A great many works on agriculture appeared during the time
of the Commonwealth, of which Walter Blith's Improver
Improved and Samuel Hartlib's Legacie are the most
valuable. The first edition of the former was published
in 1649, and of the latter in 1651; and both of them were
enlarged in subsequent editions. In the first edition of
the Improver Improved no mention is made of clover, nor in
the second of turnips, but in the third, clover is treated of
at some length, and turnips are recommended as an excellent
cattle crop, the culture of which should be extended from
the kitchen garden to the field. Sir Richard Weston must
have cultivated turnips before this; for Blith says that
Sir Richard affirmed to himself that he fed his swine with
them. They were first given boiled, but afterwards the swine
came to eat them raw, and would run after the carts, and
pull them forth as they gathered them--an expression which
conveys an idea of their being cultivated in the fields.
Blith's book is the first systematic work in which there
are some traces of alternate husbandry or the practice of
interposing clover and turnip between culmiferous crops.
He is a great enemy to commons and common fields, and to
retaining land in old pasture, unless it be of the best
quality. His description of the different kinds of ploughs is
interesting; and he justly recommends such as were drawn by two
horses (some even by one horse) in preference to the weighty
and clumsy machines which required four or more horses or
oxen. The following passage indicates the contemporary
theory of manuring:---``In thy tillage are these special
opportunities to improve it, either by liming, marling,
sanding, earthing, mudding, snayl-codding, mucking, chalking,
pidgeons-dung, hens-dung, hogs-dung or by any other means
as some by rags, some by coarse wool, by pitch marks, and
tarry stuff, any oyly stuff, salt and many things more, yea
indeed any thing almost that hath any liquidness, foulness,
saltness or good moysture in it, is very naturall inrichment
to almost any sort of land.'' Blith speaks of an instrument
which ploughed, sowed and harrowed at the same time; and the
setting of corn was then a subject of much discussion. Blith
was a zealous advocate of drainage and holds that drains to
be efficient must be laid 3 or 4 ft. deep. The drainage of
the Great Level of the Fens was prosecuted during the 17th
century, but lack of engineering skill and the opposition of
the fen-men hindered the reclamation of a now fertile region.
Hartlib's Legacie contains, among some very judicious directions,
a great deal of rash speculation. Several of the deficiencies
which the writer complains of in English agriculture must be
placed to the account of climate, and never have been or can be
supplied. Some of his recommendations are quite unsuitable to
the state of the country, and display more of general knowledge
and good intention than of either the theory or practice of
agriculture. Among the subjects deserving notice may be
mentioned the practice of steeping and liming seed corn as
a preventive of smut; changing every year the Species of
grain, and bringing seed corn from a distance; ploughing down
green crops as manure; and feeding horses with broken oats and
chaff. This writer seems to differ a good deal from Blith about
the advantage of interchanging tillage and pasture. ``It were
no losse to this island,'' he says, ``if that we should not
plough at all, if so be that we could certainly have corn at
a reasonable rate, and likewise vent for all our manufactures
of wool''; and one reason for this is, that pasture employs
more hands than tillage, instead of depopulating the country,
as was commonly imagined. The Grout, which he mentions
as ``coming over to us in Holland ships,'' about which he
desires information, was probably the same as shelled barley;
and mills for manufacturing it were introduced into Scotland
from Holland towards the beginning of the 18th century.
Among the other writers previous to the Revolution mention must
be made of John Ray the botanist and of John Evelyn, both men of
great talent and research, whose works are still in high estimation.
The first half of the 17th century was a period of agricultural
activity, partly due, no doubt, to the increase of enclosed
farms. Marling and liming are again practised, new
agricultural implements and manures introduced, and the
new crops more widely used. But the Civil War and the
subsequent politicaldisturbances intervened to prevent the
continuance of this progress, and the agriculture of the
end of the century seems to have relapsed into stagnation.
Scottish agriculture of the 17th century.
Of the state of agriculture in Scotland in the 16th and the
greater part of the 17th century very little is known; no
professed treatise on the subject appeared till after the
Revolution. The south-eastern counties were the earliest
improved, and yet in 1660 their condition seems to have been very
wretched. Ray, who made a tour along the eastern coast in
that year, says, ``We observed little or no fallow ground in
Scotland; some ley ground we saw, which they manured with sea
wreck. The men seemed to be very lazy, and may be frequently
observed to plough in their cloaks. It is the fashion of them
to wear cloaks when they go abroad, but especially on Sundays.
They have neither good bread, cheese nor drink. They cannot make
them, nor will they learn. Their butter is very indifferent,
and one would wonder how they could contrive to make it so
bad. They use much pottage made of coal-wort, which they call
kail, sometimes broth of decorticated barley. The ordinary
country-houses are pitiful cots, built of stone and covered with
turfs, having in them but one room, many of them no chimneys,
the windows very small holes and not glazed. The ground in
the valleys and plains bear very good corn, but especially
bears barley or bigge, and oats, but rarely wheat and rye.''
