AN 



AGRICULTURAL FAGGOT. 



CHAPTER I. 



FARMING IN OLDEN TIMES. 1 



The agricultural history of this country before the coming 

 of the English is mainly a matter of guesses and infer- 

 ences. Of the English invaders — a race of countrymen 

 and farmers who detested the towns, and preferred the 

 lands of the Britons to the towns of the Romans— we 

 have a little more knowledge; but until William the 

 Conqueror issued the first Royal Commission on Agri- 

 culture, and collected the first Agricultural Returns, our 

 knowledge of English rural life is scanty. What we find 

 when these records begin is — over the greater part of 

 England, at any rate — an organisation of rural life in self- 

 contained village units which, as the manorial system, 

 formed the structural basis of English rural economy for 

 centuries. Indeed, the skeleton of that system still 

 remains, although its substance has been changed and 

 its spirit transformed. 



The Domesday Survey covered thirty-four counties, 

 excluding Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, West- 

 morland, Lancashire and Monmouth. The actual extent 

 of agricultural land included is a matter about which 

 competent authorities differ considerably. One writer 



1 Read before the Farmers' Club, May, 1913. (Abridged.) 

 A.F. B 



