this use with that of 'great', as it was called, or broad clover, Weston pressed on the English farmer. But their progress was wofully slow. At Hawsted in Suffolk clover and turnips were first sown about 1700, and the eastern portion of England was far ahead of the north and west; as late as 1772 Arthur Young wrote that 'sainfoin, cabbages, potatoes, and carrots are not common crops in England; I do not imagine above half or at most two-thirds of the nation cultivate clover.'[253] Yet their introduction must have been of the greatest benefit to the farmer and the public; his stock of hay was increased, he could utilize his fallows, and keep a much larger head of stock through the winter, who would give him a greater quantity of manure. Every one where turnips were grown could now have fresh meat during the winter. The slow progress of these great blessings is perhaps the strongest testimony in our history of the innate conservatism of the farmer. The green crop was for long considered to be suited only to the garden, and as our forefathers were prejudiced against the spade it was difficult to get such crops cultivated even there; but it should also be remembered that no crop was possible in the common fields which did not come to maturity before Lammas, unless some special agreement was made as to it.[254] Clover, Sir Richard Weston said, thrives best when sown on the worst and barrenest ground, which was to be pared and burnt, and unslaked lime added to the ashes. Then it was to be well ploughed and harrowed, and about 10 lb. of seed sown per acre in the end of March or in April. 'It will stand five years, and then when ploughed up will yield three or four years running rich crops of wheat, and then a crop of oats, after which you may sow clover again.'

In the seventeenth century the practice of liming and marling, which had been largely discontinued since the fourteenth century, was revived (Westcote, in his View of Devon in 1630, calls liming, &c., a new invention), and there was also a great improvement in implements. Patents were taken out for draining machines in 1628, for new manures in 1633-6, ploughs 1623-7 and 1634, mechanical sowing 1634-9. Only six were taken out, however, between 1640 and 1760 that concerned agriculture.[255] The Civil War checked the improvement, for though the great mass of the people had nothing to do with either party, the country was of necessity in a very unsettled state, and both sides plundered indiscriminately. Yet in some parts, as in Devonshire, so many of the able men served in the two armies, that few but old men, women, and children were left to manage the farms, and even they were afraid to grow more than enough to supply themselves since both armies seized the crops.[256] These bad effects lasted for some time afterwards; Chapple, a Devonshire land agent of the eighteenth century, says he had talked with people who remembered the state of husbandry in the last ten or twelve years of the reign of Charles II, when in many parts of Devonshire an acre or two of wheat was esteemed a rarity.

That the rate of progress in the century was not more rapid is attributed by Blyth to several causes[257]:—

The average price of wheat during the seventeenth century was 41s. a quarter, of barley 22s., and oats 14s. 8¹/₂d. Oxen averaged about £5 apiece, cows much less, about £3, and there was not much change in their value during the century. Sheep were about 10s. 6d., and a cart-horse in the first half of the century from £5 to £10, in the second half from £8 to £15. Beef rose from 2d. a lb. in the early part of the century to 3d. at the close of it. Wool remained stationary at from 9d. to 1s. per lb.

[258]A proclamation of 1633 fixed the following prices for London poulterers and victuallers:—

According to the Manydown Manor Rolls the Wootton churchwardens in 1600 paid from 8s. to 11s. for calves, 4s. 4d. for a fat lamb, 8s. for a sheep, 6s. 8d. for a barren ewe, 6d. for a couple of chickens, 1s. 6d. for 500 faggots.[259]

After the restoration in 1660 another period of prosperity set in,[260] and altogether the century was a prosperous one for farmers and manufacturers. The newly established Royal Society materially helped agriculture. 'Since his majesty's most happy restoration the whole land hath been fermented and stirred up by the profitable hints it hath received from the Royal Society, by which means parks have been disparked, commons enclosed, woods turned into arable, and pasture lands improved by clover, St. foine, turnips, cole-seed, and many other good husbandries, so that the food of cattle is increased as fast, if not faster, than the consumption, and by these means the rent of the kingdom is far greater than ever it was.'[261] The century was distinguished also for the curious number of cycles of good and bad seasons; 1646-50 were years of prolonged dearth, wheat reaching an enormous price, and 1661-2, were famine years, while the end of the century was long famous for its barren years.

With the prices of produce rents rose enormously. Very early in the century[262] rents of arable land had increased ninefold, since the fifteenth century, and by 1688 Davenant and King estimated the average rent of arable land in England at 5s. 6d. per acre and of permanent grass at 8s. 8d. Perhaps this is too high an estimate, as on the Belvoir estate of 17,837 acres in 1692 the rental all round was 3s. 9¹/₄d. an acre for land above the average in quality, though it must be remembered that the Earls and Dukes of Rutland were indulgent landlords.

The History of Hawsted affords a valuable index of the increase of rents at this period.[263] In 1500 the average rent was 1s. 4d. an acre; in 1572, 39 acres of arable, meadow, and pasture were let for 2s. 3d. an acre, the landlord, it is interesting to notice, reserving the right of hawking, netting rabbits, hunting, and fowling; and about the same date other lands on the estate were let at 1s. 3d. and 1s. 6d. an acre, so that there had not generally been much advance since 1500, which is what we should expect, as the great rise took place at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. In 1589, therefore, it is not surprising to find that 40 acres of meadow and pasture let at 5s. an acre, and in 1611 some buildings and 155 acres of park at 11s. an acre. In 1616, 366 acres of arable and pasture and 39 acres of meadow were valued at 12s. an acre for letting, and the Hall Farm of 175 acres (8¹/₂ acres meadow) at 10s.; and Great Pipers Farm of 138 acres (8 meadow) at 7s., while meadow and pasture near the mansion was valued at 21s. an acre.

In 1658 the rent of the Hall Farm had advanced from 10s. an acre to about 13s., though in 1682 it went down to 11s. 6d.[264] According to the survey of the Manor of Manydown in Hampshire in 1650, meadow land was worth 20s. an acre, pasture 8s. to 10s., arable from 2s. to 10s., the latter showing a great variation in quality.[265] In 1723 Bryers Wood Farm at Hawsted, which had been let in 1620 for £15, was let at £29 5s. These rents are considerably higher than the estimate of Davenant and King; but it must be remembered that they were for land in the parts of England, where farming was at its best, and they, in accounting for the whole country, had to take into consideration a vast amount of land in the north and west which was worth very little. In the Rawlinson Collection[266] in the Bodleian Library is a rental of Lord Kingston's estate in north Nottinghamshire in 1689, the rents averaging 10s. an acre; but this was an exceptionally good estate, much of the property being meadow and pasture. The farmhouses also were above the average, while in two of the parishes the tenants had rights of common, and in two others the tenancies were tithe free. There was very little arable land on the estate, three small holdings letting for 6s. 8d. an acre; and some of the pasture land was let at 14s., 15s. 6d., and even 18s. an acre. The largest farm, Saundby Hall, of 607 acres, nearly all meadow and pasture, was 9s. 10d. an acre. The cottages were fortunate in having pieces of land attached to them. In Saundby, Richard Ffydall rented a cottage and 2 acres of arable land for £1 13s. 4d.; Widow Johnson a cottage and yard for 13s. 4d.; William Daubney a cottage with 6¹/₂ acres of arable and 5¹/₂ acres of pasture for £7 18s. 6d. A farm in Scrooby, consisting of a messuage, cottage, and 113 acres of arable, meadow, and pasture, only let at £23.

As to the freehold value of land, in 1621, according to D'Ewes, it was worth from sixteen to twenty years' purchase; yet, in 1688, Sir Josiah Child said that lands now sell at twenty years' purchase, which fifty or sixty years before sold at eight or ten; and he also states, 'the same farms or lands to be now sold would yield treble and in some cases six times the money they were sold for fifty years ago'.[267] Davenant puts land at twelve years' purchase in 1600, at eighteen years in 1688.[268] In 1729 the price of land was said to be twenty-seven years' purchased.[269]

The legislation against laying down tillage to grass was continued until the end of the sixteenth century. The statute 39 Eliz., c. 1, repealed 4 Hen. VII, c. 19, and all other Acts against pulling down houses, and provided that a house of husbandry should be a house that hath or hath had 20 acres of arable land. All such houses which had been destroyed during the last seven years were to be rebuilt, and if destroyed more than seven years only one-half was to be rebuilt; but to each of them at least 40 acres of land were to be attached.

The next statute, 39 Eliz., c. 2, sets forth once more the advantages of tillage, viz. the increase and multiplying of people for service in the wars, and in time of peace the employment of a greater number of people, the keeping of people from poverty, the dispersal of the wealth of the kingdom in many hands, and 'the standing of this realm upon itself without depending upon foreign countries'[270]; and therefore enacts that lands converted from tillage to pasture shall be restored to tillage within three years, and lands then in tillage should be so continued; but this was only to extend to twenty-three counties, and omitted most of those in the south-west. At the beginning of the seventeenth century a reaction set in; the price of corn had risen immensely and continued to do so, the price of wool remained stationary, and tillage was as profitable as grass. In 1620 Coke speaks of the man who only kept a shepherd and a dog as one who never prospered. In 1624 several of the tillage laws were repealed.[271]

As an example of the unenclosed fields, at the end of the sixteenth century, we may take the common fields at Daventry, which were three in number, containing respectively 368, 383, and 524 acres, divided into furlongs, a term which had now a very wide signification, each of which was subdivided into lands nearly always half an acre in extent, several of these lands when adjoining being often held now by the same owner. One furlong may be taken as an example. It was 37 acres 1 rood in extent, and contained ninety-six lands, owned by seventeen people. The meadows were divided still more minutely, some of the smaller portions being only a quarter of an acre each. The largest meadow contained 50 acres, divided among fifty-three people. In the manor, besides the arable and meadow, there were 300 acres of common pasture, a park, and a small wood. There were forty-one freeholders and many leasehold tenants, the average freehold being 34 acres, the average leasehold only half an acre, small holdings being the usual feature of the unenclosed township.

In the seventeenth century the price of wool ceased to operate as a cause of enclosure, but in many parts the change to pasture continued, owing to the rise in price of cattle and of wages. The same reason, too, for laying down land to grass that had been so powerful in the preceding centuries still existed, the common arable fields needed rest from continual cropping and poor manuring, while good crops of corn could be grown from the virgin soil of the newly enclosed waste. The preamble of the Durham decrees clearly states this: 'the land is wasted and worn with continual ploweing, and thereby made bare, barren, and very unfruitful.'[272] We may, therefore, take Coke's words as inapplicable to many districts. In the seventeenth century there were several methods of enclosing. Sometimes the lord of the manor enclosed and left the land of the tenants still in common; or a tenant enclosed piece by piece; or enclosures were made by Act of Parliament, the earliest of which for common fields was passed in the time of James I, a method at this period very seldom used; or there was an agreement between lord and tenants often authorized by the Courts of Chancery or Exchequer.

Besides enclosure, another process was going on, the consolidation of farms by the amalgamation of small holdings into larger ones. Farmhouses, as we see them to-day, began to appear on the holdings thus consolidated, instead of being grouped together in villages. A writer in 1604 says, 'we may see many of their houses built alone like raven's nests, no birds building neere them' so unwonted was the sight of isolated dwellings in most places at the time.

However, in 1630 Charles I went back to the policy of his forefathers and issued letters to certain of the Midland counties ordering all enclosures of the last two years to be removed, and Commissions were issued to inquire into the matter in 1632, 1635, and 1636,[273] the chief evil feared from enclosures being depopulation, and enclosers were prosecuted in the Court of Star Chamber.

