CHAPTER XII 



THE GREAT AGRICULTURAL WRITERS OF THE 



SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. FRUIT GROWING. 



A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ORCHARD 



THE seventeenth century is distinguished by a number of 

 agricultural writers whose works, as they afford the best 

 account of the farming of the time, we may be pardoned for 

 freely quoting. The best known of them were, Sir John Norden, 

 Gervase Markham, Sir Richard Weston, Blythe, Hartlib, Sir 

 Hugh Plat, John Evelyn, John Worlidge, and Houghton. 



Sir John Norden printed his Surveyor s Dialogue in 1608, 

 which is in the form of a conversation between a farmer and a 

 surveyor, the former at the outset telling the latter that men 

 of his profession were then very unpopular because ' you pry 

 into men's titles and estates, and oftentimes you are the cause 

 that men lose their land, and customs are altered, broken, and 

 sometimes perverted by your means. And above all, you look 

 into the values of men's lands, wherefore the lords of manors 

 do reckon their tenants to a higher rent, and therefore not only 

 I but many poore tenants have good cause to speak against the 

 profession '. 



The surveyor attributes the increase in prices to farmers 

 outbidding one another for farms, for the rents of farms and 

 prices grow together ; a statement which seems to have been 

 quite true and disposes of the assertion that the landlords 

 raised the rents unfairly, for they were quite entitled to what 

 rent they could get in the open market, the farmers being 

 presumably wise enough not to offer rents which would 

 preclude a profit. He further blames the farmer of his day 

 for being discontented with his lot : in former times ' farmers 



1 Surveyor's Dialogue (ed. 1608), p. 2. 



