134 LATER STEWARTS AND THE REVOLUTION 



posed a " short discourse " of a Pythagorean and a mystic. His 

 agricultural book, The Countryman's Companion (1681), is chiefly 

 noticeable for its account of that " Monsterous, Mortifying Dis- 

 temper, the Rot," and for the strange remedies which he suggests 

 for the preservation of sheep from that disorder. Thomas Tryon 

 is an admirable representative of the class of writers who brought 

 the book-farmer into disrepute. But already true science was 

 coming to the aid of agriculture. The Sylva (1664) and Terra (1676) 

 of John Evelyn are known to all well-read agriculturists, and John 

 Ray's Catalogus Plantarum Angliae (1670) marks an epoch in the 

 history of botanical science. 



All these conditions combined to raise formidable obstacles to 

 the diffusion of improvements in farming. Agricultural writers 

 scarcely expected that the changes they suggested would be adopted. 

 Donaldson, for instance, says that people will probably answer him 

 with " Away with your fool Notions ; there are too many Bees in 

 your Bonet-case. We will satisfie ourselves with such Measures as 

 our Fathers have followed hitherto." Farmers, says Hartlib's 

 Legacie, did not venture to attempt innovations lest they should 

 be called " projectors." Bradley, Professor of Botany at Cambridge, 

 complains in his Complete Body of Husbandry (1727), that if he were 

 to advise farmers " about improvements, they will ask me whether 

 I can hold a plough, for in that they think the whole mystery of 

 husbandry consists." It was long before clover emerged " from the 

 fields of gentlemen into common use " ; it did not penetrate into 

 Suffolk villages till the eighteenth century. In Worcestershire 

 and adjoining districts the personal efforts of Andrew Yarranton 

 in 1653-77 had for the time established its use. But " farmers," 

 says Jethro Tull, writing in the reign of George II., " if advised to 

 sow clover would certainly reply, ' Gentlemen might sow it if they 

 pleased, but they (the farmers) must take care to pay their rents.' ' 

 Even more obstinate was the resistance to turnips. It was of little 

 use that Worlidge in his Systema (1669) urged upon farmers the 

 cultivation of roots ; or that Reeve (1670) reprinted Weston's advice 

 to use turnips as the best methods of improving " barren and heathy 

 land " ; or that Hough ton (1684) described the benefits which had 

 resulted in Norfolk and Essex from growing them as winter food 

 for sheep. Even their advocates had not yet appreciated the full 

 value of roots. Worlidge l in 1683 had observed that " sheep fatten 



1 Houghton's Collections on Husbandry and Trade (ed. 1728), vol. iv. p. 142. 