The assertion that enclosures ceased during the seventeenth century has been proved inaccurate by modern research, and there is no doubt that they went on continuously. In 1607, in the Midlands, the enclosing of land produced serious armed resistance, probably because the Midland counties were then the great corn-growing district of England, and the change to pasture and the consolidation of farms displaced a larger population there than elsewhere. Between 1628 and 1630 enclosures in Leicestershire, for instance, were very numerous, no less than 10,000 acres being enclosed in that time, most of which was converted to pasture. The attempt of the Government to check the movement, initiated by Charles I, seems to have had considerable effect, but died away with the Civil War, and though other attempts were made under the Commonwealth they came to nothing, and from this time enclosures went on unchecked by the Government,[274] and were soon to have its active support. Yet there was a vast amount still in common field: the whole of the cultivated land of England in 1685 was stated by King and Davenant to amount to not much more than half the total area, and of this cultivated portion three-fifths was still farmed on the old common-field system. Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire were comparatively unenclosed.[275] From the books and maps of the day 'it is clear that many routes which now pass through an endless succession of orchards, corn-fields, hay-fields, and bean-fields then ran through nothing but heath, swamp, and warren. In the drawings of an English landscape made in that age for the Grand Duke Cosmo scarce a hedgerow is to be seen.... At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of the capital, was a region of five-and-twenty miles in circumference which contained only three houses and scarcely any enclosed fields.'[276] The enclosure of these areas was to be mainly the work of the latter half of the eighteenth and the first quarter of the nineteenth centuries.

The amount of enclosure in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and the first half of the seventeenth centuries was, according to the latest research, much, and perhaps very naturally, exaggerated by contemporaries. Between 1455-1607 the enclosures in twenty-four counties are said to have amounted to some 500,000 acres, or 2.76 of their total area,[277] but the evidence for this is by no means conclusive. However, there seems no reason to doubt that the enclosure of this period was but a faint beginning of that great outburst of it that marked the agrarian revolution of the middle of the eighteenth century, and that it was mainly confined to the Midland counties, Mr. Johnson, in his recent Ford Lectures, has stated that the enclosure of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was not accompanied by very much direct eviction of freeholders or bona fide copyholders of inheritance; yet the small holder suffered in many ways, e.g. by the lord disproving the hereditary character of the copyhold, or by changing copyholds of inheritance into copyholds for lives or leases for lives or years. He and his successors could then refuse to renew at the termination of lives or years except on payment of a practically prohibitory fine. In short, though there was not much violation of legal right there was much injustice, and enclosure, though its effects were exaggerated at this period, certainly tended to displace the small landholder. It does not appear, however, that the moderate-sized proprietors were seriously affected. Many of the larger freeholders and copyholders on manors enclosed on their own account, and perhaps increased at the expense of the very large and the very small. Indeed, the decrease of small landowners was chiefly due to political and social causes. The old self-sufficing, agricultural economy of England, which we have seen beginning to break up in the fourteenth century, was becoming thoroughly disintegrated. The capitalist class was increasing; the successful merchant and lawyer were acquiring land and becoming squires; there was an intense land hunger. Simon Degge, wilting of Staffordshire in 1669, says that in the previous sixty years half the lands had changed owners, not so much as of old they were wont to do, by marriage, but by purchase; and he notices how many lawyers and tradesmen have supplanted the gentry.[278]

In fact, there was a much freer disposal of lands from the end of the fifteenth century, when the famous Taltarum's case enabled entailed estates to be barred, until the Restoration, than there has been before or since. For these two hundred years the courts of law and parliament resisted every effort to re-establish the system of entails; the owners of land constantly multiplied, and this tendency must have counteracted the displacement of the small holder by enclosure. Sir Thomas Smith, writing towards the end of the sixteenth century, says that it was the yeomen who bought the lands of 'unthrifty gentlemen;' and Moryson tells us that 'the buyers (excepting lawyers) are for the most part citizens and vulgar men'.[279] It became one of the boasts of England that she had a large number of yeomen farming their own land. During the Civil War, however, it became important to landowners to protect their properties in the interest of children and descendants from forfeiture for treason. The judges lent their aid, and the system of strict family settlements was devised, under which the great bulk of the estates in England are now held. This system favoured the accumulation of lands in a few hands and the aggregation of great estates, and was largely responsible for the disappearance of the small freeholder.

In reviewing the progress of agriculture in the seventeenth century, the drainage of the fen country of Lincolnshire and the adjoining counties must not be forgotten. It had been for centuries the scene of drainage operations on a more or less extended scale, few of which, however, met with success; but in the seventeenth century the growing value of land caused a serious revival of these efforts. Attempts made under Elizabeth and James I had only succeeded in rescuing a certain amount of land for pasture,[280] but in the reign of Charles I the scheme of Cornelius Vermuyden was more successful. His system, however, was defective, and in the reign of Charles II the Bedford Level was in a lamentable state and in danger of reverting to its primitive condition. Many of the works too were destroyed by the 'stiltwalkers', and in 1793 Maxwell states that out of 44,000 acres of fen land in Huntingdonshire only 8,000 or 10,000 were productive[281]; and in 1794 Stone tells us that the commons round the Isle of Axholme were chiefly covered with water.[282] Still to Vermuyden and his contemporaries must be assigned the credit of the first comprehensive scheme for rescuing these fertile lands from the waters that covered them.

At the commencement of this important century an old calendar of 1606[283] clearly sets forth the farming work of the year:—

January and February are the best months for ploughing for peas, beans, and oats, and to have peas soon in the year following sow them in the wane of the moon at S. Andrewstide before Christmas; which may be compared to Tusser's advice for February,

'Clean grounds of all such rubbish as briars, brambles, blackthorns, and shrubbs' (then more often choking the ground than now), which are to be fagoted as good fuel for baking and brewing.

'Do not plough in rainy weather, for it impoverisheth the earth.'

March and April. Take up colts from grass to be broken. Sow beans, peas, and oats. In these months are all grounds where cattle went in the last winter to be furthed (apparently managed) and cleared and the mole-hills scattered, that the fresh spring of grass may grow better. All hedges and ditches to be made betwixt 'severals', evidently enclosures as distinguished from common fields. From March 25 to May 1 summer pastures are to be spared, that they may have time to get head before summer cattle be put in. In the meantime such cattle are to be bestowed in meadows till May Day, and after that date such meadows are to be cleansed and spared until the crops of hay be taken off. From now till midsummer sell fat cattle and sheep, and with the money buy lean cattle and sheep. Sow barley.

May and June. Sort all cattle for their summer pasture on May Day, viz. draught oxen by themselves, milch cows by themselves, weaning calves, yearlings, two-year-olds, three- and four-year-olds, every sort by themselves, which being divided in pasture fitting for them will make larger and fairer cattle. Separate the horses in the same way. Wash sheep and shear four or five days after, which done the wool is to be well wound and weighed, and safely laid up in some place where there is not too much air or it will lose weight, nor where it is damp or it will increase too much in weight. Cleanse winter corn from thistles and weeds.

July and August. First of all comes hay-making. In August wean lambs, and put them in good pasture, and in winter put them in fresh pasture until spring, and then put them with the 'holding' sheep.

In these months is corn to be 'shornne or mowen downe' (the writer, it is to be noticed, has no preference for either method); and after the corn is carried put draught horses and oxen into the averish (corn stubble), to ease other pastures; and after them put hogs in. Gather crabs in woods and hedgerows for making verjuice.

September and October. Have all plows and harrows neat and fit for sowing of wheat, rye, mesling (wheat and rye mixed), and vetches.[284]

Pick hops. Buy store cattle, both steers and heifers, of three or four years old, which being well wintered at grass, or on straw at the barn doors, will be the sooner fed the summer following, and they will sooner feed after straw than grass.

From October to May are calves to be reared, because then they be more hardly bred and become the stronger cattle. Feed brawns, bacons, lards, and porkets on mast if there is any, if not on corn. 'In these months cleanse poundes or pools, this season being the driest;' an extraordinary assertion, unless the climate has changed, seeing that according to the monthly averages from 1841-1906, taken at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, October is the wettest month in the year.[285]

November and December. Sort all kinds of sheep until Lady Day, viz. wethers by themselves, and weaning lambs by themselves; and do not put rams to the ewes before S. Lukestide, October 18, for those lambs fall about March 25, and if they fall before then the scarcity of grass and the cold will so nip and chill them that they will die or be weaklings. It is good at this time to take draught cattle and horses from grass into the house before any great storms begin. Thrash corn now after it hath had a good sweat in the mow, and so dried again, and give the straw to the draught oxen and cattle at the standaxe or at the barn doors for sparing of hay, advice which Tusser also gives:

---

CHAPTER XII

THE GREAT AGRICULTURAL WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.—FRUIT GROWING. A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ORCHARD

The seventeenth century is distinguished by a number of agricultural writers whose works, as they afford the best account of the farming of the time, we may be pardoned for freely quoting. The best known of them were, Sir John Norden, Gervase Markham, Sir Richard Weston, Blythe, Hartlib, Sir Hugh Plat, John Evelyn, John Worlidge, and Houghton.

Sir John Norden printed his Surveyor's Dialogue in 1608, which is in the form of a conversation between a farmer and a surveyor, the former at the outset telling the latter that men of his profession were then very unpopular because 'you pry into men's titles and estates, and oftentimes you are the cause that men lose their land, and customs are altered, broken, and sometimes perverted by your means. And above all, you look into the values of men's lands, wherefore the lords of manors do reckon their tenants to a higher rent, and therefore not only I but many poore tenants have good cause to speak against the profession'.[286]

The surveyor attributes the increase in prices to farmers outbidding one another for farms, for the rents of farms and prices grow together; a statement which seems to have been quite true and disposes of the assertion that the landlords raised the rents unfairly, for they were quite entitled to what rent they could get in the open market, the farmers being presumably wise enough not to offer rents which would preclude a profit. He further blames the farmer of his day for being discontented with his lot: in former times 'farmers and their wives were content with mean dyet and base attire and held their children to some austere government, without haunting alehouses, taverns, dice, and cards; now the husbandman will be equal to the yeoman, the yeoman to the gentleman, the gentleman to the squire, and there is at this day thirty times as much vainely spent in a family of like multitude and quality as was in former ages'; a complaint that has been common in all ages. Contrary to what is the practice to-day, and apparently to common sense, the surveyor recommends that open drains be made as narrow above as at the bottom, at the most not more than a foot and a half broad.[287] Hops, he says, were then grown in Suffolk, Essex, and Surrey, 'in your loose and spongie grounds, trenched.' 'Carret' roots were raised in Suffolk and Essex, and beginning to increase in all parts of the realm[288]; but if he alludes to their cultivation in the open field the statement must be taken with considerable qualification, as they were not so grown generally until the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the next.

Kent was then, as now, the great fruit county of England; 'above all others I think the Kentishmen be most apt and industrious in planting orchards with pippins and cherries, especially near the Thames about Feversham and Sittingbourne.' But Devon and Hereford were also famous; Westcote about 1630 says the Devonshire men had of late much enlarged their orchards, and 'are very curious in planting and grafting all kinds of fruit'[289]; and John Beale in 1656 tells us Hereford 'is reputed the orchard of England'[290]; while Hartlib says there were many orchards in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire.[291] He calls 'Tandeane' near Taunton the Paradise of England, where the husbandry was excellent, the land fruitful by nature and improved by the art and industry of the farmers; 'they take extraordinary pains in soyling, ploughing, and dressing their lands, and after the plow there goeth some three or four with mattocks to break the clods and to draw up the earth out of the furrows that the lands may lye round, and that the water annoy not the seed (the water evidently often lying long in the furrows between the great high ridges), and to that end they most carefully cut gutters and trenches in all places. And for the better enriching of their ploughing lands they cut up, cast, and carry in the unplowed headlands and places of no use. Their hearts, hands, eyes, and all their powers concurre in one to force the earth to yield her utmost fruit; and the crops of wheat that rewarded this industry were sometimes 8 and 10 quarters to an acre.

