356 HIGH FARMING, 1837-1874 



sisted during the winter months on starvation allowance. Fat 

 cattle, instead of being conveyed by rail quickly and cheaply, were 

 driven to distant markets, losing weight every yard of the way. 

 Long legs were still a consideration for sheep which had to plough 

 through miry lanes. Farm roads were few and bad. Where land 

 had been early enclosed, the fields were often small, fenced with 

 high and straggling hedges. Very little land was drained, and, 

 except in Suffolk and Essex, scarcely any effort had been made to 

 carry off the surface-water from clay soils. 



Little or no machinery was employed in any operation of tillage. 

 In remote parts of the country, even on light soils and for summer 

 work, heavy wooden ploughs with wooden breasts, slowly drawn 

 by teams of five horses or six oxen, attended by troops of men and 

 boys, still lumbered on their laborious way, following the sinuous 

 shape of boundary fences, or throwing up ridges crooked like an 

 inverted S, and laid high by successive ploughing towards the crown. 

 In more advanced districts, less cumbrous and more effective im- 

 plements of lighter draught, wheel or swing, were employed. But 

 not a few discoveries of real value fell into disuse, or failed to find 

 honour in the land of their birth, till they returned to this country 

 with the brand of American innovations. The mistake was too 

 often made of exaggerating the universal value of a new implement 

 in the style of modern vendors of patent-medicines. Enthusiasts 

 forgot that provincial customs were generally founded on common- 

 sense, and that farmers reasoned from actual instances which had 

 come within their personal experience. The boast that a two-horse 

 plough, with reins and one man, could, on all soils and at all seasons, 

 do the work of the heavy implement dear to the locality only made 

 the ancient heirloom more precious in the eye of its owner. It was 

 with antiquated implements, heavy in the draught, that most of 

 the soil was still cultivated. Harrows were generally primitive in 

 form and ineffective in operation, scarcely penetrating the ground and 

 powerless to stir the weeds. To keep the seed-bed firm against the 

 loosening effects of frost the only roller was a stone or the trunk of 

 a tree heavily weighted. When the bed was prepared for the crop, 

 the seed was still sown broadcast by hand, or, more rarely, either 

 dibbed or drilled. The Northumberland drill for turnips, and the 

 Suffolk drill for cereals, which travelled every year on hire as far as 

 Oxfordshire, had already attained something more than local 

 popularity. But corn and roots, even in 1837, were seldom either 



