^be Zxi^ov period 



CHAPTEE XXIV. 



A SIXTEENTK-CENTURY FAKM. 



The site for the farm under discussion is best fixed in Norfolk, 

 «o that we may be able later on to compare its system of 

 husbandry before the introduction of the turnip, with that a 

 century later, when the famous four-course rotation of crops 

 was in full swing. In parts of England, especially in Lanca- 

 shire, the farming of the latter end of this century would have 

 been scarcely distinguishable from that practised in the same 

 locality now. After the introduction of clover from the Nether- 

 lands and the potato from Ireland, both of which events oc- 

 curred prior to or early in the seventeenth century, there 

 could have been no radical change in the system, unless we 

 except the gradual absorption of the common tillage field into 

 fenced and private enclosures. Let the reader go up into 

 south Lancashire, and in fancy blot out of his purview the 

 great commercial towns, coal mines, cotton factories and rail- 

 ways of the Wigan district. He will then have rolled back 

 the centuries to the period when good Queen Bess Vv-as becom- 

 ing wrinkled and haggard. No agricultural prosperity seems 

 to have induced the Lancastrian gentry of these districts to 

 add field to field, and pull down their barns in order to build 

 greater. The sixteenth-century date stones on many of the 

 great buildings which held the Elizabethan tenant's hay afford 

 indisputable proofs of our assertion.^ The houses with their 

 stone roofs, stone walls and stone mullions, are hardly even 



' I have seen dozens siicli in my business visits to the farms about 

 Wigan. Turnips and carrots have been grown in one or two fields of late 

 years, but otherwise the farming is wholly as I have described. 



313 



