102 SCIENCE WITH PEACTICE, 1812 TO 1845 



Nor were the inflated prices of the war without perma- 

 nent advantage to the agriculture of the county. The 

 history of farming in Northumberland strongly illustrates 

 this brighter aspect of a gloomy period. John Grey of 

 Dilston,' the Black Prince of the North, one of the most 

 skilful and enterprising agriculturists of the day, played a 

 conspicuous part in the change. Born in 1785, and early 

 called, through the death of his father, to the management 

 of property, he lived in the midst of the agricultural revo- 

 lution. When his father first settled in Glendale the plain 

 was a forest of wild broom. He took his axe, and, like a 

 backwoodsman, cleared a space on which to commence 

 his farming operations. The Cheviot herdsmen were then 

 described as ' ferocious and sullen,' the people as unedu- 

 cated, barbarous, and ill-clothed. The country was wholly 

 unenclosed, without either roads or sign-posts. The cattle 

 were lost for days in the forests of wild broom. But the 

 character of the soil, on which landlords alternately plun- 

 dered or starved, attracted skill, enterprise, and industry. 

 Men of the same stamp as the Messrs. Culley settled in its 

 fertile vales, and by their spirited farming revolutionised 

 whole districts which, like the rich vale of the Till, were 

 wildernesses of underwood. The value of land was doubled, 

 if not quadrupled, by the use of turnips and artificial grasses 

 upon tracts which had previously produced naked fallows, 

 or crops of peas choked with weeds. Money made by farm- 

 ing was eagerly re-invested in the reclamation of wastes; 

 commodious buildings were erected, new roads were laid 

 out, threshing machines, worked by water or by horses, 

 were introduced as flails proved too slow a process for the 

 increased produce. During the wars of the French Revo- 



' Memoir of John Grey of Dllston, by Josephine E. Butler. Edin- 

 burgh, 1869. 