A short pamphlet called the Fruiterer's Secrets, published in London in 1604, imparts some interesting and curious information about fruit growing.[292] There were then four sorts of cherries in England, Flemish,[293] English, Gascoyne, and black, and the preserving of them from birds, always a burden on the grower, the author says can be done by a gun or a sling; the worst enemies being jays and bullfinches, who ate stones and all. Stone fruit should be gathered in dry weather, and after the dew is off, for if gathered wet it loses colour and becomes mildewed. If nettles newly gathered are laid at the bottom of the basket and on the top of the fruit, they will hasten the ripening of fruit picked unripe, and make it keep its colour.

Those English farmers who still shake their apples from the trees to fall and be bruised on the ground had better listen to the careful directions for placing the ladder on the trees where it will do no damage, as to the use of the gathering hook so that the branches can be brought within easy reach of the picker on his ladder, the wearing of a gathering apron, and the emptying of it gently into the baskets. Green fern has the same effect on pears packed for carriage as nettles on stone fruit; while apples should be packed in wheat, or better still in rye straw. For long journeys the American system of packing in barrels is anticipated, the apples being carefully put in by hand, and the barrels lined at both ends with straw, but not at the sides to avoid heating, while holes should be bored at either end to prevent heat. Pippins, John Apples, Pearmains, and other 'keepers' need not be turned until the week before Christmas, and again at the end of March, when they must be turned oftener; but never touch fruit during a frost or a thaw, or in rainy weather, or it will turn black.

Hartlib, a few years after, reckoned no less than 500 sorts of apples in England, though doubtless many of these were identical, since the same apple often has two or three names in one parish. The best for the table were the Jennetings, Harvey Apple, Golden Pippin, Summer and Winter Pearmains, John Apple, &c.; for cider the Red Streak (the great favourite), Jennet Moyle, Eliot, Stocking Apple, &c. He was told that in Herefordshire a tenant bought the farm he rented with the fruit crop of one year; £10 to £15 having been given per acre for cherries and more for apples and pears. Pears for the table were the Windsor, 'Burgamet,' 'Boon Christians'! Greenfield, and others; and for perry, which John Beale, a well-known writer of the day considered 'a weak drink, fit for our hindes and generally refused by our gentry as breeding wind in the stomack', the Horse Pear, Bosbury, Choak, &c.[294] There were many kinds of plums, among them the Mistle Plum, Damazene, Violet, and Premorden.

Four kinds of grafting were practised: in the cleft, and in the bark, the two most usual ways; shoulder or whip grafting, and grafting by approach,[295] the last 'where the stock you intend to graft on and the tree from which you take your graft stand so near together that they may be joined, then take the sprig you intend to graft and pare away about three inches in length of the rind and wood near unto the very pith, and cut also the stock on which you intend to graft the same after the same manner that they may evenly join each other, and so bind them and cover them with clay or wax.' Inoculation was also practised, 'when the sap is at the fullest in the summer, the buds you intend to inoculate being not too young but sufficiently grown.' For transplanting the middle of October is recommended, and the wise advice added, 'plant not too deep,' and in clay plant as near the surface as possible, for the roots will seek their way downward but rarely upward; and in transplanting 'you may prune the branches as well as the roots of apples and pears, but not of plums.' The best distance apart in an orchard for apples and pears was considered to be from 20 to 30 feet, the further apart the more they benefit from the sun and air, a piece of advice which many a subsequent planter has neglected. For cherries and plums 15 to 20 feet was thought right. Worlidge's directions for pruning are minute and careful, and should be well hammered into many slovenly farmers to-day.

Cider-making was performed much as it is in old-fashioned farms to-day, by mashing the apples in a trough by means of a millstone set edgeways, and then pressing the juice out through hair mats, the juice, says Hartlib, 'having been let stand a day or two and the black scum that ariseth in that time taken off they tunne it, and in the barrels it continueth to work some days longer, just as beer useth to do.[296] Another method was to put the fruit in a clean vessel or trough, and bruise or crush it with beetles, then put the crushed fruit in a bag of hair-cloth and press it.[297] After the cider was in the barrels there was placed in them a linen bag containing cloves, mace, cinnamon, ginger, and lemon peel which was said to make the cider taste as pleasantly as Rhenish wine.

Worlidge gives us what is perhaps the first mention of a poultry farm, and strangely enough it seems to have paid. 'I have been credibly informed that a good farm hath been wholly stocked with poultry, spending the whole crop upon them and keeping severall to attend them, and that it hath redounded to a very considerable improvement'.[298] Incubators of a very rude sort were used, three or four dozen eggs being placed in a 'lamp furnace made of a few boards', and hatched by the heat of a lamp or candle.

It must strike the reader that the accusation levelled against the English farmer, of having made little progress in his art from the Middle Ages to the commencement of the reign of George III is hardly warranted. Their knowledge and skill in their business were evidently such as to make considerable progress inevitable, and then as now they were in some cases assisted by their landlords, as in Herefordshire, where Lord Scudamore, after the assassination of his friend the Duke of Buckingham, devoted his energies to the culture of fruit, and with other public-spirited gentlemen turned that county into 'one entire orchard', besides improving the pastures and woods[299]; though Hartlib laments that gentlemen try so few experiments for the advancement of agriculture, and that both landowners and farmers instead of communicating their knowledge to each other kept it jealously to themselves.[300] The chief hindrance to landlord and tenant was that the heavy hand of ancient custom lay upon them, with its antiquated communistic system of farming, which still in the greater part of the land of England utterly prevented good husbandry and stifled individual effort. It was one of these Herefordshire gentlemen. Rowland Vaughan, who in 1610 wrote what is probably the first account of irrigation in England, though the art was mentioned by Fitzherbert and must have been known in Devon and Hampshire long before his time; indeed, it is another instance of the then isolation of country districts that he speaks as if he had made a new discovery. He tells us that 'having sojourned two years in his father's house, wearied in doing nothing and fearing his fortunes had been overthrown, he cast about what was best to be done to retrieve his reputation'. And one day he saw from a mole-hill on the side of a brook on his property a little stream of water issuing down the working of the mole, which made the ground 'pleasing green', and from this he was led on to what he calls 'the drowning of his lands'. This was so successful that he improved the value of his estate from £40 to £300 a year, and his neighbours, who of course had first scoffed at him, came to learn from him. Not many years after 'drowning' was said to have become one of the most universal and advantageous improvements in England.[301] Vaughan says that he had counted as many as 300 persons gleaning in one field after harvest, and that in the mountains near eggs were 20 a penny, and a good bullock 26s. 3d., but this was a backward region.[302]

Between 1617 and 1621 the price of wheat fell from 43s. 3d. to 21s. a quarter, and immediately affected the payment of rent.[303] Mr. John Chamberlain, in February, 1620, wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton, 'We are here in a strange state to complain of plenty, but so it is that corn beareth so low a price that farmers are very backward to pay their rents and in many places plead disability: for remedy whereof the Council have written letters into every shire to provide a granary with a stock to buy corn and keep it for a dear year.' Sir Symonds D'Ewes notes in his diary that 'at this time (1621) the rates of all sorts of corn were so extremely low as it made the very prices of land fall from twenty years' purchase to sixteen or seventeen. For the best wheat was sold for 2s. 8d. and 2s. 6d. the bushel, the ordinary at 2s. Barley and rye at 1s. 4d. and 1s. 3d. the bushel, and the worser of those grains at a meaner rate, the poorer sort that would have been glad but a few years before of coarse rye bread, did now usually traverse the markets to find out the finer wheats as if nothing else would please their palates'. Instead of being glad that they were for once having a small share of the good things of this world, he rejoices that their unthankfulness and daintiness was soon punished by high prices and dearness of all sorts of grain.[304] The year 1630 was the commencement of a series of dear seasons, when for nine consecutive years the price of wheat did not fall below 40s. a quarter and actually touched 86s. The restraints laid on corn-dealers had, since the principles of commerce were being better understood, been modified in 1624, but the high prices revived the old hatred against them, and we find Sir John Wingfield writing from Rutland that he has 'taken order that ingrossers of corne shall be carefullie seen unto and that there is no Badger (corn-dealer) licensed to carry corne out of this countrye nor any starch made of any kind of graine'. He adds that he had 'refrayned the maulsters from excessive making of mault, and had suppressed 20 alehouses'.[305] However, the senseless policy of preventing trade in corn received a severe blow from the statute 15 Car. II, c. 7, which enacted that when corn was under 48s. persons were to be allowed to buy and store corn and sell the same again without penalty, provided they did not sell it in the same market within three months of buying it, a statute which Adam Smith said contributed more to the progress of agriculture than any previous law in the statute book.

Gervase Markham, who was born about 1568 and died in 1637, gives us a description of the day's work of the English farmer. He is to rise at four in the morning, feed his cattle and clean his stable. While they are feeding he is to get his harness ready, which will take him two hours. Then he is to have his breakfast, for which half an hour is allowed. Getting the harness on his horses or cattle, 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, clean them and give them their food, dine himself, and at four go back to his cattle and give them more fodder, and getting into his barn make ready their food for next day, not forgetting to see them again before going to his own supper at six. After supper 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 or verjuice, or else grind malt, pick candle-rushes, or 'do some husbandry 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. The farm roller of this time, according to Markham, was made of a round piece of wood 30 inches in circumference, 6 feet long, having at each end a strong pin of iron to which shafts were made fast.[306] He mentions wooden and iron harrows, but this refers only to the tines, the wooden ones being made of ash. From an illustration of a harrow which he gives, it appears it was much like Fitzherbert's and many used to-day: a wooden frame, with the teeth set perhaps more closely than ours; the single harrow 4 feet square drawn by one horse, the double harrow 7 feet square by two oxen at least. Wheat he says, when the land is dug 15 inches deep, and the seed dibbled in, will produce twelve times as much as when ploughed; but he admits the 'intricacy and trouble' of this method.[307] As to the question of mowing or reaping corn, he is of opinion that though 'it is a custom in many countries of this kingdom not to sheare the wheat but to mow it, in my conceit it is not so good, for it both maketh the wheate foule and full of weede'. Barley, however, should be mown close to the ground, though many reap it; oats too were to be mown. His directions for planting an orchard[308] are interesting, both as showing the kinds of fruit then grown, the number of different sorts planted together, and the growth of the olive in England.[309] The orchard, he says, should be a square, divided into four quarters by alleys, and in the first quarter should be apples of all sorts, in the second pears and wardens of all sorts, in the third quinces and chestnuts, in the fourth medlars and services. A wall is the best fence, and on the north wall, 'against which the sunne reflects, you shall plant the abricot, verdochio, peache, and damaske plumbe; against the east side the white muskadine grape, the pescod plumbe, and the Emperiale plumbe; against the west, the grafted cherries and the olive tree; and against the south side the almond and the figge tree.' As if this extraordinary mixture were not enough, 'round about the skirts of the alleys' were to be planted plums, damsons, cherries, filberts and nuts of all sorts, and the 'horse clog' and 'bulleye', the two latter being inferior wild plums. Plums were to be 5 feet apart, apples and other large fruit 12 feet.

Young trees should be watered morning and evening in dry summers, and old ones should have the earth dug away from the upper part of the roots from November to March, then the earth, mixed with dung or soap ashes, replaced. Moss was carefully to be scraped off the trees with the back of an old knife, and, to prevent it, the trees manured with swine's dung. Minute distinctions are given as to pruning and washing the trees with strong brine of water and salt, either with a garden pump placed in a tub or with 'squirtes which have many hoales', the forerunner of modern spraying.

