64 AGRICULTURE IN THE 



respective merits of different kinds of manures. The rest of 

 his work is on the cultivation of trees, fruit and timber, on the 

 culture of the hop, on gardening for the kitchen, on the 

 management of orchards, and on the manufacture of home- 

 made wine. In speaking of the garden he alludes to potatoes, 

 which are he says cultivated a great deal abroad, and in some 

 places in England. The last part of his work treats of cattle 

 and poultry, of tools for the farm, of fowling and fishing. 



Among the farm products on which Worlidge touches, is 

 tobacco. He says that before the laws were enacted which 

 prohibited its cultivation, many hundred acres were pre- 

 pared and employed as tobacco plantations in Gloucester 1 , 

 Devon, Somerset, and Oxfordshire ; that the profit on it was 

 very great ; that it had often been sold in London as Spanish 

 tobacco ; that the reason why the prohibition was imposed was 

 the shipping employed in the colonial trade, and the risk 

 which the permission to cultivate it would induce on the 

 king's revenue. The answer to these arguments is that 

 tobacco is a small matter among the colonial products, and 

 might easily give way to other articles, while the possible 

 loss of revenue from the customs may be supplemented by a 

 countervailing excise on the home product. The Statute 

 referred to is 1 2 Chas. II. cap. 34. 



The improvements effected in English husbandry during the 

 course of the seventeenth century more than doubled the 

 population. Nothing, I am persuaded, enabled that increase 

 to be effected, during the reign of Elizabeth, so much as the 

 fact that the immigration of the Flemish refugees improved in 

 some degree English husbandry as well as English manufactures. 

 For the Flemings and Hollanders were the teachers of the new 

 agriculture. They adopted the artificial grasses, and culti- 

 vated winter roots in the fields long before their neighbours 

 adopted either of these capital discoveries. To the inhabitants 

 of the Low Countries, and especially to Holland, the civilisation 



1 My friend, Lord Moreton, tells me that he has found evidence of this fact 

 having been as stated, during the Civil War, in Gloucestershire. 



