444 History of the English Landed Interest. 



had progressed. Tlie area of wheat-growing soil had largely 

 increased, and though most of the fresh breadth was greatly 

 inferior to that originally under this form of husbandry, the 

 average yield had been increased — a phenomenon only explic- 

 able by the higher farming introduced by the chemist. 



It might have been thought that the extension of root 

 cultivation, one of the results of drainage, would have bettered 

 the position of the clay-land farmer. But this was not the 

 case, because though butter, meat, and wool had, as we have 

 said, largely increased in value, wheat had kept at the same 

 price. On dairy and mixed farms suitable for the rearing and 

 feeding of livestock, therefore, the value of the produce had 

 kept pace with the rise in rents ; on the light lauds the ability 

 of keeping sheep, afforded to farmers by the extension of green 

 crops, had effected the same end ; but on the heavily tithed 

 clays, producers could not compete in the grain market with 

 the low prices at which the less expensive process of cultiva- 

 tion on the light lands had kept wheat. 



Comparing the farming of the northern counties with that 

 of the southern, we find that the difference which most struck 

 a southern visitor was the inferiority of the corn husbandry of 

 the former, and the superiority of their pasturage. Cobbett 

 had read, he says, much about the northern harvest, the 

 superiority of Durham ploughs, and the excellence of the 

 Northumberland system of husbandry. When, however, he 

 visited these parts during the middle of the harvest of 1832, 

 he was disappointed in finding what few grain crops he saw, 

 to consist of miserable oats, those in the process of cutting still 

 nearly green, those set up in shock with straw scarcely one and 

 a half feet long, and those already stored in minute circular 

 stacks containing barely three waggon-loads of sheaves. He 

 went so far as to assert that, in the entire area of the North 

 Riding of Yorkshire, and in half that of the county of Durham 

 put together, the whole of the stacked wheat would not have 

 exceeded in bulk that on the estates of Tom Baring, of 

 Micheldever. He longed to show the sensible men of New- 

 castle, the farming on a fifty or hundred-acre field on the 

 South Downs, with its four teams of hu^e oxen ; each con- 



