THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION 113 



profession and settled down, as quite a young man, 

 on his father's farm at Howberry in Oxfordshire. He 

 seems at once to have thrown himself into farming, and 

 some two years later he was inventing and using a 

 clover drill, planned on the general lines of the im- 

 plement used at the present day. He developed this 

 drill, adapting it for corn and turnips, and claimed that 

 he could make savings on a large scale, not only in 

 the amount of seed sown, but in labour in sowing and 

 in cultivation. He advocated the increased use of 

 turnips and clover, and emphasized the importance of 

 keeping the land clean and free from weeds, which 

 could of course be more easily done when the crop was 

 sown in lines with a drill than when scattered broad- 

 cast. He published in 1731 a book dealing with many 

 of these matters under the title of " Horse-hoeing 

 Husbandry." His proposals were much discussed, but 

 rarely adopted in his lifetime, and he himself died 

 ruined. 



A more influential and immediately successful leader 

 was Lord Townshend (1674-1738), a contemporary 

 of Tull. He started life as a politician and diplomat, 

 taking a leading and brilliant part in the intricate 

 political life of the first thirty years of the century ; 

 but in 1730 he threw up his political career and retired 

 to his Norfolk estates, to see what he could do to 

 reclaim the stretches of marsh, waste and woodland of 

 which a great part of his property consisted. In this 

 work he was extraordinarily successful. Townshend 

 treated his sandy wastes with marl to such good 

 account, that he transformed them into fertile fields and 

 made a fortune. It became a saying in Norfolk that 

 " He who marls sand may buy his land." Even more 

 important than this development of marling was the 



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