Farming of Warwickshire. 491 



mingham, a man gets 135. a week and 2 quarts of beer a day. 

 Beyond its precincts they are paid 12.s. to 135. ; and men in the 

 house, 10/. to 127. a year ; boys 3/. to 11. 



The waste and uninclosed land remaining since the date of 

 Murray's Report has been further reduced by the inclosure of 

 Sutton Coldfield, and Meriden Heath, besides a large central 

 district comprising Balsall, Haseley, Beausale, Wroxhall, and 

 Shrewley Commons. Sutton Coldfield is now the potato garden 

 of Birmingham : immense quantities are grown by trenching the 

 deep sands and the use of dung. Meriden Heath is the site of 

 Lord Aylesford's farms ; 200 acres of heath and bog have been 

 recently reclaimed, and the land has been made, by high farming, 

 to double its produce, which we may now state at 32 bushels of 

 wheat per acre. Lord Aylesford has erected some substantial and 

 excellent farm buildings, where the usual operations of a first- 

 rate model farm are carried on. The system of cultivation is 

 based on that of Norfolk, liberally carried out and assisted by a 

 free use of artificial manures. We saw there 100 fattening oxen, 

 scores of pigs, a dairy of 60 Devon cows, and a flock of highly 

 fed Shropshire sheep. 



A strong contrast to this are the inferior spots of land where 

 poverty has located itself, and no generous landowner has made 

 *' the barren wilderness to smile." There is a belt of gravel and 

 clay soil, which crosses a part of the county, lying between 

 Knowle and Tanworth : here instead of the signs of industry 

 and improvement, we see narrow winding lanes, leading to 

 nothing, and traversed by lean pigs and rough cattle, broad 

 copse-like hedges, small and irregular fields of couch, amidst 

 which strug:2:le the stalks of some smothered cereal — these, with 

 gipsies' encampments, and the occasional sound of the poacher's 

 gun from woods and thickets around, are the characteristics of 

 the district, its soil, culture, and population.* 



* The picture is severe as well as laughable, but sadly too near the truth. It is 

 difficult to account adequately for the wilduess and want of improvement often to 

 be seen in the neiglibourhood of large and even metropolitan towns ; for it is true 

 of Loudon as well as Birmingham ; and the dwellers near Sheffield, Manchester, 

 and other great towns could probably attest the same. A band of black vegetable- 

 gardens, reeking with town manure, environing and intersecting the suburbs, is 

 next succeeded by coarse, undraiued, irregular pasture-fields, ' divided,' it can 

 hardly be said, by brokeu-down hedges, in whicli a few stunted pollards and tall 

 dreary poplars serve to chill and blot the scenery, already clouded and sombre 

 enough to the eye. This may be perhaps to some extent inevitable in the close 

 proximity of " Land to be sold or let in building lots," in the transition state 

 of brickkilns and gravel-pits ; but it is the next circle to this (sufficiently described 

 above by the author of thisessay) that is the most remarkable — a circle over which 

 the unlimited command of manure and convenience of haulage for drain-tiles and 

 €very other element of improvement, and of increased produce, might seem to 

 warrant generous investment even upon the least promising surface, at least in 

 the heart of a kingdom whose population has doubled aud trade quadrupled in 



