54 Improvements in Farming 



learn little or nothing from past experience in the long centuries 

 during which the same things had been grown in the same way. 

 They were free to search the world for improved ways of farming, 

 and a remarkable number set out on inquiries and brought home 

 the results to their fellows. 



The interest in farming, and the eagerness to instruct in better 

 methods through writings began with Walter of Henley in the 

 thirteenth century, but it was in the sixteenth century that the 

 great work in this direction began. Fitzherbert in 1523 published 

 his Book of Husbandry, and in 1557 Tusser published A Hundred 

 Good Points of Husbandry, which he afterwards enlarged to Five 

 Hundred. From this time onwards the number of such books 

 increased rapidly, and through them agricultural education was 

 extended. Looking back with our knowledge of what can be done 

 in agriculture beyond growing corn for one or two years and then 

 fallowing, beyond cutting hay on the same meadow from one 

 generation to another, feeding cattle and horses in winter on 

 nothing but hay, and letting them breed as they would rather 

 than by selection, we are apt to forget what a difficult problem 

 our fathers had. Clover, turnips, and the other feeding stuffs 

 that keep our live stock nearly as fat in spring as they are in 

 autumn were hardly known, and never cultivated on farms. 

 The only rotation of crops with which farmers were familiar was 

 corn, beans or peas, and fallow. Their efforts were naturally 

 directed towards increasing the yield of these. There is no clear 

 description of how they were doing this, but progress was made 

 where conditions were favourable. Whitelock, in his Memorials, 

 his diary of events between 1625 and 1660, says that on the 

 6th September, 1650, the day before news of the battle of Dunbar 

 reached London, letters came to the Parliament from Cromwell's 

 army telling them ' that in those parts where the army marched 

 (in East Lothian) was the greatest plenty of corn that they ever , 

 saw, and not one fallow field, and now extremely trodden down 



