Notes, Communications and Revieios. 369 



"English Farming, Past and Present." — By Rowland E. 

 Prothero. — This book is based on Mr. Prothero's earlier history 

 of English Agriculture, The Pioneers and Progress of English 

 Farming, published in 1888. Like its predecessor, but in 

 much greater detail, the present work traces the development 

 of agriculture from the old English manor, the communal 

 village-farm of the thirteenth century, which may be con- 

 sidered the beginning of agriculture proper, as distinguished 

 from a mere nomadic existence, through the alternations of 

 progress and decay, prosperity and distress, to the present time 

 — a time when, as many people think, w'e are thi-eatened with 

 far-reaching changes in the whole relation of the people to the 

 land. Thus a wide and broad-minded view of the past, which 

 has produced the present conditions, is now especially opportune. 

 There is probably no other living writer who could combine 

 so happily the qualities of historian and practical agriculturist. 

 Mr. Prothero has the imagination and knowledge to recon- 

 struct for us pictures of a long-forgotten countryside, of 

 manorial village and open field-farm, and at the same time the 

 closing pages show that he is entirely in touch with all the 

 modern developments of scientific farming. He refutes his 

 own motto from Jethro Tull, "Writing and Ploughing are two 

 different talents." 



It is impossible in a short notice to do justice to the enor- 

 mous amount of hard work which has been put into this book. 

 Naturally the tale of the great rise in agriculture from 1700 to 

 1874 occupies relatively most space, and the headings of some 

 of the chapters show in what detail this period is treated — 

 Jethro Tull and Lord Townsend, 1700-1760— The Stock- 

 breeders' Art and Robert Bakewell, 1725-1795— The English 

 Corn Laws — Highways — Tithes, are only some of them. In 

 such a mass of detail a few slips are bound to crop up, but 

 surely both the old Wiltshire and the old Herefordshire herds 

 of sheep are wrongly described as black-faced ! The old Wilt- 

 shire still used largely in the Midlands for crossing, and now 

 known as "Westerns," is a white-faced horned breed, and is not 

 the modern Ryeland, white-faced and hornless, the ancestor of 

 the old Herefordshire breed which made "Lemster Ore" famous. 



These are, however, merely details. Perhaps the most 

 useful lesson the book teaches is how entirely inter-dependent 

 manufacture and agriculture, the town and the country, have 

 always been. Till the middle of the eighteenth century a great 

 part of England was still farmed on the " open-field " system, 

 a development of the old " village manor " farms, when the 

 ara])le land was tilled in separate strips by a number of occu- 

 piers, and the pasture-land was common *' stinted " in propor- 

 tion to the acreage of arable land held by each tenant. The 



