SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. 45 



corn-land. Norden concludes his book with some general 

 advice, and some pious exhortations, for in his day all writers 

 illustrated material business with scriptural quotations. 



I have so far dealt with Norden's book, because it contains 

 a good deal of early information about the start which English 

 agriculture was making, and, as I think, of the influence which 

 the husbandry of Holland was exercising over English agri- 

 culture. It is noteworthy that the cultivation of winter roots 

 was undertaken first in those parts of England, the Eastern 

 Counties, which had been for centuries in close commercial 

 intercourse with the Low Countries. But the Surveyors' 

 Dialogue has a further interest, in that it frankly admits how 

 unpopular these agents of the landlords were, how necessary 

 it was for the practitioner of the art to defend his existence, 

 and how the fears of the farmer, which Norden calls blind and 

 brutish, were to be illustrated, perhaps justified, by the per- 

 fidious advice which generations of these professional people 

 have given to landowners. 



Gervase Markham 1 , who enjoyed a high reputation as an 

 agricultural authority for more than half a century, and a 

 respectable memory till the close of my period, was a person 

 of very varied accomplishments. He was a poet and a dra- 

 matist, in his way, a leech and a naturalist, a politician, a 

 traveller, a sportsman of great experience, a man who seems to 

 have had some knowledge of military matters, but who claims 

 above all to have been a practical and scientific agriculturist. 

 The first edition of his work, 'The English Husbandman,' was 

 printed in 1613, but the book was very often reprinted, and 

 during the first half of the seventeenth century, and indeed 

 through the whole century, enjoyed a high reputation. 



The early part of Markham's work is occupied with a state- 

 ment as to how the husbandman should build his house, a 

 quaint ground-plan of the structure being given. I have seen 

 iy old farm-houses built on Markham's plan, and I re- 

 ibcr one particularly at Besils Lee near Oxford, which must 

 1 Mnrkham was boru in 1570, and is supposed to have died in 1655. 



