CHAPTER XIII. PRESENT AND FORMER CONDITION OF ENGLAND.-PROGRESS OF CULTIVATION.—EVIL INFLUENCE OF FEUDALISM.-STATE OF AGRICULTURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. -MODERN IMPROVEMENTS.-CULTIVATION.-AVERAGE CONSUMPTION OF WHEAT IN GREAT BRITAIN.-IMPLEMENTS OF AGRICULTURE NOW IN USE.-NUMBER OF AGRICULTURALISTS IN GREAT BRITAIN. It is the remark of English tourists, as they travel from the sea-coast to London, that the country is a garden. It has taken nineteen centuries to make it such a garden. The marshes in which the legions of Julius Cæsar had to fight, up to their loins, with the Britons, to whom these swamps were habitual, are now drained. The dense woods in which the Druids worshiped are now cleared. Populous towns and cheerful vilages offer themselves on every side. Wherever the eye reaches, there is cultivation. Instead of a few scattered families painfully earning a subsistence by the chase, or by tilling the land without the knowledge and the instruments that science has given to the aid of manual labor-that cultivation is carried on with a systematic routine that improves the fertility of a good season, and diminishes the evils of a bad. Instead of the country being divided among hostile tribes, who have little communication, the whole territory is covered with a network of roads, and canals, and navigable rivers, and rail-roads, through which means there is a universal market, and wherever there is demand there is instant supply. Rightly considered, there is no branch of production which has so largely benefitted by the power of knowledge as that of INFLUENCE OF FEUDALISM. 187 agriculture. It was ages before the great physical changes were accomplished which are now beheld on every side; and England is still in a state of progress toward the perfection of those results which an over-ruling Providence had in store for the human race, in the gradual manifestation of those discoveries which have already so changed our condition and the condition of the world. The history of cultivation in Great Britain is full of instruction as regards the inefficiency of mere traditional practice and the slowness with which scientific improvement establishes its dominion. It is no part of our plan to follow out this history; but a few scattered facts may not be without their value. The oppressions of tenants that were perpetrated under the feudal system, when ignorant lords of manors impeded production by every species of extortion, may be estimated by one or two circumstances. There can be no doubt that the prosperity of a tenant is the best security for the landlord's due share of the produce of the land. Without manure, in some form or other, the land can not be fertilized; the landlords knew this, but they required to have a monopoly of the fertility. Their tenants kept a few sheep, but the landlords reserved to themselves the exclusive privilege of having a sheepfold; so that the little tenants could not fold their own sheep on their own lands, but were obliged to let them be folded with those of their lord, or pay a fine. The flour-mill was the exclusive property of the manorial lord, whether lay or ecclesiastical; and whatever the distance, or however bad the road, the tenant could grind nowhere but at the lord's mill. No doubt the rent of land was exceedingly low, and the lord was obliged to maintain himself and his dependents by adding something considerable to his means by many forms of legalized extortion. The rent of land was so low because the produce was 188 INFLUENCE OF FEUDALISM. inconsiderable, to an extent which will be scarcely comprehended by modern husbandmen. In the law-commentary called "Fleta," written about the end of the thirteenth century, the author says, the farmer will be a loser unless corn be dear, if he obtains from an acre of wheat only three times the seed sown. He calculated the low produce at six bushels an acre: the average produce was perhaps little higher; we have distinct records of its being no higher a century afterward. In 1390, at Hawsted, near Bury, the produce of the manor-farm was forty-two quarters of wheat, or three hundred and thirty-six bushels, from fifty-seven acres; and upon an average of three years sixty-one acres produced only seventy quarters, or five hundred and sixty bushels. Sir John Cullum, who collected these details from the records of his own property, says, "no particular dearness of corn followed, so that probably, those very scanty crops were the usual and ordinary effects of the imperfect husbandry then practiced." The husbandry was so imperfect that an unfavorable season for corn-crops, which in our days would have been compensated by a greater production of green crops, was followed by famine. When the ground was too hard, the seed could not be sown for want of the sufficient machine-power of plow and harrow. The chief instrument used was as weak and imperfect as the plow ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PLOW. which we see depicted in Egyptian monuments, and which is still found in parts of Syria. The Oriental plowman was with such an instrument obliged to bend over his plow, and load it with all the weight of his body, to prevent it merely scratching the ground instead of turning it up. His labor was great and his care inces AGRICULTURE OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 189 sant, as we may judge from the words of our Saviour"No man having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the king dom of God." Latimer, the Protestant martyr, in his "Sermon of the plow," in which he holds that "preaching of the Gospel is one of God's plow-works, and the preacher is one of 1. The plow. 4. Handle. Ü 2. The pole. 3. Shares (various). 5. Yokes. 6. Ox-goad. God's plowmen," describes the labor upon which he raises his parallel: "For as the plowman first setteth forth his plow, and then tilleth his land and breaketh it in furrows, and sometimes ridgeth it up again; and at another time harroweth it and clotteth it, and sometimes dungeth it and hedgeth it, diggeth it and weedeth it, purgeth it and maketh it clean-so the prelate, the preacher, hath many divers offices to do." Latimer was the son of an English farmer, and knew practically what he was talking about. He knew that the land would not bear an adequate crop without all this various and often-repeated labor. And yet the labor was so inadequately performed that a few years after he had preached this famous sermon, we are told by a credible writer of the times of Queen Mary-William Bulleyn, a physician and botanist-that in 1555 "bread was so scant, insomuch that the plain poor people did make very much of acorns." A few years onward a great impulse was given to husbandry through various causes, among which the increased abundance of the precious metals through the opening of the mines of South America had no inconsiderable influence. The industrious spirit of England was fairly roused from a long sleep in the days of Queen Elizabeth. 190 AGRICULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Harrison, in his "Description of Britain," says, "The soil is even now in these our days grown to be much more fruitful than it hath been in times past." This historian of manners saw the reason. "In times past" there was "idle and negligent occupation;" but when he wrote (1593), "our countrymen are grown to be more painful, skillful, and careful, through recompense of gain." The cultivators had their share of the benefits of cultivation; they had their " recompense of gain." Capital had been spread among the class of tenants; they were no longer miserable dependents upon their grasping lords. For a century or so onward, the improvements in agriculture were not very decided. The rotation of crops was unknown; and winter food for sheep and cattle not being raised, the greater number were slaughtered and salted at Martinmas.* The fleeces were wretchedly small, for the few sheep nibbled the stubble and commons bare till the spring-time. The carcases of beef were not half their present size. At the beginning of the last century the turnip cultivation was introduced, and in the middle of the century the horse-hoeing husbandry came into use. The agricultural revolution was fairly begun a hundred years ago; and yet, for many years, the value of manure was very imperfectly understood, and even up to our own time it has been wasted in every direction. There is given in Sir John Cullum's book, an abstract of the lease of an English farm in 1753. The tenant was to be allowed two shillings for every load of manure that he brought from a town about four miles distant. During twenty-one years the landlord was charged with only one load. At that period all agriculture was in a great degree traditional. There were no agricultural societies-no special journals for this great branch of national industry. Arthur Young applied his shrewd and observing talent to *The eleventh of November. |