SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. 57 



clear improvement, or else suffer him or his to enjoy it so 

 much longer, as till he hath had a proportionable requital 1 .' 



The next person on whom to comment is Simon Hartlib. 

 He was a Dutchman by birth and a friend of Milton, having 

 been especially associated with the poet's theories of education. 

 It is plain that Hartlib had travelled extensively. He is not 

 only well acquainted with most countries in Western Europe, 

 but he had visited the American plantations, and refers to 

 New England and Virginia in terms which show that he was 

 familiar with them. His only considerable book on agriculture 

 is ' The Legacy of Husbandry.' The copy to which I refer 

 is of the third edition, published in 1655. 



The method of Hartlib's treatise is to point out the nu- 

 merous particulars in which English husbandry is defective, 

 and to illustrate his advice by reference to the practice of 

 other countries, particularly Flanders and Holland. He says 

 that the art of gardening came into England 'about fifty 

 years ago,' and that old men in Surrey remember the time 

 when the first gardeners came there and began to plant 

 cabbages, cauliflowers, turnips, carrots, parsnips, early peas 

 and rape, which were up to that time great rarities, all 

 which were seen in England, having come from Flanders 

 or Holland. These gardeners got land with difficulty, though 

 they offered enormous rents for it, the landowners imagining 

 that the use of the spade would spoil the ground. * Even now,' 

 he says, ' gardening and hoeing is scarcely known in the North 

 and West of England, in which places a few gardeners might 

 have saved the lives of many poor people, who have starved 

 c dear years 2 .' He goes on to say that we still import 

 a number of articles which we could easily grow ourselves, 

 that nearly everything now produced in gardens at home 

 imported in Elizabeth's reign from foreign countries. 



1 I have dwelt on the agricultural writers of the seventeenth century at some 

 length in my ' Six Centuries of Labour and Wages,' p. 450, sqq. 

 ' Hartlib is probably referring to the five years 1646-50, in which a real famine 



v.led. 