Cider was then mostly made in the west, as in Devonshire and Cornwall, and perry in Worcestershire and Gloucestershire; but he leaves out Herefordshire, where it was certainly made at this time.[310]

A curious help to fattening beasts, says Markham, is a lean horse or two kept with them, for the beasts delight to feed with them. Fattening cattle were to have first bite at the pastures, then draught cattle, and then sheep; after Midsummer, when there is an extraordinary sweetness in the grass, suffer the cattle to eat the grass closer till Lammas (August 1). Though some do not hold with him, he thinks reading and writing not unprofitable to a husbandman, but not much material 'to his bailiff'; for there is more trust in an honest score chalked on a trencher than 'in a commen writen scrowle'. Landowners derived a good income from their woods and coppices. An acre of underwood of twenty-one years' growth, was at this time worth from £20 to £30; of twelve years' growth, £5 to £6; but on many of the best lands it was only cut every thirty years.[311]

In 1742-3 oak timber was worth from 15d. to 18d. per cubic foot and ash about 10d. During the Napoleonic war oak sold for 4s. 6d. a foot.

In Blyth's Improver Improved we have one of the first accounts of covered drains. The draining trench was to be made deep enough to go the bottom of the 'cold spewing moist water' that feeds the flags and the rushes; as for the width 'use thine own liberty' but be sure make it as straight as possible. The bottom was to be filled in with faggots or stones to a depth of 15 inches, a method in some parts retained till comparatively modern times, with the top turf laid upon them grass downward, and the drain filled in with the earth dug out of it.

A country gentleman at this date could keep up a good establishment on an income which to-day would compel him to live economically in a cottage. From the accounts of Mr. Master, a landowner near Chiselhurst, it appears that a man with an income of £300 or £400 a year could live in some luxury, keep a stud of horses, and a considerable number of servants.[312] Some of them had no scruples about adding to their incomes by turning corn-dealers, even selling such small quantities as pecks of peas, bushels of rye, and half pecks of oatmeal. From the accounts of one of them, Henry Best,[313] of Elmswell, we learn many valuable details concerning farming in Yorkshire about 1641. It was the custom to put the ram to the ewes about October 18, but Best did so about Michaelmas, and generally used one ram to 30 or 40 ewes, and he considered it necessary that the ewes should be two-shear. 'Good handsome ewes', he says, could have been bought at Kilham fair for 3s. 6d. each, a price far below the average of the time. As for wages, mowers of grass had 10d. a day, and found their own food and their scythes, which cost them about 2s. 3d. each. Haymakers got 4d. a day, and had to 'meat themselves' and find their own forks and rakes. Shearers or reapers were paid from 8d. to 10d., and found their own sickles; binders and stackers, 8d.; mowers of 'haver', or oats, 10d., a good mower cutting 4 acres a day. In 1641 he sold oats for 14s. a quarter, best barley for 22s., rye 27s. 6d., wheat 30s.[314] The roads were dreadful, and produce nearly all sent to market on pack-horses. 'Wee seldome send fewer than 8 horse loads to the market at a time, and with them two men, for one man cannot guide the poakes (sacks) of above four horses. When wee sende oats to the market wee sack them up in 3 bushel poakes and lay 6 bushels on a horse; when wee sende wheate, rye, or masseldene (rye and wheat) and barley to market wee put it into mette poakes (2 bushel sacks), sometimes into half quarter sacks, and these we lay on horses that are short coupled and well backed.' When the servants got to market they were charged a halfpenny a horse for stabling and hay, but if they dined at the inn they paid nothing for their horses, and their dinners cost them 4d. a head. Butter was sold by the lb., or the 'cake' of 2 lb., and in the beginning of Lent was 5d. a lb., by April 20, 3d., in the middle of May, 2¹/₂d. When William Pinder took 50 acres of land 'of my Lord Haye' he paid a fine of £60 and a rent of £40; but this must have been an extremely choice piece of land, for arable land rented apparently at less than 3s. an acre.[315] The rent of a cottage was usually 10s. a year, 'though they have not so much as a yard or any backe side belonging to them.' There is more evidence, if such were needed, of the beneficial effect of enclosure, which was said to treble the value of pasture. Good meadow land fetched a great price: 'The medow Sykes is about 5 acres of grounde, and was letten in the year 1628 at £6 per annum, and in 1635 at £6 13s. 4d.

The requirements of a foreman on a farm were that he could sow, mow, stack peas, go well with 4 horses, and be accustomed to marketing; and for this when hired by the year he received 5 marks, and perhaps half a crown as earnest money. The next man got 50s., the next 46s. 6d., the fourth 35s. 'Christopher Pearson had the first year he dwelt here £3 5s. 0d. wages per annum and 5s. to a God's penny (earnest money); next year he had £4 wages, and he was both a good seedsman,' before the invention of drills a very valuable qualification, 'and did sow all our seed both the years. When you are about to hire a servant you are to call them aside and talk privately with them concerning their wage, and if the servants stand in the churchyard they usually call them aside and walk to the back side of the church and there treat of their wage. I heard a servant asked what he could do, who made this answer:

If we are to judge by the food provided for the thatchers, who were little better than ordinary labourers, the Yorkshire farm-hand fared well on plenty of simple food, his three meals a day consisting of butter, milk, cheese, and either eggs, pies, or bacon, sometimes porridge instead of milk.

Probably, however, few country gentlemen were such industrious farmers as Best; many of them passed their days mostly in hunting and fowling and their evenings in drinking, though we know too that there were exceptions who did not care for this rude existence. Deer hunting, and we must add deer poaching, was the great sport of the wealthy, but the smaller gentry had to be content with simpler forms of the chase. For fox hunting each squire had his own little pack, and hunted only over his own estate and those of his friends. He had also the otter, the badger, and the hare to amuse him. Fowling was conducted, as in the Middle Ages, by hawk or net, for the shot gun had not yet come into use, and was forbidden by an old law.[316] The partridge and pheasant, as now, were the chief game birds. After the Restoration the country gentlemen seem to have been infected by the dissipation of the Court, and farming was left to the tenant farmer and yeoman: 'our gentry', says Pepys, 'have grown ignorant of everything in good husbandry.'

The middle of the seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the yeoman who owned and farmed his land; even at the end of the Stuart period, when their decline had already begun, Gregory King estimated their numbers at 160,000 families, or about one-seventh of the population. The class included all those between the man who owned freehold land worth 40s. a year and the wealthier yeoman who was hardly distinguishable from the small gentleman. Owning their own land they were a sturdy and independent class, and they 'took a jolly pride in voting as in fighting on the opposite side of the neighbouring squire'. 'The yeomanry', wrote Fuller, 'is an estate of people almost peculiar to England;' he 'wears russet clothes but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket He seldom goes abroad, and his credit stretches farther than his travel.' The tenant farmers were nearly as numerous, King estimating them at 150,000 families; economically they were about on a level with the yeoman, their social standing, however, was considerably inferior.

The greatest improvement of the seventeenth century, the introduction from Holland of turnips and clover, was over-estimated by its author, Sir Richard Weston; for he tells his sons that by sowing flax, turnips, and clover they might in five years improve 500 acres of poor land so as to bring in £7,000 a year.[317] To bring about this desirable consummation, he provides his sons with accounts as to the cost, one of which shows the cost of growing an acre of flax and the profit thereon, though this gentleman's estimates are clearly optimistic:

Turnips were to come after flax, and were to be given to the cows as they did in Flanders; that is, wash them clean, put them in a trough where they were to be stamped together with a spitter or small spade; and the turnips were to be followed by clover. All these, says Weston, were already grown in England, but 'there is as much difference between what groweth here and there as is between the same thing which groweth in a garden and that which groweth wild in the fields'. Worlidge soon after recommended that clover be sown on barley or oats about the end of March or in April, and harrowed in, or by itself; and says, with optimism equal to Weston's, one acre of clover will feed you as many cows as 6 acres of ordinary grass and make the milk richer.[318]

It has been noticed that the price of wool altered little during the century, and from the private accounts of Sir Abel Barker[319] of Hambleton, in the County of Rutland, we learn that in 1642 he sold his wool to his 'loving friend Mr. William Gladstone' for £1 a tod, though by 1648 it had gone up to 29s., a good price for those days. During the Civil War some of Barker's horses were carried off for the service of the State, and he values them at £8 a piece, a fair price then. Some years later, for mowing 44 acres of grass he sets down in his account £2 7s. 0d., for making the same £2 3s. 0d., and stacking it 3s.

Simon Hartlib, a Dutchman by birth and a friend of John Milton, published his Legacy in 1651, containing both rash statements and useful information. We certainly cannot believe him when he states that pasture employs more hands than tillage. His estimate of a good crop of wheat was from 12 to 16 bushels per acre, and he speaks strongly of the great fluctuations in prices, for he had known barley sell at Northampton at 6d. a bushel, and within 12 months at 5s., and wheat in London in one year varied from 3s. 6d. to 15s. a bushel. The enormous number of dovecotes was still a great nuisance, and the pigeons were reckoned to eat 6,000,000 quarters of grain annually. Hartlib recommends his countrymen to sow 'a seed commonly called Saint Foine, which in England is as much as to say Holy Hay,' as they do in France: especially on barren lands, advice which some of them followed, and in Wilts., soon after, sainfoin is said to have so improved poor land that from a noble (6s. 8d.) per acre, the rent had increased to 30s.[320] They were also to use 'another sort of fodder which they call La Lucern at Paris for dry and barren grounds'. So wasteful were they of labour in some parts that in Kent were to be seen 12 horses and oxen drawing one plough.[321]

The use of the spade was long looked askance at by English husbandmen; old men in Surrey had told Hartlib that they knew the first gardeners that came into those parts to plant cabbages and 'colleflowers', and to sow turnips, carrots, and parsnips, and that they gave £8 an acre for their land. The latter statement must be an exaggeration, as it is equivalent to a rent of about £40 in our money; but we may give some credence to him when he says that the owner was anxious lest the spade should spoil his ground, 'so ignorant were we of gardening in those days.' Though it was not the case in Elizabeth's time, by now the licorice, saffron, cherries, apples, pears, hops, and cabbages of England were the best in the world; but many things were deficient, for instance, many onions came from Flanders and Spain, madder from Zealand, and roses from France.[322] 'It is a great deficiency in England that we have not more orchards planted. It is true that in Kent, and about London, and in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire[323] there are many gallant orchards, but in other country places they are very rare and thin, I know in Kent some advance their ground from 5s. per acre to £5 by this means', and 30 acres of cherries near Sittingbourne had realized £1,000 in one year. His recipe for making old fruit trees bear well savours of a time when old women were still burnt as witches. 'First split his root, then apply a compost of pigeon's dung, lees of wine, or stale wine, and a little brimstone'. The tithes of wine in Gloucestershire were 'in divers parishes considerably great', and wine was then made in Kent and Surrey, notably by Sir Peter Ricard, who made 6 or 8 hogsheads yearly.[324] There is no doubt that the vine has been grown in the open in England from very early times until comparatively recent ones. The Britons were taught to plant it by the Romans in A.D. 280.[325] In Domesday there are 38 examples of vineyards, chiefly in the south central counties. Neckham, who wrote in the twelfth century, says the vineyard was an important adjunct to the mediaeval mansion.[326] William of Malmesbury praised the vines and wine of Gloucestershire; and says that the vine was either allowed to trail on the ground, or trained to small stakes fixed to each plant. Indeed, the mention of them in mediaeval chronicles is frequent.

