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, 2-1/2d. 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:
"I can sowe,
I can mowe,
And I can stacke;
And I can doe
My master too
When my master turns his backe".'
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:
DR. £ s. d.
Devonshiring, i.e. paring and burning 1 0 0
Lime 0 12 0
Ploughing and harrowing 0 6 0
3 bushels of seed 2 0 0
Weeding 0 1 0
Pulling and binding 0 10 0
Grassing the seed from the flax 0 6 0
Watering, drying, swinging, and beating 4 10 0
----------
£9 5 0
==========
CR. £ s. d.
900 lb. of flax 40 0 0
9 5 0
-----------
Balance profit £30 15 0
===========
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, 13-1/4 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]
FOOTNOTES:
[286] _Surveyor's Dialogue_ (ed. 1608), p. 2.
[287] _Surveyor's Dialogue_, p. 188.
[288] Ibid. p. 207.
[289] _Victoria County History: Devon, Agriculture_.
[290] _Herefordshire Orchards a Pattern for All England_ (ed. 1724).
[291] See infra, p. 136.
[292] These extracts are from the original edition in the Bodleian
Library.
[293] 'The Flanders cherry excels', says Worlidge, _Syst. Agr._, p.
97.
[294] Bradley, in 1726, gives a long list of pears all with French
names, hardly any of which are now known in England.
[295] Worlidge, _Systema Agriculturae_, p. 107.
[296] _Annotation upon the Legacie of Husbandry_, 1651, p. 105.
[297] Markham, i. 174 (ed. 1635).
[298] _Systema Agriculturae_, p. 152.
[299] Evelyn, _Pomona_ (ed. 1664), p. 2.
[300] _Compleat Husbandman_ (ed. 1659), p. 75.
[301] _Most Approved and Long Experienced Waterworks_. London, 1610.
[302] See Worlidge, _Systema Agriculturae_ (ed. 1669), p. 155.
[303] Tooke, _History of Prices_, i. 23.
[304] _Life of Sir S. D'Ewes_, i. 180.
[305] _Calendar of State Papers, Domestic_, 1629-31, p. 414.
[306] _Whole Art of Husbandry_ (ed. 1635), i. 50.
[307] Ibid. i. 100.
[308] Ibid. i. 121.
[309] An astonishing statement; cf. Denton, _England in the Fifteenth
Century_, p. 56, Neckham, _De Natura Rerum_, cap. clxvi. and above, p.
93.
[310] _Whole Art of Husbandry_ (ed. 1635), i. 173.
[311] _Whole Art of Husbandry_ (ed. 1635), ii. 144. and MS. accounts
of Mr. Chevallier of Aspall Hall, Suffolk.
[312] Thorold Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, v. 28.
[313] _Farming and Account Books of Henry Best of Elmswell_, 1641,
Surtees Society, xxxiii. 157.
[314] Ibid. p. 99.
[315] _Farming and Account Books of Henry Best of Elmswell_, 1641.
Surtees Society, xxxiii. 124. Many districts in the north of England
were still much behind the rest of the country.
[316] Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_, 8 sq. Though, as we have
seen, p. 157, the writer of the _Fruiterer's Secrets_ recommends the
gun for scaring birds in 1604.
[317] _The Husbandry of Brabant and Flanders_ (ed. 1652), p. 18.
[318] _Systema Agriculturae_, p. 26.
[319] MS. accounts of Sir Abel Barker, in the possession of G.W.P.
Conant, Esq.
[320] Worlidge, _Systema Agriculturae_, p. 28.
[321] _Compleat Husbandman_ (1659), p. 5.
[322] Ibid. p. 9.
[323] Cf. supra, p. 136.
[324] _Compleat Husbandman_ (1659), p. 23.
[325] _Archaeologia_, i. 324; iii. 53.
[326] _De Natura Rerum_, Rolls Ser., lxi.
[327] Denton, _England in the Fifteenth Century_, 57 n.
[328] Ibid.
[329] Ed. 1686, p. 380.
[330] R. Bradley, _A General Treatise of Husbandry_ (ed. 1726), ii.
52.
[331] Tooke, _History of Prices_ i. 44. Brandy was made in the
eighteenth century from grapes grown in the Beaulieu vineyards in
Hampshire, and a bottle of it long kept at the abbey.--_Hampshire
Notes and Queries_, vi. 62. There are two vineyards to-day, of 2-3/4
and 4 acres respectively, on the estates of the Marquis of Bute in
Glamorganshire; but a vintage is only obtained once in four or five
years from them, and they are not profitable.
[332] _Compleat Husbandman_, 1659, p, 42.
[333] _Compleat Husbandman_, 1659, p. 57.
[334] Ibid. p. 73.
[335] In this apparently repeating Davenant's statement. See
McCulloch, _Commercial Dictionary_, 1852, p. 271.
[336] Thorold Rogers, _History of Agriculture and Prices_, v. 332.
[337] Houghton, _Collections for Improvement of Husbandry_, i. 294.
[338] Ibid., _Collections for Husbandry and Trade_ (ed. 1728), iv.
336.