374 History of the Eitglisk Landed Interest, 



town manure obviates any necessity for binding him to 

 consume tlie bulk of his produce on the holding. 



Let us take another example. It might have been supposed 

 that in Norfolk neither landlord nor tenant would have ob- 

 jected to the terms of an agreement which compelled the latter 

 to adopt the four-course system. But this would not have 

 availed in any locality where rights of commonage were still 

 claimed and practised over many of the enclosed lands. No 

 system of improved husbandry was possible, for instance, in 

 the township of Froston, in which one crop was sandwiched 

 in between two fallows. The latter process, in the words of 

 Arthur Young (who wrote the report from Suffolk to the 

 Board), consisted " in leaving the land to weeds for the 

 flock of one farmer, who, by prescription, is the only person 

 that can keep sheep in the parish ! " 



Again, it was a practice in Scotland, and, for all we know to 

 the contrary, it may have been so in parts of England, for a 

 landlord to nominate a certain tract of his estate a farm and 

 to let it out to a number of tenants without assigning to each 

 individual any distinct share of it. The outfield, the pasture, 

 the fauchs, etc., would be left in common and its farmers made 

 to arrange amongst themselves each person's share in the 

 husbandry. One idle or depraved member of this small co- 

 operative society was quite capable of ruining the rest. For 

 unless all the cattle and sheep on the holding were carefully 

 herded during the seven winter months, grass, pea, turnip, 

 and even wheat-sowing were impossible, though the terms of 

 the lease might render the cultivation of one or more of these 

 crops imperative.^ 



There is therefore ground for fault-finding not so much be- 

 cause in no two districts were either leases or customs the same, 

 as in the fact that leases often contained clauses restricting 

 tenants to a course of cropping utterly unsuited to the circum- 

 stances of their particular locality. In our examination of the 

 various rotations we found bare-fallowing still prevalent, and 

 we shall now see that the lease was almost invariably to blame 



^ Dissertation on the Chief Obstacles to the Improvement of Land, etc. 

 Aberdeen. 1760, 