Two bushels of green grapes in 1332 fetched 7s. 6d.[327] Richard II planted vines in great plenty, according to Stow, within the upper park of Windsor, and sold some part to his people. The wine made in England was sweetened with honey, and probably flavoured and coloured with blackberries.[328] At the dissolution of the monasteries there was a vineyard at Barking Nunnery. 'We might have a reasonable good wine growing in many places of this realme', says Barnaby Googe, about 1577, 'as doubtless we had immediately after the Conquest, tyll, partly by slothfulnesse, partly by civil discord long continued, it was left, and so with time lost.... There is besides Nottingham an ancient house called Chylwel in which remaineth yet as an ancient monument in a great wyndowe of glasse, the whole order of planting, proyning, stamping, and pressing of vines. Upon many cliffes and hills are yet to be seen the rootes and old remaines of vines.' Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire,[329] says 'the vine has been improved by Sir Henry Lyttelton at Over (Upper) Arley, which is situate low and warm, so that he has made wine there undistinguishable from the best French by the most judicious palates, but this I suppose was done only in some over hot summer, and Dr. Bathurst made very good claret at Oxon in 1685, a very mean year for the purpose.' In 1720 the famous vineyard at Bath of 6 acres, planted with the 'white muscadene' and the 'black Chester grape,' produced 66 hogsheads of wine worth £10 a hogshead, but in unfavourable years grew very little.'[330] Mr. Peter Collinson, writing from Middlesex in 1747, says, 'the vineyards turn to good profit, much wine being made this year in England;' and again in 1748, 'my vineyards are very ripe; a considerable quantity of wine will this year be made in England.'[331] However, the attempt made to grow vines on the undercliff at Ventnor at the end of the eighteenth century by Sir Richard Worsley ended in dismal failure, and it is probable that the English climate in its normal years seldom produced good grapes out of doors whatever it may have done in exceptionally hot ones, unless we assume that it has changed considerably, for which there is little ground.

Hartlib was no friend of commons; they made the poor idle and trained them for the gallows or beggary, and there were fewest poor where there were fewest commons,[332] as in Kent—a statement re-echoed by many observant writers; he also recommends enclosures, because they gave warmth and consequent fertility to the soil. He tells us that an effort had been made by James I to encourage the growth of mulberry trees and the breeding of silkworms, the lords-lieutenant of the different counties being urged to see to it, but it had little effect.[333]

The number of different sorts of wheat was by this time considerable. Hartlib gives the white, red, bearded ('which is not subject to mildews as others'); some sorts with two rows, others with four and six; some with one ear on a stalk, others with two; the red stalk wheat of Bucks; winter wheat and summer wheat. There were also twenty varieties of peas that he knew, and the white, black, naked. Scotch, and Poland oats. Markham adds the whole straw wheat, the great brown pollard, the white pollard, the organ, the flaxen, and the chilter wheat.

There was a sad lack of enterprise in the breeding of stock now and for many generations before; indeed, it may be doubted if this important branch of farming, except perhaps in the case of sheep, was much attended to until the time of Bakewell and the Collings. In Elizabeth's time a Frenchman had twitted England with having only 3,000 or 4,000 horses worth anything, which was one of the reasons that induced the Spaniards to invade us.[334] 'We are negligent, too, in our kine, that we advance not the best species.'

The size of cattle at this date, however, seems to have been greater than is often stated. The Report of the Select Committee on the Cultivation of Waste Lands in 1795, states that the average weight, dressed, of cattle at Smithfield in 1710 was only 370 lb.,[335] yet the Household Book of Prince Henry at the commencement of the seventeenth century says that an ox should weigh 600 lb. the four quarters, and cost about £9 10s., a sheep about 45 lb., so that the latter were apparently relatively smaller than the oxen. In 1603 oxen were sold at Tostock in Suffolk weighing 1,000 lb. apiece, dead weight.[336] According to the records of Winchester College, the oxen sold there in the middle of the century averaged, dressed, about 575 lb.; in 1677, 35 oxen sold there averaged 730 lb. 'Some kine,' it was said at the end of the century, 'have grown to be very bulky and a great many are sold for £10 or £12 apiece; there was lately sold near Bury a beast for £30, and 'twas fatted with cabbage leaves. An ox near Ripon weighed, dressed, 13¹/₄ cwt.'[337] They were, of course, chiefly valued as beasts of draught, and no doubt the one Evelyn saw in 1649, 'bred in Kent, 17 foot in length, and much higher than I could reach,' was a powerful animal for this purpose. The young ones were taught to draw by yoking two of them, together with two old ones before and two behind, with a man on each side the young ones, 'to keep them in order and speak them fair,' for if much beaten they seldom did well: for the first two or three days they were worked only three or four hours a day, but soon they worked as long as the older ones, that is from 6 to 11, then a bait of hay and rest till 1, with work again till 5, at least in Lancashire. They were kept in the yoke till nine or ten years old, then turned on to the best grass in May, and sold to the butcher.[338]

---

CHAPTER XIII

THE EVILS OF COMMON FIELDS.—HOPS.—IMPLEMENTS.—MANURES.—GREGORY KING—CORN LAWS

From what has been said in the preceding pages, it will be gathered that a vast amount of compassion has been wasted on the enclosure of commons, for it is abundantly evident from contemporary writers that there were a large number of people dragging out a miserable existence on them, by living on the produce of a cow or two, or some sheep and a few poultry, with what game they could sometimes catch, and refusing regular work. Dymock, Hartlib's contemporary, questions 'whether commons do not rather make poore by causing idlenesse than maintaine them;' and he also asks how it is that there are fewest poor where there are fewest commons.

In the common fields, too, there was continual strife and contention caused by the infinite number of trespasses that they were subject to.[339] The absence of hedges, too, in these great open fields was bad for the crops, for there was nothing to mitigate drying and scorching winds, while in the open waste and meadows the live stock must have sadly needed shelter and shade, 'losing more flesh in one hot day than they gained in three cool days.' Worlidge, a Hampshire man, joins in the chorus of praise of enclosures, for they brought employment to the poor, and maintained treble 'the number of inhabitants' that the open fields did; and he gives further proof of the enclosure of land in the seventeenth century, when he mentions 'the great quantities of land that have within our memories lain open, and in common of little value, yet when enclosed have proved excellent good land.' Why then was this most obvious improvement not more generally effected? Because there was a great impediment to it in the numerous interests and diversity of titles and claims to almost every common field and piece of waste land in England, whereby one or more envious or ignorant persons could thwart the will of the majority.[340] Another hindrance, he says, was that many roads passed over the commons and wastes, which a statute was needed to stop.

In the seventeenth century hop growing was not nearly so common in England as in the preceding, when Harrison had said, in his Description of Britain, 'there are few farmers or occupiers in the country which have not gardens and hops growing of their own, and those far better than do come from Flanders.' There seems, indeed, to have been a prejudice against the hop; Worlidge[341] says it was esteemed an unwholesome herb for the use it was usually put to, 'which may also be supplied with several other wholesome and better herbs.' John Evelyn was very much against them, probably because he was such an advocate of cider: 'It is little more than an age,' he says, 'since hopps transmuted our wholesome ale into beer, which doubtless much altered our constitutions. That one ingredient, by some not unworthily suspected, preserving drink indeed, and so by custom made agreeable, yet repaying the pleasure with tormenting diseases, and a shorter life, may deservedly abate our fondness for it, especially if with this be considered likewise the casualties in planting it, as seldom succeeding more than once in three years.'[342] The City of London petitioned against hops as spoiling the taste of drink.

Yet its cultivation is said to have advanced the price of land to £40, £50, and sometimes £100 an acre, the latter an almost incredible price if we consider the value of money then. There were not enough planted to serve the kingdom, and Flemish hops had to be imported, though not nearly so good as English. A great deal of dishonesty, moreover, was shown by the foreign importers, so that in 1603 a statute (1 Jac. I, c. 18) was passed against the 'false packinge of forreine hops,' by which it appears that the sacks were filled up with leaves, stalks, powder, sand, straw, wood, and even soil, for increasing the weight, by which English growers it is said lost £20,000 a year. Such hops were to be forfeited, and brewers using them were to forfeit their value. The chief cause of their decrease was that few farmers would take the trouble and care required to grow them, in spite of the often excellent prices, which at Winchester at this date averaged from 50s. to 80s. a cwt., sometimes, however, reaching over 200s., as in 1665 and 1687, though then as now they were subject to great fluctuations, and in 1691 were only 31s. Many, too, were discouraged by the fact 'they are the most of any plant that grows subject to the various mutations of the air, mildews sometimes totally destroying them,' no doubt an allusion to the aphis blight. Hop yards were often protected at this early date by hedges of tall trees, usually ash or poplar, the elm being disapproved of as contracting mildews. Markham[343] says that Hertfordshire then contained as good hops as he had seen anywhere, and there the custom was 250 hills to every rood, 'and every hill will bear 2¹/₂ lb., worth on an average 4 nobles a cwt. (a noble = 6s. 8d.);' hills were to be 6 ft. apart at least, poles 16 to 18 ft. long and 9 or 10 inches in circumference at the butt, of ash, oak, beech, alder, maple or willow.

Some planted the hills in 'plain squares chequerwise, which is the best way if you intend to plough with horses between the hills. Others plant them in form of a quincunx, which is better for the hop, and will do very well where your ground is but small that you may overcome it with either the breast plough or spade.' The manure recommended by Worlidge was good mould, or dung and earth mixed. The hills were like mole-hills 3 feet high, and sometimes were large enough to have as many as 20 poles, so that some hop yards must have looked very different then from what they do now, even when poles are retained; but from two to five poles per hill was the more usual number. Cultivation was much the same as in Reynold Scott's time, and picking was still done on a 'floor' prepared by levelling the hills, watering, treading, and sweeping the ground, round which the pickers sat and picked into baskets, but the hop crib was also used.

It was considered better not to let the hops get too ripe, as the growers were aware of the value of a fresh, green-looking sample; and Worlidge advises the careful exclusion of leaves and stalks, though Markham does not agree with him. Kilns were of two sorts: the English kiln made of wood, lath, and clay; the French of brick, lime, and sand, not so liable to burn as the former and therefore better.[344] One method of drying was finely to bed the kiln with wheat straw laid on the hair-cloth, the hops being spread 8 inches thick over this, 'and then you shall keepe a fire a little more fervent than for the drying of a kiln full of malt,' the fire not to be of wood, for that made the hops smoky and tasted the beer, but of straw! Worlidge, strangely, recommended the bed of the kiln to be covered with tin, as much better than hair-cloth, for then any sort of fuel would do as well as charcoal, since the smoke did not pass through the hops.

Besides Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire, Leicestershire, and Rutlandshire; Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire were recommended by Markham for hop growing, the great hop counties of to-day being passed over by him.

The growth of hemp and flax had by this time considerably decayed, owing to the want of encouragement to trade in these commodities, the lack of experience in growing them, and the tithes which in some years amounted to more than the profits.[345] An acre of good flax was worth from £7 to £12; but if 'wrought up fit to sell in the market' from £15 to £20.

Woad was considered a 'very rich commodity', but according to Blyth it robbed the land if long continued upon it, although if moderately used it prepared land for corn, drawing a 'different juice from what the corn requires'. It more than doubled the rent of land, and had been sold at from £6 to £20 a ton, the produce of an acre. John Lawrence, who wrote in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, says woad was in his time cultivated by companies of people, men, women, and children, who hired the land, built huts, and grew and prepared the crop for the dyer's use, then moved on to another place.[346]

There were proofs that man's inventive genius was at work among farm implements. Worlidge mentions[347] an engine for setting corn, invented by Gabriel Plat, made of two boards bored with wide holes 4 in. apart, set in a frame, with a funnel to each hole. It was fitted with iron pins 5 in. long to 'play up and down', and dibble holes into which the corn was to go from the funnels. This machine was so intricate and clumsy that Worlidge found no use for it. However, he recommends another instrument which certainly seems to anticipate Tull's drill, though Tull is said to have stated when Bradley showed him a cut of it that it was only a proposal and it never got farther than the cut.[348] It consisted of a frame of small square pieces of timber 2 inches thick; the breadth of the frame 2 feet, the height 18 inches, length 4 feet, placed on four good-sized wheels. In the middle of the frame a coulter was fixed to make a furrow for the corn, which fell through a wooden pipe behind, that dropped the corn out of a hopper containing about a bushel, the fall of the corn from the hopper being regulated by a wooden wheel in its neck. The same frame might contain two coulters, pipes, and hoppers, and the instrument could be worked with one horse and one man. It was considered a great advance on sowing broadcast, and by the use of it 'you may also cover your grain with any rich compost you shall prepare for that purpose, either with pigeon dung, dry or granulated, or any other saline or lixirial (alkaline, or of potash) substance, which may drop after the corn from another hopper behind the one that drops the corn, or from a separate drill'. The corn thus sown in rows was found easier to weed and hoe, so that it is clear that this advantage was well understood before Tull's time.

