440 History of the English Landed Interest. 



as well as to avoid injury by frost, grub, wireworm, and 

 poppy, a stale furrow was preferred for wheat or oats. Broad- 

 casting of all kinds of crops made way for tlie row culture of 

 the drill or dibble, and the repeated use of the inverted horse- 

 hoe reduced to a minimum the ravages of the turnip fly.^ 

 Land was laid down to permanent pasture by inoculation, the 

 mangold wurzel became more widely adopted, and Talavera 

 wheat was grown successfully as a spring crop. The spring 

 cultivation of this variety of cereal, however, having been 

 found less remunerative than the cultivation of a winter wheat, 

 had fallen largely into disuse. The western dairy-farmers sold 

 their cows and bought Southdown sheep, whereby milk and 

 cheese yielded precedence to fine fleeces and fat carcasses. 

 The hitherto despised clay lands of the county came into 

 greater favour ; because underdraining, at first with stones, 

 brushwood, whin, straw and sods, afterwards with the tiles 

 invented by Reed and improved by Scraggs, so mellowed this 

 clammy -/ariety of soil as to adapt it for turnip culture. The 

 bare-fallow disappeared from stiff land almost as completely 

 as it had done from lighter lands. Clay became valued as a 

 manure, and in districts where it did not exist as a subsoil it 

 was transported in numberless cartloads for a top dressing, by 

 which means it soon gave considerable solidity to the blowing 

 sands of West Norfolk. The face of this part of the county 

 got to be covered with pits, as though afflicted with smallpox, 

 and scarcely a field at the present day does not possess a pond 

 which marks the site where our forefathers excavated this 

 fertilising substance.^ By its use the sandy lands vied with 



* Blaikie originated this practice, maintaining that everything which 

 promoted a fine tilth hurried the growth of the plant through the period 

 when tlie fly attacked it. — Agriculture of Norfolk, p. 89. E,. N. Bacon. 



^ This was, however, a process which permanently disabled an area of 

 the agricultural .surface. A more preferable method was when the land 

 was ridged eighteen yards apart, and a .series of holes dug along the 

 ridges down to the clay. A load and a quarter of solid clay was raised 

 from each hole (of which there was one in every three yards), and spread 

 on the land. The cost was Q^d. per hole where the clay averaged five to 

 nine feet deep. Agriculture of Norfolk. Richard Bacon, j). 94. London, 

 1844. 



