;^6S History of the English Landed Interest. 



their while to discuss this vexed question. For example, the 

 Norfolk correspondent writes : " Nature does not seem to re- 

 quire any pause of this kind ; all plants make their annual 

 shoots as regular as the day succeeds the night. The earth 

 was evidently designed to yield a regular uninterrupted pro- 

 duce, and it does so where we leave it to itself. The idea of 

 leaving land to rest is ridiculous ; keep it clean and intermix 

 the crops upon it judiciously, so that one may fertilise as much 

 as another exhausts, and it may be sown as a garden is planted 

 from one generation to another." But the whole difficulty 

 lay in deciding which crop would fertilise and which would 

 exhaust, for what was to one class of soil meat might easily 

 have proved to be another's poison. It was therefore the 

 difference between the various soils and the systems of their 

 tenure which prevented all agriculturists from adopting the 

 rotation of crops practised in the Norfolk writer's locality. 

 Even there complaints had already begun to come in that the 

 land was " clover sick," and thus we have the Essex corre- 

 spondent to the Board reporting the use of tares as a substitute. 



Then again sainfoin in many of the southern counties, pas- 

 tured year after year till the crop failed, had been (is now, in 

 fact) found preferable as a culmiferous crop. On lands sub- 

 ject to Lammas tenure it was of course useless to sow clover, 

 and so we read, in the Middlesex report, of farmers in the 

 Chiswick district anxious to pursue a rotation consisting first 

 of pulse, then of turnips, next of oats, or barley with clover, 

 and lastly of wheat, but forced to grow vetches for spring 

 feed, or a pulse crop to be gathered green, next turnips to be 

 sold off to the London cowkeepers, then wheat, and finally 

 barley or oats. Though in this latter rotation they had to 

 manure the land twice instead of once (viz., before the pulse 

 crop and between the two white crops), and though they saw 

 that the land suffered more by this than the other rotation, 

 they were deprived of all choice in the matter by the inutility 

 of cultivating clover, the aftermath of which would have 

 been only beneficial to the Lammas graziers. 



Then, too, custom of the country and the terms of his cove- 

 nants to a certain extent limited the farmer in his choice of a 



