2 AGRIC UL ri 'RA L WRITERS. 



only mentioned incidentally. It required a very advanced state of the 

 arts and of literature to produce in those days a treatise on any one 

 practical subject exclusively, and the simpler and more common the arts 

 the less they are noticed in the early literature of a nation, and there 

 would seem to be no other means of tracing the progress of husbandry 

 than by the manuscripts of the monks who troubled to record the ex- 

 periences of their labours. 



The science of agriculture is remarkable for the few great names 

 whose discoveries or writings thereon adorn its early history. For an 

 explanation of this fact we must in some measure be contented with the 

 commonplace observation, that its advances, and improvements, were so 

 slow in coming as to be almost imperceptible. The great wonder is that 

 men should have looked upon nature so long and yet have known so 

 little about her. Outiof'some sixty centuries that make up the history 

 of the world as we know it, take away but the last and what a loss to 

 that great science, yet but little valued in its true importance, which 

 explains the growth and structure of all forms of life ? It is claimed that, 

 as the progress of the art altered with every condition at every step, the 

 early literature proved itself useless and was distrusted when every rule 

 laid down was found false on application. Another impediment to 

 agricultural knowledge was found in the conditions of the life of the 

 farmer, always more or less localised or isolated and lacking the salutary 

 influence of that mental attrition caused by the aggregation of numbers 

 in towns. Thus encircled with difficulties requiring, for the attainment of 

 considerable eminence, the union of both practice and experience, we w^ta 

 hardly feel surprised that the few illustrious exceptions to the general 

 rule have appeared at very distant intervals to describe in print the 

 inventions and improvements of their time. 



In Britain it was not until the end of the eleventh century that the 

 practice of agriculture was honoured with a written notice, so that 

 previously to this time we have no means of tracing the progress of 

 the industry other than by those ancient writers who discoursed 

 upon the subject. The Doomsday Book describes the agricultural 

 aspect of the kingdom at the Norman Conquest as being generally 

 in uninclosed pasturage or co^'ered with vast tracts of forest and un- 

 productive coppice. Much of the otherwise waste land was given 

 over to the monasteries, and it was under the protection afforded by the 

 religious houses, the abbots of which paid more attention to the moral 

 and material welfare of their dependents, that the lands belonging to 

 them were better cultivated and more thickly inhabited than the estates 

 belonging to the- feudal lords (whose whole time seems to have been 

 engaged in fighting), and the earliest improvements in Elnglish husbandry 

 must be ascribed to their skill and industry. 



In the early part of the eighteenth century, and thence to the present 

 time, a different class of men have engaged in the cultivation of the soiL 



