42 AGRICULTURE IN THE 



of course if the weather be open and the soil workable. After 

 the Epiphany, the plough should be set to work, and as occa- 

 sion serves, be kept at work. Plough land for fallow or for 

 oats, that the grass and the moss may rot, and plough with a 

 deep square furrow. In all manner of ploughing see that thy 

 eye, thy hand, and thy foot agree, and be always ready one 

 to save the other, and turn up much mould, and to lay it flat, 

 that it wear not on edge. If it do, the grass and moss will 

 not rot. If winter corn, as wheat or rye, be sown, such of it 

 as touches the moss will be drowned, because the moss keeps 

 the wet. In some countries ploughing deep will get below the 

 good ground, and the crop will fail. Such ground is not 

 for husbandry, but for pasture. Sometimes, however, as in 

 many places of Cornwall, and some in Devonshire, land of 

 this kind is beaten with mattocks. Close furrows are the best ; 

 for the more furrows, the more corn, is a general rule for all 

 kinds of grain. It can be proved, says the writer, by watching 

 when the corn is coming up. Stand at the land's end, and 

 look towards the other end. If the ground is clay, plough that 

 first, and let the frost, the wind, the sun, and the rain, break it 

 and ridge it. Peas should be sown on clay ground, beans on 

 marly ground, the latter requiring a ranker soil than the 

 former. Some husbandmen, he observes, think that big and 

 stiff ground, as clay is, should be sown with beans, but his 

 experience is contrary to this opinion. On such ground, beans 

 are short in dry summers. 



Beans and peas were generally sown together, the proportion 

 of the former varying with the goodness of the ground. Some 

 ground is so rank that it is better sown with beans only, for 

 otherwise peas will be stifled by charlock, or as Fitzherbert 

 calls it 'kedloke.' The time for sowing is that which is 

 seasonable, provided it be in the month of March, the test 

 of seasonableness being that the ground makes no noise, and 

 that it bears the hoofs of horses. The peas are hand sown, and 

 the author is at the pains to describe the proper attitude which 

 the sower should take with his sccd-lep, or as he calls it, his 