There was a great diversity of ploughs at this date, almost every county having some variation.[349] The principal sorts were the double-wheel plough, useful upon hard land, usually drawn with horses or oxen two abreast, the wheels 18 in. to 20 in. high. The one-wheel plough, which could be used on almost any sort of land; it was very 'light and nimble', so that it could be drawn by one horse and held by one man, and thus ploughed an acre a day.

Then there was a 'plain plough without either wheel or foot', very easy to work and fit for any lands; a double plough worked by four horses and two men, of two kinds, one ploughing a double furrow, the other a double depth.

There were also ploughs with a harrow attached, others constructed to plough, sow, and harrow, but not of much value; and a turfing plough for burning sod. Carts and waggons were of many sorts, according to the locality, the greater wheels of the waggon being usually 18 feet in circumference the lesser 9 feet. A useful implement was the trenching plough used on grass land to cut out the sides of trenches or drains, with a long handle and beam and with a coulter or knife fixed in it and sometimes a wheel or wheels. The following is a list of other implements then considered necessary for a farm.

A considerable variety of manures were in use, chalk, lime, marl, fuller's earth, clay, sand, sea-weed, river-weed, oyster shells, fish, dung, ashes, soot, salt, rags, hair, malt dust, bones, horns, and the bark of trees. Of the oyster shells Worlidge says, 'I am credibly informed that an ingenious gentleman living near the seaside laid on his lands great quantities, which made his neighbours laugh at him (as usually they do at anything besides their own clownish road or custom of ignorance),' and after a year or two's exposure to the weather 'they exceedingly enriched his land for many years after.' The bones then used were marrow-bones and fish bones, or 'whatever hath any oiliness or fatness in it', but the bones of horses and other animals were also used, burnt before being applied to the land, crushing not being thought of till many years after.

In 1688 Gregory King,[352] who was much more accurate than most statisticians of his time, gave the following estimate of the land of England and Wales:—

He valued the live stock of England and Wales at £18¹/₄ millions, and estimated the produce of the arable land in England at:

The same statistician drew up a scheme of the income and expenditure of the 'several families' in England in 1688, the population being 5¹/₂ millions[353]:—

He calculated that the freeholder of the better sort saved on an average £8 15s. 0d. a year per family of 7; and the lesser sort £2 15s. 0d. a year with a family of 5¹/₂. The tenant farmer with a family of 5, only saved 25s. a year, while labouring families who, he said, averaged 3¹/₂ (certainly an under estimate), lost annually 7s., and cottagers and paupers with families of 3¹/₄ (also an under estimate) lost 16s. 3d. a year. It will thus be seen that the tenant farmers, labourers, and cottagers, the bulk of those who worked on the land, were very badly off; the tenant farmer saved considerably less than the artisan. It will also be noticed that the rural population of England was about three-quarters of the whole.[354]

The winter of 1683-4 was marked by one of the severest frosts that have ever visited England. Ice on the Thames is said to have been eleven inches thick; by Jan. 9 there were streets of booths on it; and by the 24th, the frost continuing more and more severe, all sorts of shops and trades flourished on the river, 'even to a printing press, where the people and ladies took a fancy to have their names printed and the day and year set down when printed on the Thames.' Coaches plied, there was bull-baiting, horse and coach races, puppet plays and interludes, tippling 'and other lewd places'—a regular carnival on the water.[355] Altogether the frost which began at Christmas lasted ninety-one days and did much damage on land, many of the trees were split as if struck by lightning, and men and cattle perished in some parts. Poultry and other birds and many plants and vegetables also perished. Wheat, however, was little affected, as the average price was under 40s. a quarter. In 1692 a series of very bad seasons commenced, lasting, with a break in 1694, until 1698, always known as the 'ill' or 'barren' seasons, and the cause was the usual one in England, excessive cold and wet. In 1693 wheat was over 60s. a quarter, and in Kent turnips were made into bread for the poor.[356] The difference in the price of farm produce in various localities was striking, and an eloquent testimony to the wretched means of communication. At Newark, for instance, in 1692-3 wheat was from 36s. to 40s. a quarter, while at Brentford it touched 76s.; next year in the same two places it was 32s. and 86s. respectively. In 1695-6 hay at Newark was 13s. 4d. a ton, at Northampton it was from 35s. to 40s.

In 1662 was passed the famous statute of parochial settlement, 14 Car. II, c. 12, which forged cruel fetters for the poor, and is said to have caused the iron of slavery to enter into the soul of the English labourer.[357] The Act states, that the reason for passing it was the continual increase of the poor throughout the kingdom, which had become exceeding burdensome owing to the defects in the law. Poor people, moreover, wandered from one parish to another in order 'to settle where there is the best Stocke, the largest commons or wastes to build cotages, and the most woods for them to burn and destroy.'[358] It was therefore determined to stop these wanderings, and most effectually was it done. Two justices were empowered to remove any person who settled in any tenement under the yearly value of £10 within forty days to the place where he was last legally settled, unless he gave sufficient security for the discharge of the parish in case he became a pauper.

It is true that certain relaxations were subsequently made. The Act of 1691, 3 W. & M., c. 2, allowed derivative settlements on payment of taxes for one year, serving an annual office, hiring for a year, and apprenticeship; while the Act of 1696, 8 & 9 Wm. III, c. 30, allowed the grant of a certificate of settlement, under which safeguard the holder could migrate to a district where his labour was required, the new parish being assured he would not become chargeable to it, and therefore not troubling to remove him till there was actual need: but the statute acted as an effectual check on migration and prevented the labourer carrying his work where it was wanted.[359] It became the object of parishes to have as few cottages and therefore as few poor as possible. In 'close' parishes, i.e. where all the land belonged to one owner, as distinguished from 'open' ones where it belonged to several, all the cottages were often pulled down so that labourers coming to work in it had to travel long distances in all weathers. We shall see further relaxation in the law in 1795, but it was not until modern times that this abominable system was destroyed. The agricultural labourer's difficulty in building a house was aggravated by the statute 31 Eliz., c. 7, before noticed, which in order to restrain the building of cottages enacted that none, except in towns and certain other places, were to be built unless 4 acres of land were attached to them, under a penalty of £10, and 40s. a month for continuing to maintain it. This Act was not repealed until the reign of George III. However, it seems to have been frequently winked at. In Shropshire, for instance, the fine often was only nominal; in the seventeenth century orders authorizing the building of cottages on the waste were freely given by the Court of Quarter Sessions, and orders were also made by the Court for the erection of cottages elsewhere.[360]

At the restoration of Charles II the corn laws had practically been unaltered since 1571,[361] when it had been enacted that corn might be exported from certain ports in certain ships at all times when proclamation was not made to the contrary, on a payment of 12d. a quarter on wheat and 8d. a quarter on other grain. Now both export and import were subjected to heavy duties, but these caused such high prices in corn that they were reduced in 1663; yet high duties were again imposed in 1673, which continued until the revolution. Then, owing to good crops and low prices, which brought distress on the landed interest, a new policy was introduced: export duties were abolished and the other extreme resorted to, viz. a bounty on export of 5s. in the quarter as long as the home price did not exceed 48s. At the same time import duties remained high, and this system lasted till 1773. Never had the corn-growers of England been so thoroughly protected, yet, owing to causes over which the legislators had no control, namely bountiful seasons, the prices of wheat for the next seventy years was from 15 to 20 per cent. cheaper than in the previous forty. Modern economists have described this system as one of the worst instances of a class using their legislative power to subsidize themselves at the expense of the community. As a matter of fact it was the firm conviction of the statesmen and economists of the time, that husbandry, being the main industry and prop of England, and the foundation on which the whole political power of the country was based, should receive every encouragement. At all events, in many ways the policy was successful.[362] It encouraged investment in land, and materially assisted the agricultural improvement for which the eighteenth century was noted, the export too employed English shipping, and thus aided industry. Arthur Young said it was the singular felicity of this country to have devised a plan which accomplished the strange paradox of at once lowering the price of corn and encouraging agriculture, for by the system in vogue till 1773 if corn was scarce it was imported, while if there was a glut at home export was assisted so that great fluctuations in price were prevented.[363] It seemed of the utmost importance to men of that time that England should be self-supporting and independent of possible adversaries for the necessaries of life; the wisdom of the policy was never questioned, and was accepted by statesmen of every party.[364] To blame the landowners for adopting what seemed the wisest course to every sensible person is merely an instance of partisan spite.

At the Peace of Paris in 1763 the question as to whether England or France was to be the great colonizing country of the world was finally settled, and a great development of English trade ensued. It was accompanied by a great increase of population, exports of corn were largely reduced, and the balance began to incline the other way, so that the next Act of importance was that of 1773 which permitted the import of foreign wheat at a nominal duty of 6d. a quarter when it was over 48s., but prohibited export and the bounty on export when wheat was at or above 44s. This was the nearest approach to free trade before 1846.

The time, however, was not yet ripe for this, and the nominal duty on imports was too small for landlords and farmers, so that in 1791 the price when the same nominal duty was to come into force was raised to 54s., while between 50s. and 54s. a duty of 2s. 6d. was imposed, and under 50s. a duty of 24s. 3d.; and export was allowed without bounty when wheat was under 46s. Export of corn, however, by this time had become a matter of little moment, England having definitely ceased to be an exporting country after 1789.

Not only were English landowners after the Restoration anxious to protect their corn, but they also took alarm at the imports of Irish cattle which they said lowered English rents, so that in 1665 and 1680 (18 Car. II, c. 2, and 32 Car. II, c. 2) laws were framed absolutely prohibiting the import of Irish cattle, sheep, and swine, as well as of beef, pork, bacon, and mutton, and even butter and cheese. The statute 12 Car. II, c. 4, also virtually excluded Irish wool from England by duties amounting to prohibition. It was not until 1759 that free imports of cattle from Ireland were allowed for five years,[365] a period prolonged by 5 Geo. III, c. 10, and a statute of 1772.

In 1699 wool was allowed to be shipped from six specified ports in Ireland to eight specified ports in England,[366] and by 16 Geo. II, c. 11, wool might be sent from Ireland to any port in England under certain restrictions.

---

CHAPTER XIV

1700-1765

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.—CROPS.—CATTLE.— DAIRYING.—POULTRY.—TULL AND THE NEW HUSBANDRY.—BAD TIMES. —FRUIT-GROWING

The history of agriculture in the eighteenth century is remarkable for several features of great importance. It first saw the application of capital in large quantities to farming, the improvements of the time being largely initiated by rich landowners whom Young praises rightly as public-spirited men who deserved well of their country, though Thorold Rogers attributes a meaner motive for the improvement of their estates, namely, their desire not to be outshone by the wealthy merchants.[367] They were often ably assisted by tenant farmers, many of whom were now men with considerable capital, for whom the smaller farms were amalgamated into large ones. After the agricultural revolution of the latter half of the century, the tendency to consolidate small holdings into large farms grew apace and was looked on as a decided mark of progress. This agricultural revolution was largely a result of the industrial revolution that then took place in England. Owing to mechanical inventions and the consequent growth of the factory system, the great manufacturing towns arose, whence came a great demand for food, and, to supply this demand, farms, instead of being small self-sufficing holdings just growing enough for the farmer and his family and servants, grew larger, and became manufactories of corn and meat. The century was also remarkable for another great change. England, hitherto an exporting country, became an importing one. The progress of the century was furthered by a band of men whose names are, or ought to be, household words with English farmers: Jethro Tull, Lord Townshend, Arthur Young, Bakewell, Coke of Holkham, and the Collings. Further the century witnessed a great number of enclosures, especially when it was drawing to its close. According to the Report of the Committee on Waste Lands in 1797, the number of Enclosure Acts was: under Anne, 2 Acts, enclosing 1,439 acres; under Geo. I, 16 Acts, enclosing 17,960 acres; under Geo. II, 226 Acts, enclosing 318,778 acres; from 1760 to 1797, 1,532 Acts, enclosing 2,804,197 acres.

