PRINCE CHARLIE'S TIME 



bramble, whin, and weeds. The names of the months give 

 some idea of Anglo-Saxon methods of farming. May was 

 Thrimylce^ because the cows might then be milked thrice a 

 day. August was Weodmonath (weed-month), November 

 Blotmonath, or blood-month, because the cattle were then 

 killed to supply salt beef for winter time.^ 



Very much later in history, after our English friends had 

 laid waste and depopulated Scotland, so that woods sprang 

 up again everywhere, and again long after that time when 

 the gradual increase of population had again utterly de- 

 stroyed those woods, a certain Dr. Johnson travelled from 

 Carlisle to Edinburgh. This gentleman declared that he 

 saw no tree between those places. This statement must not 

 be taken too literally, for he had written a dictionary and 

 considered himself not merely the Times but an Encyclopoedia 

 Britannica as well.^ 



The Earl of Dundonald (in 1795) thus describes the 

 agriculture of 1745 (Prince Charlie's days) : " The out-field 

 land never receives any manure. After taking from it two 

 or three crops of grain it is left in the state it was in at 

 reaping the last crop, without sowing thereon grass-seeds for 

 the protection of any sort of herbage. During the first two 

 or three years a sufficiency of grass to maintain a couple of 

 rabbits per acre is scarcely produced. In the course of some 

 years it acquires a sward, and after having been depastured 

 for some years more, it is again submitted to the same 

 barbarous system of husbandry '" (that is used as a fold and 

 then ploughed up). In the same year (1745) in Meigle 

 parish, the land was never allowed to lie fallow : neither 

 pease, grass, turnips, nor potatoes were raised. No cattle 



^ Sir H. Maxwell, Memories of the Months^ First Series. 

 '^ This may of course have been an exaggeration, a sort of joke. But 

 he had no right to make jokes on such a subject. 



