The Farm Livestock of the Period. 279 



Poultry was even more neglected than it is now. As JMr. 

 Brodrick points out in his English Land and Englhh Landlords, 

 Arthur Young had shown that, save in Ireland, the domestic 

 fowl was considered beneath the farmer's notice, and that 

 Adam Smith included the business of the dairy, the feeding of 

 hogs, and the rearing of poultry, in the same category as market 

 gardening,^ stating that, where practised at all, these pursuits 

 owed their origin to the sentiment of " save all." But then 

 Adam Smith was no farmer, though in Marshall's Review of 

 the Reports to the Board of Agricidture we may find much 

 corroboration of this notion from men who ought by profession 

 to have known better.^ 



One exception only have we found to this condition of affairs, 

 and that is an important one. Suffolk and Norfolk seem to 

 have supplied the rest of England with turkeys. On the 

 road from Ipswich to London was situated Stratford Bridge, 

 and along this passage over the Stour some 150,0rX) turkeys 

 were driven yearly. During August and September droves 

 consisting of thousands of geese might frequently be met with 

 on the main roads converging on the east of London. At the 

 end of October, when the highways got too heavy, special carts, 

 composed of four stories or stages, drawn by two horses abreast, 

 and travelling as much as a hundred miles in the twenty-four 

 hours, conveyed the poultry to the metropolitan markets.^ 



* Compare Wealth of ]^ations, Bk. I. ch. xi. 210, id. ibid. p. 315, A. 

 Smith, ed 1809. Adam Smith had probably never studied the economy 

 of market gardening as practised in the suburbs of great towns even at 

 this period. Defoe describes the market gardens around Ely as fur- 

 nishing the whole country-side for twenty miles round with vegetable 

 produce, 



2 English Land and English Landlords, p. 63. 



^ A Tour through Great Britain, vol. i. p. 53. Defoe, 1769. 



