28 Farming of Bedfordshire. 



order to assist the reader to form a still more definite judgment, 

 I may be allowed a brief recapitulation. 



Begin, then, with the days of Lord Somerville and Sir John 

 Sinclair, those well-known patrons of agriculture, and what 

 do you see? About two-thirds of the county in a state of 

 common or open field ; a third of the arable land, whether con- 

 vertible or clay soil, under a dead fallow every year, while 

 the part considered to be under crop was woefully damaged 

 by water. The sheep, generally meagre-looking animals as they 

 were, were often swept off in entire flocks by the rot. The neat 

 cattle were of no distinct breed. The farm-horses were rough 

 and hairy about the heels, and admirably adapted to carry along 

 with them, on every leg, some stones of the wet tenacious soils 

 they had to plough. The farm implements were of the rudest 

 kind. A little mutton, it is true, was here and there produced in 

 the summer on the best grass-lands ; but in winter there was 

 scarcely any, and still less of beef. The manure (if manure it 

 might be called) was little else than a quantity of decomposed 

 straw, scarcely worth the cost of carting on the land, and pro- 

 ducing the most wretched crops. Such is the summary, and a 

 tolerably just one, of the farming of Bedfordshire at the close of 

 the eighteenth century. 



To exhibit the contrast most vividly would be best accom- 

 plished by ocular demonstration on the farms of some of the 

 best agriculturists of the present day. Let it suffice, however, 

 to say that there are scores of farms now producing 50 per cent, 

 more corn than in 1794, and supplying the metropolitan markets 

 with a stone of meat for every pound supplied at the former 

 period. To what, then, are these vast improvements, which now 

 everywhere present themselves, to be attributed ? To the solu- 

 tion of that question the closing observations of this treatise shall 

 be directed. 



It has been said of some men that their friends lived before 

 them. With perfect propriety may the axiom be applied to the 

 agriculturists of Bedfordshire. Master-minds have preceded 

 them. No one that lived in the days of the first Francis Duke 

 of Bedford can be ignorant of the efforts which that nobleman 

 put forth to arouse the torpor-stricken agriculturists of his 

 day. He was cotemporary with Mr. Coke of Norfolk in the 

 earlier days of that eminent agriculturist, and in all matters of 

 agricultural improvement was a man of kindred spirit. He vied 

 with that gentleman in establishing his annual agricultural 

 gathering at Woburn with a noble munificence, and he continued 

 those meetings to the day of his death. The spirit of improve- 

 ment, however, survived him. His brother and successor, John 

 Duke of Bedford, continued to aid the cause of agriculture in 