The period from 1700 to 1765 has been called the golden age of the agricultural classes, as the fifteenth century has been called the golden age of the labourer, but the farmer and landlord were often hard pressed; rates were low, wages were fair, and the demand for the produce of the farm constant owing to the growth of the population, yet prices for wheat, stock, and wool were often unremunerative to the farmer, and we are told in 1734, 'necessity has compelled our farmers to more carefulness and frugality in laying out their money than they were accustomed to in better times.'[368] The labourer's wages varied according to locality. The assessment of wages by the magistrates in Lancashire for 1725 remains, and according to that the ordinary labourer earned 10d. a day in the summer and 9d. in the winter months, with extras in harvest, and this may be taken as the average pay at that date. Threshing and winnowing wheat by piece-work cost 2s. a quarter, oats 1s. a quarter. Making a ditch 4 feet wide at the top, 18 inches wide at the bottom, and 3 feet deep, double set with quicks, cost 1s. a rood (8 yards), 10d. if without the quick.[369] The magistrates remarked in their proclamation on the plenty of the times and were afraid that for the northern part of the county, which was then very backward, the wages were too liberal. Wheat was, unfortunately, that year 46s. 1d. a quarter, but a few years before and after that date it was cheap—20s., 24s., 28s. a quarter—and fresh meat was only 3d. a lb., so that their wages went a long way.[370] A considerable portion of the wages was paid in kind, not only in drink but in food, though this custom became less frequent as the century went on.[371]

As for his food, Eden tells us[372] that the diet of Bedford workhouse in 1730 was much better than that of the most industrious labourer in his own home, and this was the diet: bread and cheese or broth for breakfast, boiled beef hot or cold, sometimes with suet pudding for dinner, and bread and cheese or broth for supper. This must have been sufficiently monotonous, and we may be sure the labourer at home very seldom had boiled beef for dinner; but in the north he was much cleverer than his southern brother in cooking cereal foods such as oatmeal porridge, crowdie (also of oatmeal), frumenty or barley milk, barley broth, &c.[373]

The village of the first half of the eighteenth century contained a much better graded society than the village of to-day. It had few gaps, so that there was a ladder from the lowest to the highest ranks, owing to the existence of many small holders of various degree, soon to be diminished by enclosure and consolidation.[374]

There was a great increase in the number of live stock owing to the spread, gradual though it was, of roots and clover, which increased the winter food; 'of late years,' it was said in 1739, 'there have been improvements made in the breed of sheep by changing of rams, and sowing of turnips, grass seeds, &c.'[375] Crops, too, were improving; and enclosed lands about 1726 were said to produce over 20 bushels of wheat to the acre.[376]

Though the number of Enclosure Acts at the beginning of the century was nothing like the number at the end, the process was steadily going on, often by non-parliamentary enclosure, and was approved by nearly every one. Some, however, were opposed to it. John Cowper, who wrote an essay on 'Enclosing Commons' in 1732, said, a common was often the chief support of forty or fifty poor families, and even though their rights were bought out they were under the necessity of leaving their old homes, for their occupation was gone; but he says nothing of the well-known increased demand for labour on the enclosed lands. The force of his arguments may be gauged from his answer to Lawrence's statement that enclosure is the greatest benefit to good husbandry, and a remedy for idleness. On the contrary, says he, who among the country people live lazier lives than the grazier and the dairyman? All the dairyman has to do is to call his cows together to be milked!

Worlidge in 1669 had lamented that turnips were so little grown by English farmers in the field, and that it was a plant 'usually nourished in gardens',[377] and in a letter to Houghton in 1684, he is the first to mention the feeding of turnips to sheep.[378] However, in 1726 it was said that nothing of late years had turned to greater profit to the farmer, who now found it one of his chief treasures; and there were then three sorts: the round which was most common, the yellow, and the long.[379] For winter use they were to be sown from the beginning of June to the middle of August, on fallow which had been brought to a good tilth, the seed harrowed in with a bush harrow, and if necessary rolled. When the plants had two or three leaves each they were to be hoed out, leaving them five or six inches apart, though some slovenly farmers did not trouble to do this; but there is no mention of hoeing between the rows. The fly was already recognized as a pest, and soot and common salt were used to fight it. Folding sheep in winter on turnips was then little practised, though Lawrence strongly recommends it. According to Defoe,[380] Suffolk was remarkable for being the first county where the feeding and fattening of sheep and other cattle with turnips was first practised in England, to the great improvement of the land, 'whence', he says, 'the practice is spread over most of the east and south, to the great enriching of farmers and increase of fat cattle.' There were great disputes as to collecting the tithe, always a sore subject, on turnips; and the custom seems to have been that if they were eaten off by store sheep they went tithe free, if sheep were fattened on them the tithe was paid.[381]

Clover, the other great novelty of the seventeenth century, was now generally sown with barley, oats, or rye grass, about 15 lb. per acre. This amount, sown on 2 acres of barley, would next year produce 2 loads worth about £5. The next crop stood for seed, which was cut in August, the hay being worth £9, and the seed out of it, 300 lb., was sold much of it for 16d. a lb., the sum realized in that year from the 2 acres being £30, without counting the aftermath. At this time most of the seed was still imported from Flanders.[382] Much of the common and waste land of England, not previously worth 6d. an acre, had been by 1732 vastly improved through sowing artificial grasses on it, so that various people had gained considerable estates.[383]

Carrots were also now grown as a field crop in places, especially near London, two sorts being known, the yellow and red, used chiefly by farmers for feeding their hogs.[384] Of wheat the names were many, but there were apparently only seven distinct sorts, the Double-eared, Eggshell, Red or Kentish, Great-bearded, Pollard, Grey, and Flaxen or Lammas.[385] The growth of saffron had declined, though the English variety was the best in the world, according to Lawrence, and except in Cambridgeshire and about Saffron Walden it was little known.

Though it was still some time before the days of Bakewell, increased attention was given to cattle-breeding; it was urged that a well-shaped bull be put to cows, one that had 'a broad and curled forehead, long horns, fleshy neck, and a belly long and large.'[386] Such in 1726 was the ideal type of the long-horns of the Midland and the north, but it was noticed that of late years and especially in the north the Dutch breed was much sought after, which had short horns and long necks, the breed with which the Collings were to work such wonders. The then great price of £20 had been given for a cow of this breed. Bradley, Professor of Botany at Cambridge, and a well-known writer on agriculture, divided the cattle of England into three sorts according to their colour: the black, white, and red.[387] The black, commonly the smallest, was the strongest for labour, chiefly found in mountainous countries; also bred chiefly in Cheshire, Yorkshire, Lancashire, and Derbyshire, sixty years before this, and in those days Cheshire cheese came from these cattle, apparently very much like the modern Welsh breed.[388] The white were much larger, and very common in Lincolnshire at the end of the seventeenth century. They gave more milk than the black sort but went dry sooner. They were also found in Suffolk and Surrey.

The red cattle were the largest in England, their milk rich and nourishing, so much so that it was given specially to consumptives. They were first bred in Somerset, where in Bradley's time particular attention was paid to their breeding, and were evidently the ancestors of the modern Devons. About London these cows were often fed on turnips, given them tops and all, which made their milk bitter. They were also found in Lincolnshire and some other counties, where 'they were fed on the marshes', and Defoe saw, in the Weald of Kent, 'large Kentish bullocks, generally all red with their horns crooked inward.' Bradley gives the following balance sheet for a dairy of nine cows:[389]

A correspondent, however, pointed out to Bradley that this yield and profit was far above the average, which was about £5 a cow, on whom Bradley retorted that it could be made, though it was exceptional.

In the eighteenth century the great trade of driving Scottish cattle to London began, Walter Scott's grandfather being the pioneer. The route followed diverged from the Great North Road in Yorkshire in order to avoid turnpikes, and the cattle, grazing leisurely on the strips of grass by the roadside, generally arrived at Smithfield in good condition.[390]

Defoe tells us that most of the Scottish cattle which came yearly into England were brought to the village of S. Faiths, north of Norwich, 'where the Norfolk graziers go and buy them. These Scots runts, coming out of the cold and barren highlands, feed so eagerly on the rich pasture in these marshes that they grow very fat. There are above 40,000 of these Scots cattle fed in this county every year. The gentlemen of Galloway go to England with their droves of cattle and take the money themselves.'[391] It was no uncommon thing for a Galloway nobleman to send 4,000 black cattle and 4,000 sheep to England in a year, and altogether from 50,000 to 60,000 cattle were said to come to England from Galloway yearly. Gentlemen on the Border before the Union got a very pretty living by tolls from these cattle; and the Earl of Carlisle made a good income in this way.

Cattle were sometimes of a great size. In 1697, in the park of Sir John Fagg near Steyning, Defoe saw four bullocks of Sir John's own breeding for which was refused in Defoe's hearing £26 apiece. They were driven to Smithfield and realized £25 each, having probably sunk on the way, but dressed they weighed 80 stone a quarter![392] These weights must have been very exceptional, but go to prove that cattle then could be grown to much greater size than is generally credited. A good price for a bullock in the first half of the eighteenth century was from £7 to £10.

The best poultry at the same date (1736) were said to be 'the white-feathered sort', especially those that had short and white legs, which were esteemed for the whiteness of their flesh; but those that had long yellow legs and yellow beaks were considered good for nothing.[393] Care was to be used in the choice of a cock, for those of the game kind were to be avoided as unprofitable. Bradley gives a balance sheet for 12 hens and 2 cocks who had a free run in a farmyard and an orchard:[394]

He also recommends that in stocking a farm of £200 a year the following poultry should be purchased:

The best way to fatten chickens, according to Bradley, was to put them in coops and feed them with barley meal, being careful to put a small quantity of brickdust in their water to give them an appetite.[395]

On this farm were 20 acres of cow pasture besides common, and this with some turnips kept 9 cows, which gave about three gallons of milk a day at least, the milk being worth 1d. a quart. His pigs were of the 'Black Bantham' breed, which were better than the large sort common in England, for the flesh was much more delicate.

Suffolk was famous for supplying London with turkeys.[396] Three hundred droves of turkeys, each numbering from 300 to 1000, had in one season passed over Stratford Bridge on the road from Ipswich to London. Geese also travelled on foot to London in prodigious numbers from Norfolk, Suffolk, and the Fen country, often 1,000 to 3,000 in a drove, starting in August when harvest was nearly over, so that the geese might feed on the stubble by the way; 'and thus they hold on to the end of October, when the roads begin to be too stiff and deep for their broad feet and short legs to march on.' There was, however, a more rapid method of getting poultry to the great market, by means of carts of four stages or stories, one above another, to carry the birds in, drawn by two horses, which by means of relays travelled night and day, and covered as much as 100 miles in two days and one night, the driver sitting on the topmost stage.

Hop growing in 1729, according to Richard Bradley, paid well; he says, 'ground never esteemed before worth a shilling an acre per annum, is rendered worth forty, fifty, or sometimes more pounds a year by planting hops judiciously. An acre of hops shall bring to the owner clear profit about £30 yearly; but I have known hop grounds that have cleared above £50 yearly per acre.' At this date 12,000 acres in England were planted with hops.

The great market for hops was Stourbridge Fair, once the greatest mart in England and still preserving much of its former importance: 'there is scarce any price fixed for hops in England till they know how they sell in Stourbridge Fair.'[397] Thither they came from Chelmsford, Canterbury, Maidstone, and Farnham, where the bulk of the hops in England were then grown, though some were to be found at Wilton near Salisbury, in Herefordshire, and Worcestershire. Round Canterbury Defoe says there were 6,000 acres of hops, all planted within living memory[398]; but the Maidstone district was called 'the mother of hop grounds', and with the country round Feversham was famous for apples and cherries.

