194 Wealden Clay of Sussex. 



are evidently not adapted to the soil. The Service or Sorb 

 becomes full-sized timber, and is a very ornamental tree, but the 

 wood is not of much value ; it bears an abundance of plea- 

 sant acid fruit, which is sold by the country people. The 

 common gorse or furze grows freely, and is left on many farms 

 as a cover for game, but no use is made of it as food for horses 

 or cattle. 



Apples are grown in every garden, and bear well ; a good deal 

 of cider is made, and some perry. Plums, cherries, and all 

 stone-fruit bear remarkably well. The grape-vine bears enor- 

 mously ; not only the walls, but the I'oofs of many cottages, may 

 be seen covered with this plant, and wine is made of the fruit by 

 all classes of people. 



The habits of the labourers show the nature of the country ; 

 plenty of men are to be found who can use the axe, the saw, the 

 bill-hook, and tools for rinding the oak timber most dexterously ; 

 but it is not so easy to find men who can handle a turnip-hoe, or 

 who can set out plants either on ridge or flat work. There are 

 many farms of 80 to 100 acres with not a field upon them con- 

 taining five acres, and these little enclosures of the most irregu- 

 lar shapes must be ploughed at great and needless expense ; but 

 a still greater evil is that their productiveness is destroyed by 

 over much shade and moisture, as the wide, straggling shaws 

 never allow the sun to shine on them except for a few hours in 

 the middle of the day. The headlands, too, upon which the 

 shaws gain yearly, are not only robbed by the roots of the trees 

 and injured by their shade, but are trodden upon at every turn- 

 ing of the ploughs and harrows, so as to be of very little use. 

 The expression in the Weald is, that such fields are lioiised in 

 with trees : in the middle the wheat-straw looks of a good colour, 

 but on the sides of every such field the straw is faint and unripe, 

 and the produce of grain small and inferior. In harvest-time all 

 crops, whether loose or bound in sheaves, are ready to cart, in 

 open lands, hours before anything can be touched in small fields 

 surrounded by trees. This is a serious annoyance to the farmer, 

 especially in wet seasons, such as those of 1848 and 1852, and 

 nothing except the force of habit could make him endure such 

 nuisances. He hires land capable of producing 40 busliels of 

 wheat per acre at the apparently \o\y rent of IO5. or 12*'., but the 

 shaws and coppice-wood are measured in, so that, in fact, he 

 pays the full value of the land. 



A field of four or five acres, all close land, that is to say almost 

 impervious to air and water, undrained, and surrounded by shaws 

 of oak and underwood, is as nearly unproductive as any land can 

 be ; even during a long fallow the sun and air cannot act upon 

 it, and the wet can only be carried off by slow evaporation — a 



