IC4 AGRICULTURAL WRITERS. 



to Blith, this work was published by the good nature of Hartlib, whose 

 record is given elsewhere. 



In his address to the reader Speed savs : 



How excellent and how innocent the art of Husbandry is. Nor can there be 

 found in Nature a more ingenuous, necessary, delightful!, or honourable employment 

 than Agriculture; a calling born with us and bred in us, affording matter for the 

 most refined wits. . . . Embrace this opportunity and reduce these precepts to 

 practice. England affords Land enough for the Inhabitants, and if men did but 

 industriously and skilfully improve and manure it, we need not go to Jamaica for new 

 plantations. 



The first chapter " sheweth how ground may be raised from the 

 value yearly of ^2oo to the sum of ;^20oo by means of rabbits, which are 

 to be kept in enclosures and indulged with the shelter of furze and 

 broom." " There is plenty of land," he adds, '' within fifteen miles of 

 London at eight shillings the acre, and more further away at one shilling 

 that will carry five hundred breeders, the progeny of which will fetch 

 eightpence each several times in the \ear." 



Chapter 2 is all about " Coles to be had at the Pits near Notingham 

 to the Trent side and so by Boats to Newark and the Towns adjacent, to 

 be delivered at two shillings and sixpence per load." 



Chapter 3 concerns turnips on Devonshire lands and those grown at 

 Hackney. In Chapter 4 he describes the sow thistle as a useful grass, 

 wonderfully fruitful for milch cows, and in the making of cheese. 

 Chapter 5 is all about clover, and how he proved its value when sown 

 under a crop of barley. He also says : " St. Foyn is exceedingly profit- 

 able, and may be cut seven or eight times in a year." He reckoned one 

 acre of clover to keep four cows winter and summer, one acre for seed to 

 produce five bushels, one acre for hay to give seven loads and one half, 

 to sell for £(^ 6^-. 8^/. the load. (There is something very different in a 

 comparison of his acreage weights with those of to-day. In naming 

 seven and a half loads per acre he must have referred to the fresh crop 

 as carted to the stack, as nowadays a farmer considers his hay crop a 

 good one if it turns out in trusses anything near two tons per acre.) 



Like other writers of his dav, he refers to "the strange kind of grass 

 growing in Wiltshire with which they fat hogs, being four-and-twenty foot 

 long." 



He says at Chapter 7 : " Potatoes are excellent for making bread, 

 cakes, paste, and pyes ; as they give the crust without and the food 

 within," and adds : " There is a knight now living in London that got a 

 thousand pounds per annum by planting carrets in a mere sandy 

 ground." At Chapter 14 is given directions how to have as good musk 

 melons as are in Italy, and produced here by the Earl of Dorset and 

 Earl of Tenett. 



To have a white spot on a black horse's forehead, he savs at 



