SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. 51 



of which were a potherb), borage, bugloss and rosemary, penny 

 royal (used for blood puddings), leeks and onions. Besides 

 these are salad herbs, lettuce, spinach, asparagus, colewort or 

 cabbage, purslane, artichokes, garlick, radishes, navew or 

 turnips, parsnips, carrots, pumpkins, gourds or melons, cu- 

 cumber, Egyptian beans, skirrets. The seeds of many of these 

 plants are given in the accounts. The writer concludes this 

 part of his work with an account of garden pests. 



The last part of my author's work deals with the planting 

 of woods and coppices. In the latter Markham says that an 

 acre of twenty-one years' growth is worth 20 or 30, one of 

 seventeen years' 8 to 10, one of twelve years' 5 to 6, and 

 that in many of the bishops' woods the cutting is delayed 

 for thirty years. He infers therefore that the yearly cuttings 

 should be so limited as to extend at least over the twenty-one 

 years if possible. The work concludes with a short account of 

 the diseases affecting horses and the remedies for them. 

 Appended to the edition of 1635 is a short treatise on angling, 

 and on the art of breeding and training fighting-cocks, which 

 the author describes as the pleasures of princes, or good 

 men's recreations. 



Among the works of this voluminous and popular writer, 

 whose books went through many editions, is one which he 

 entitled * Markham's Farewell to Husbandry.' I shall refer 

 to and quote from the fourth edition, published in 1649. The 

 principal object of the book is to point out how land, hitherto 

 uncultivated, and deemed to be incapable of bearing a pro- 

 fitable crop, may be made useful and even fertile. In com- 

 piling this part of his work, I suspect that Markham laid the 

 Dutch and Flemish writers on husbandry under contribution, 

 for the processes which he describes are vastly like those which 

 had been in use for cultivating poor sands in Brabant. Another 

 work of his, long popular, and reprinted till the end of the cen- 

 tury, under the title of ' The Enrichment of the Weald of Kent 

 and Sussex ', bears the same marks of foreign influences, and 

 of projects which were not to be realised for a long time. I do 



