48 A NEW AGRICULTURAL POLICY 



upper greensand, lying along the lower slopes 

 of the Downs — strips fruitful of many a bumper 

 crop. 



To know what you can do with the soil, even 

 with chalk soil, you must summer it and winter 

 it, as farmers say. A farmer told me that on one 

 side of a certain road, unkindly called " Starve- 

 lot," he could grow wheat ; but on the other 

 side of the road of apparently identical soil, 

 expressively called "Stonecrop," he could not 

 recover the cost of the seed. 



Progressive as some of these farmers are, 

 they gave me the feeling that a deep-seated 

 veneration for feudalism still biased their 

 decisions. They seemed very loath to intrude 

 upon the Duke of Richmond's park at Good- 

 wood, or the Duchess of Norfolk's at Arundel, 

 or Lord Leconfield's at Petworth. These were 

 the old aristocratic families who generally made 

 the easiest landlords. 



In spite of their protestations that they did 

 not care "tuppence who people were" they 

 invariably excused these owners of old titles on 

 the score that they kept up a good number of 

 sheep, like the Duke of Richmond ; or that 

 the land at Petworth Park was not worth 

 ploughing. It was the new squirearchy who, 

 they reckoned, "were the curse of the country 

 and bred trouble " : those city people who 

 bought large country estates for the sake of 

 sport7and added field to field to increase their 



