SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES. 63 



convinced that were * immunities ' granted to districts in which 

 this crop might be cultivated, much good and a rapid ex- 

 tension of the produce would speedily result. He does not 

 indeed go into any detail about his immunities, but he speaks 

 with great dissatisfaction of the check which experimental 

 agriculture suffers from the system of tithe, which may, in 

 such an experiment as this, absorb the whole of the farmer's 

 profits ; and he argues, that as the tithe-owner does not reap 

 any benefit as long as the occupier abstains from this kind of 

 cultivation, he would not be wronged if he were debarred from 

 increasing his toll whenever such a novel kind of agriculture is 

 adopted. 



As regards root cultivation, Worlidge only urges the claims 

 of the turnip, which has, he says, been made the subject of 

 farmers' cultivation for the winter feeding of stock in some 

 parts of England. Now it is certain that the improvement of 

 agriculture and stock in England was entirely due in the first 

 instance to the cultivation of the artificial grasses and of winter 

 roots, and that the former of these agricultural expedients had 

 made considerable progress in the seventeenth century, as the 

 latter did in the eighteenth. ' It is,' says Worlidge, ' a very 

 great neglect and deficiency in our English husbandry that 

 this particular piece,' i.e. turnip-sowing in fields, 'is no more 

 prosecuted, seeing that the land it requires need not be very 

 rich, and that it may be sown as a second crop, especially 

 after early peas, and that it supplies the great want of fodder 

 that is usual in the winter, not only for fatting beasts, swine, 

 &c., but also for our milch kine.' 



Worlidge describes a rude kind of drill, which he has seen 

 in operation, and informs us that all kinds of grain and pulse 

 were employed in his time for the manufacture of spirits ; and 

 like all other writers, discusses the best means for preserving 

 corn, and for assisting its fertility and obviating disease by 

 steeping it in divers mixtures before it is sown. He deals, as 

 other writers before him dealt, with liming, sanding, and marl- 

 ing land as means for developing its fertility, and of the 



