100 THE REIGN OF ELIZABETH 



forced by the beaste through the corne, did cut down al before it." 

 He insists on the extreme importance of manure, and the value of 

 marl, chalk, and ashes. But he does not consider that farmers 

 can thrive by manure alone. On the contrary, he thinks that " the 

 best doung for ground is the Maister's foot, and the best provender 

 for the house the Maister's eye." He also gives a caution against 

 the persistent use of chalk, because, in the end, it " brings the grounde 

 to be starke nought, whereby the common people have a speache, 

 that grounde enriched with chalke makes a riche father and a 

 beggerly sonne." He mentions the use of rape in the Principality 

 of Cleves, a valuable suggestion whether for green-manuring, for 

 the oil in its seeds, or for use as fodder for sheep. He commends 

 " Trefoil or Burgundian grass," which he believes to be of Moorish 

 origin and Spanish introduction, for " there can be no better fodder 

 devised for cattell." He says that turnips have been found in the 

 Low Countries to be good for live-stock, and that, if sown at Mid- 

 summer, they will be ready for winter food. In English gardens 

 turnips were already known. They appear under the name of 

 " turnepez " among " Rotys for a gardyn " in a fifteenth century 

 book of cookery recipes ; Andrew Borde l (1542) recommends them 

 " boy led and eaten with flesshe " ; William Turner, the herbalist, 

 mentions that " the great round rape called a turnepe groweth in 

 very great plenty in all Germany and more about London then 

 in any other place of England " : Tusser classes them among " roots 

 to boil and to butter " ; but Googe, though only as a translator, 

 was the first writer to suggest that field cultivation of turnips 

 which revolutionised English farming. 



Another Elizabethan writer makes the first attempt to combine 

 science with practice. Sir Hugh Plat was an ingenious inventor, 

 and, as Sir Richard Weston calls him, " the most curious man of 

 his time." He devotes the second part of his Jewell House of Art 

 and Nature (1594) to the scientific manuring of arable and pasture 

 land. Manure presents itself to his poetic mind as a Goddess with 

 a Cornucopia in her hand. If land, he says, is perpetually cropped, 

 the earth is robbed of her vegetative salt, and ceases to bear. The 

 object, therefore, of the wise husbandman must be to restore this 

 essential element of fertility. His list of manurial substances is 

 long. He recommends not only farm-yard dung, but marl, lime, 

 street refuse, the subsoil of ponds and " watrie bottomes," salt, 



1 Dyctary, ch. xix. 



