FITZHERBERT AND TUSSER 91 



It is much less difficult to imagine that John Fitzherbert should 

 combine minute experience of agricultural details with a sufficient 

 knowledge of law to write the Book of Surveying. At any rate, 

 the Book of Husbandry became, and for more than half a century 

 remained, a standard work on English farming. 



Thirty-four years later appeared Thomas Tusser's Hundreth Good 

 Pointes of Hushandrie (1557). The work was afterwards expanded 

 into Five Hundreth Pointes of Good Hushandrie, united to as many 

 Good Pointes of Huswifery (1573). Like Fitzherbert, Tusser was a 

 champion of enclosures, and his evidence is the more valuable 

 because he was not only an Essex man, a Suffolk and a Norfolk 

 farmer, but began to write Avhen the agitation against enclosures in 

 the eastern counties was at its height. His own Hfe proved the diffi- 

 culty of combining practice with science, or farming with poetry. 

 " He spread his bread," says Fuller, " with all sorts of butter, yet 

 none would ever stick thereon." He was successively " a musician, 

 schoolmaster, serving-man, husbandman, grazier, poet — more skilful 

 in all than thriving in his vocation." To the present generation he 

 is Httle more than a name. But his doggerel poems are a rich 

 storehouse of proverbial wisdom, and of information respecting 

 the rural Hfe, domestic economy, and agricultural practices of our 

 Elizabethan ancestors. His work Avas repeatedly reprinted. It is 

 also often quoted by subsequent writers, as, for example, by Henry 

 Best in his Farming Book (1641), by Walter Blith in his English 

 Improver Improved (1649), and by Worhdge in the Systema Agri- 

 culturae (1668-9). The practical parts of the poem were edited in 

 1710 by David Hillman under the title of Tusser Redivivus, with a 

 commentary which continually contrasts Elizabethan practices 

 with those of farmers in the reign of Queen Anne. When Lord 

 Molesworth in 1723 proposed the foundation of agricultural schools, 

 he advised that Tusser's " Five hundred points of good husbandry " 

 should be " taught to the boys to read, to copy and get by heart." 



From the pages of Fitzherbert and Tusser may be gathered a 

 picture of Tudor agriculture at the time when Ehzabeth came to 

 the throne. But even in this Hterature, which probably represents 

 the most progressive theory and practice of farming, it is difficult 

 to trace any important change, still less any distinct advance on 

 thirteenth century methods. Here and there, on the contrary, 

 there are signs that farmers had gone backwards instead of forwards. 

 Agricultural implements remained unaltered. Ploughs were still 



