CHAPTER XI. 



THE HUSBANDRY OF THE PERIOD, 



Somewhere about the end of the sixteenth century Lord Bacon 

 lit a fire in his courtyard, and burned a large library of agri- 

 cultural books, which he had taken considerable pains to 

 collect. His reason for doing this was that no single book 

 of his collection contained any useful information for the 

 farmer. Some fifty years later Sir Richard Weston (in 1651) 

 complained that the great drawback to English agricul- 

 ture was the ignorance of the farmers. He lamented that 

 there was no really complete work on agriculture, and ex- 

 pressed a wish for some more copious source of information 

 than was to be derived from Tusser's verses, Scot's Hop 

 Garden^ or Googe's translations. The treatises of the two 

 Platts, Markham, Blith, Butler, etc., were, he said, well 

 enough in their way ; but he demanded of the literary world 

 some more ambitious undertaking, such as was contained in 

 the translation from the French of The Country Farmer. 

 Turning to the pioneers of agricultural practice, he begged 

 them to be less niggardly in their communication of technical 

 secrets, while to the Government he held up as a pattern 

 the practice of the Romans in appointing State officials to 

 inspect the national agriculture, and punish those who 

 neglected what was considered a public duty. Lastly, he 

 besought our foreign merchants to notice and retail for the 

 benefit of their countrymen anything worth copying in the 

 agricultural economy of other lands. He was jealous of the 

 superior wool of the Spanish sheep, and envious of the fecundity 

 of the Dutch species. He longed to teach our native dairy- 

 maids how to make the famous Parmesan cheeses of Italy and 



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