The finest wool still, it seems, came from near Leominster, where the sheep in Markham's time were described as small-boned and black-faced, with a light fleece, and apparently they still had the same appearance at the beginning of the eighteenth century[399]; and large-boned sheep with coarser wool were to be found in the counties of Warwick, Leicester, Buckingham, Northampton, and Nottingham; in the north of England too were big-boned sheep with inferior wool, the largest with coarse wool being found in the marshes of Lincolnshire.

About this time wool had fallen much in price: 'Has nobody told you,' writes a west country farmer to his absentee landlord in 1737, 'that wool has fallen to near half its price, and that we cannot find purchasers for a great part of it at any price whatsoever. When most of our estates (farms) were taken wool was generally 7d., 8d., or more by the pound; the same is now 4d. and still falling.'[400] But the latter price was exceptionally low; Smith[401] gives the following average prices per tod of 28 lb.:

After 1753 it fell again, largely owing to the great plague among cattle, which brought about a 'prodigious increase of sheep'[402]; and about 1770 Young[403] favoured corn rather than wool, for there was always a market for the former, but the foreign demand for cloth was diminishing, especially in the case of France, besides prohibition of export kept down the price.[404] Yet although wool was being deserted for corn it had in Young's time 'been so long supposed the staple and foundation of all our wealth, that it is somewhat dangerous to hazard an opinion not consonant to its encouragement'.

At the end of the century, however, there was a rapid increase in the price, partly due to increased demand by spinners and weavers who, owing to machinery, were working more economically; and partly to the enclosure of commons, and the ploughing up of land for corn.[405]

Cheshire had long been famous for cheese. Barnaby Googe, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, says, 'in England the best cheese is the Cheshyre and the Shropshyre, then the Banbury cheese, next the Suffolk and the Essex, and the very worst the Kentish cheese.' Camden, who died in 1623, tells us that 'the grasse and fodder (in Cheshire) is of that goodness and vertue that cheeses be made here in great number, and of a most pleasing and delicate taste such as all England again affordeth not the like, no though the best dairywomen otherwise and skillfullest in cheese making be had from hence;' and a little later it was said no other county in the realm could compare with Cheshire, not even that wonderful agricultural country Holland from which England learnt so much.[406] In Lawrence's time Cheddar cheese was also famous, and there it had long been a custom for several neighbours to join their milk together to make cheeses, which were of a large size, weighing from 30 lb. to 100 lb. Good cheese came also from Gloucestershire and Warwickshire. The Cheshire men sent great quantities by sea to London, a long and tedious voyage, or else by land to Burton-on-Trent, and down that river to Hull and then by sea to London. The Gloucestershire men took it to Lechlade and sent it down the Thames; from Warwickshire it went by land all the way, or to Oxford and thence down the Thames to London. Stilton, too, had lately become famous, and was considered the best of all, selling for the then great price of 1s. a lb. on the farm, and 2s. 6d. at the Bell Inn, Stilton, where it seems to have first been sold in large quantities, though Leicestershire perhaps claims the honour of first making it.[407]

The eastern side of Suffolk was, in Defoe's time, famous for the best butter and perhaps the worst cheese in England, the butter being 'barrelled and sometimes pickled up in small casks'.[408]

Rabbits were occasionally kept in large numbers for profit; at Auborne Chase in Wilts, there was a warren of 700 acres surrounded by a wall—a most effective way of preventing escape, but somewhat expensive. In winter time they were fed on hay, and hazel branches from which they ate the bark. They were never allowed to get below 8,000 head, and from these, after deducting losses by poachers, weazles, polecats, foxes, &c., 24,000 were sold annually. These rabbits, owing to the quality of the grass, were famous for the sweetness of their flesh. The proprietor, Mr. Gilbert, began to kill them at Bartholomewtide, Aug. 24, and from then to Michaelmas obtained 9s. a dozen for them delivered free in London; but those from Michaelmas to Christmas realized 10s. 6d. a dozen.

The difference in price at the two periods is accounted for by the fact that their skins were much better in the latter, and the rabbits kept longer when killed; they must also have been larger. A skin before Michaelmas was only worth 1d., but soon after nearly 6d.; and in Hertfordshire was a warren where rabbit skins with silvery hair fetched 1s. each.[409]

We have now reached the period when the result of Jethro Tull's labours was given to the world, his Horse-hoeing Husbandry appearing in 1733. It is no exaggeration to say that agriculture owes more to Tull than to any other man; the principles formulated in his famous book revolutionized British agriculture, though we shall see that it took a long time to do it. He has indeed been described as 'the greatest individual improver agriculture ever knew'. He first realized that deep and perfect pulverization is the great secret of vegetable nutrition, and was thus led on to perfect the system of drilling seed wide enough apart to admit of tillage in the intervals, and abandoning the wide ridges in vogue, laid the land into narrow ridges 5 feet or 6 feet wide. He was born at Basildon in Berkshire, heir to a good estate, and was called to the bar in 1699, but on his marriage in the same year settled on the paternal farm of Howberry in Oxfordshire. In his preface to his book he throws a flash of light on country life at a time when the roads were nearly as bad as in the Middle Ages, so that they effectually isolated different parts of England, when he speaks of 'a long confinement within the limits of a lonely farm, in a country where I am a stranger, having debarred me from all conversation'.[410]

He took to agriculture more by necessity than by choice, for he knew too much 'the inconveniency and slavery attending the exorbitant power of husbandry servants', and he further gives this extraordinary character of the farm labourer of his day: ''Tis the most formidable objection against our agriculture that the defection of labourers is such that few gentlemen can keep their land in their own hands, but let them for a little to tenants who can bear to be insulted, assaulted, kicked, cuffed, and Bridewelled, with more patience than gentlemen are endowed with.'[411] Tull wrote just before it became the fashion for gentlemen to go into farming, and laments that the lands of the country were all, or mostly, in the hands of rack-renters, whose supposed interest it was that they should never be improved for fear of fines and increased rents. Gentlemen then knew so little of farming that they were unable to manage their estates. No doubt his scathing remarks helped to initiate the well-known change in this respect, and soon, over all England, gentlemen of education and position were engaged in removing this reproach from their class. The same complaint as to their ignorance of matters connected with their land crops up again during the great French war, but they then had a good excuse, as they were busy fighting the French.

Tull invented his drill about 1701 at Howberry. The first occasion for making it, he says, was that it 'was very difficult to find a man that could sow clover tolerably; they had a habit to throw it once with the hand to two large strides and go twice in each cast; thus, with 9 or 10 lb. of seed to an acre, two-thirds of the ground was unplanted. To remedy this I made a hopper, to be drawn by a boy, that planted an acre sufficiently with 6 lb. of seed; but when I added to this hopper an exceeding light plough that made 6 channels eight inches asunder, into which 2 lb. to an acre being drilled the ground was as well planted. This drill was easily drawn by a man, and sometimes by a boy.'

His invention was largely prompted by his desire to do without the insolent farm servant whom he has described above, and the year after it was invented he certainly had his wish, for they struck in a body and were dismissed: 'it were more easy to teach the beasts of the field than to drive the ploughman out of his way.'

His ideas were largely derived from the mechanism of the organ which, being fond of music, he had mastered in his youth—a rotary mechanism, which is the foundation of all agricultural sowing implements. His first invention may be described as a drill plough to sow wheat and turnip seed in drills three rows at a time, a harrow to cover the seed being attached. Afterwards he invented a turnip drill, so arranged as regards dropping the seed and its subsequent covering with soil that half the seed should come up earlier than the rest, to enable a portion at least to escape the dreaded fly. He was a great believer in doing everything himself, and worked so hard at his drill that he had to go abroad for his health. He was somewhat carried away by his invention, and asserts that the expense of a drilled crop of wheat was one-ninth of that sown in the old way, giving the following figures to prove his assertion:

It should be noted that he has omitted to charge rent for the year in which the crop was grown in both cases.

He considered fallowing and manure unnecessary, and grew without manure 13 successive wheat crops on the same piece of ground, getting better crops than his neighbours who pursued the ordinary course of farming. His three great principles, indeed, were drilling, reduction of seed, and absence of weeds, and he saw that dung was a great carrier of the latter but lacked a due appreciation of its chemical action. Of course, like all improvers, he was met with unlimited opposition, and on the publication of his book he was assailed with abuse, which, being a sensitive man, caused him extreme annoyance. His health was bad, his troubles with his labourers unending, his son a spendthrift, and he died at his now famous home, Prosperous Farm, near Hungerford, in 1741, having said not long before his death, 'Some, allowed as good judges, have upon a full view and examination of my practice declared their opinion that it would one day become the general husbandry of England.'[413] Scotland was the first to perceive the merits of the system, and it gradually worked southwards into England, but for many years had to fight against ignorance and prejudice, even so intelligent a man as Arthur Young being opposed to it.

Farm leases had by this time assumed their modern form, and cultivation clauses were numerous. In one of 1732, at Hawsted, the tenant was to keep the hedges in repair, being allowed bushes and stakes for so doing. He was also to bestow on some part of the lands one load of good rotten muck over and above what was made on the farm for every load of hay, straw, or stover (fodder) which he should carry off.[414] In another of 1740, he was to leave in the last year of the tenancy one-third of the arable land summer tilled, ploughed, and fallowed, for which he was to be paid according to the custom of the country. In 1753, in the lease of Pinford End Farm, there was a penalty of £10 an acre for breaking up pasture; a great increase in the amount of the penalty. All compost, dung, soil, and ashes arising on the farm were to be bestowed upon it.

Only two crops successively were to be taken on any of the arable land, but land sown with clover and rye-grass, if fed off, or with turnips which were fed on some part of the farm, were not to count as crops.

The ashes mentioned were those from wood, which were now carefully looked after, as it had become the custom to sell them to the soap-boilers, who came round to every farm collecting them. This is the earliest mention in a Hawsted lease of rye-grass, clover, and turnips, though clover and turnips had been first cultivated there about 1700, and soon spread.

The winter of 1708-9 was very severe, a great frost lasting from October until the spring; wheat was 81s. 9d. a quarter, and high prices lasted until 1715.[415]

From 1715 to 1765 was an era of good seasons and low prices generally; in that half-century Tooke says there were only five bad seasons. In 1732 prices of corn were very low, wheat being about 24s. a quarter, so that we are not surprised to find that its cultivation often did not pay at all.[416]

At Little Gadsden in Hertfordshire, in that year a fair season, and on enclosed land, the following is the balance sheet for an acre:

On barley, worth about £1 a quarter, the loss was 3s. 6d. an acre; on oats, worth 13s. a quarter, however, the profit was 21s.; on beans, 26s. 6d., these being that year exceptionally good and worth 20s. a quarter.[417] Ellis objected to the new mode of drilling wheat because, he said, the rows are more exposed to the violence of the winds, rains, &c., by growing apart, than if close together, when the stalks support each other.[418] This estimate may be compared to that of Tull for the 'old way' of sowing wheat,[419] and to the following estimate of fifty years later in Surrey, when wheat was a much better price:—

The profit was thus £2 10s. 0d. an acre, and for barley it was £3 3s. 6d., for oats £1 19s. 10d., for beans £1 13s. 0d.[421]

This crop of wheat was not very good, as the average in that district was from 20 to 25 bushels per acre, and Young before this saw crops of 30 bushels per acre growing. The over frequent use of fallows, which had so long marked agriculture, was in the early half of the eighteenth century beginning to be strongly disapproved of. Bradley advocated the continuous cultivation of the ground with different kinds of crops, 'for I find', he said, 'by experience that if such crops are sown as are full of fibrous roots, such roots greatly help to open the parts of grounds inclining to too much stiffness.'[422]