CHAPTER XI 



1600-1700 



CLOVER AND TURNIPS. GREAT RISE IN PRICES. 

 MORE ENCLOSURE. A FARMING CALENDAR 



THE seventeenth century was one of considerable progress, 

 in English agriculture. The decay of common-field farming| 

 was enabling individual enterprise to have its way. The 

 population was rapidly growing; by 1688 the returns of the 

 hearth tax prove that the northern counties were nearly as 

 thickly populated as the southern, and prices during the first 

 half were continually rising, though after that they remained] 

 almost stationary, since the effect of the influx of precious/ 

 metals from the New World was exhausted. In the first hal,f 

 of the century John Smyth ascribes the advance of rents to 

 1 the Castilian voyages opening the New World, whereby such 

 floods of treasure have flowed into Europe that the rates 

 of Christendom are raised near twentyfold'. 



But the greatest agricultural event of the century was the , 

 introduction of clover and the encouragement of turnips asf 

 grown in Holland, by Sir Richard Weston, about 1645. No 

 doubt the turnip was already well known in England. Tusser 

 and Fitzherbert both mention it, apparently as a garden 

 root only; but Gerard in his Herbal, 1597, says it grew in 

 fields ' and divers vineyards or hoppe gardens in most places 

 of England ', which certainly points to an effort having been 

 made generally to use it as a field crop whenever an enclosed 

 space gave it some protection from the depredations of the 

 common herds. However, its cultivation must have declined, 

 as long after this it was regarded as a novelty as a field crop 

 in most parts of England. 1 In Holland it had been used in 



1 R.A.S. E. Journal, 1896, pp. 77 sq., and Gerard, Herbal (ed. 1633), 

 p. 232. 