It is probable that no great change had taken place in Scotland
from the end of the 15th century, except that tenants gradually
became possessed of a little stock of their own, instead of
having their farm stocked by the landlord. ``The minority of
James V., the reign of Mary Stuart, the infancy of her son, and
the civil wars of her grandson Charles I., were all periods of
lasting waste. The very laws which were made during successive
reigns for protecting the tillers of the soil from spoil are
the best proofs of the deplorable state of the husbandman.''5
In the 17th century those laws were made which paved the
way for an improved system of agriculture in Scotland. By a
statute of 1633 landholders were enabled to have their tithes
valued, and to buy them either at nine or six years' purchase,
according to the nature of the property. The statute of 1685,
conferring on landlords a power to entail their estates, was
indeed of a very different tendency in regard to its effects on
agriculture. But the two Acts in 1695, for the division of commons
and separation of intermixed properties, facilitated improvements.
Progress of agriculture from 1688 to 1760.
From the Revolution to the accession of George III. the
progress of agriculture was by no means so considerable as
might be imagined from the great exportation of corn. It is
probable that very little improvement had taken place, either
in the cultivation of the soil or in the management of live
stock, from the Restoration down to the middle of the 18th
century. Clover and turnips were confined to a few districts,
and at the latter period were scarcely cultivated at all by
common farmers in the northern part of the island. Of the writers
of this period, therefore, it is necessary to notice only such
as describe some improvement in the modes of culture, or some
extension of the practices that were formerly little known.
In John Houghton's Collections on Husbandry and Trade, a
periodical work begun in 1681, there is one of the earliest
notices of turnips being eaten by sheep:----``Some in Essex have
their fallow after turnips, which feed their sheep in winter,
by which means the turnips are scooped, and so made capable
to hold dews and rain water, which, by corrupting, imbibes the
nitre of the air, and when the shell breaks it runs about and
fertilizes. By feeding the sheep, the land is dunged as if
it had been folded; and those turnips, though few or none be
carried off for human use, are a very excellent improvement,
nay, some reckon it so, though they only plough the turnips
in without feeding.'' This was written in February 1694. Ten
years before, John Worlidge, one of his correspondents, and
the author of the Systema Agriculturae (1669), observes,
``Sheep fatten very well on turnips, which prove an excellent
nourishment for them in hard winters when fodder is scarce; for
they will not only eat the greens, but feed on the roots in the
ground, and scoop them hollow even to the very skin. Ten acres
(he adds) sown with clover, turnips, &c., will feed as many
sheep as one hundred acres thereof would before have done.''
The next writer of note is John Mortimer, whose Whole Art of Husbandry,
a regular, systematic work of considerable merit, was published in 1707.
From the third edition of Hartlib's Legacie we learn that
clover was cut green and given to cattle; and it appears that
this practice of soiling, as it is now called, had become very
common about the beginning of the 18th century, wherever clover was
cultivated. Rye-grass was now sown along with it. Turnips were
hand-hoed and extensively employed in feeding sheep and cattle.
The first considerable improvement in the practice of
that period was introduced by Jethro Tull, a gentleman of
Berkshire, who about the year 1701 invented the drill, and
whose Horse-hoeing Husbandry, published in 1731, exhibits
the first decided step in advance upon the principles and
practices of his predecessors. Not contented with a careful
attention to details, Tull set himself, with admirable skill
and perseverance, to investigate the growth of plants, and
thus to arrive at a knowledge of the principles by which
the cultivation of field-crops should be regulated. Having
arrived at the conclusion that the food of plants consists
of minute particles of earth taken up by their rootlets, it
followed that the more thoroughly the soil in which they grew
was disintegrated, the more abundant would be the ``pasture''
(as he called it) to which their fibres would have access.
He was thus led to adopt that system of sowing his crops in
rows or drills, so wide apart as to admit of tillage of the
intervals, both by ploughing and hoeing, being continued until
they had well-nigh arrived at maturity. Such reliance did he
place in the pulverization of the soil that he grew as many
as thirteen crops of wheat on the same field without manure.
As the distance between his rows appeared much greater than
was necessary for the range of the roots of the plants, he
begins by showing that these roots extend much farther than
is commonly believed, and then proceeds to inquire into the
nature of their food. After examining several hypotheses,
he decides this to be fine particles of earth. The chief
and almost the only use of dung, he thinks, is to divide the
earth, to dissolve ``this terrestrial matter, which affords
nutriment to the mouths of vegetable roots''; and this can be
done more completely by tillage. It is therefore necessary not
only to pulverize the soil by repeated ploughings before it be
