132 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



Worlidge gives us what is perhaps the first mention of 

 a poultry farm, and strangely enough it seems to have paid. 

 ' I have been credibly informed that a good farm hath been 

 wholly stocked with poultry, spending the whole crop upon 

 them and keeping severall to attend them, and that it hath 

 redounded to a very considerable improvement '.* Incubators 

 of a very rude sort were used, three or four dozen eggs being 

 placed in a ' lamp furnace made of a few boards ', and hatched 

 by the heat of a lamp or candle. 



It must strike the reader that the accusation levelled against 

 the English farmer, of having made little progress in his art 

 from the Middle Ages to the commencement of the reign of 

 George III is hardly warranted. Their knowledge and skill 

 in their business were evidently such as to make considerable 

 progress inevitable, and then as now they were in some cases 

 assisted by their landlords, as in Herefordshire, where Lord 

 Scudamore, after the assassination of his friend the Duke of 

 Buckingham, devoted his energies to the culture of fruit, and 

 with other public-spirited gentlemen turned that county into 

 ' one entire orchard ' , besides improving the pastures and woods a ; 

 though Hartlib laments that gentlemen try so few experi- 

 ments for the advancement of agriculture, and that both land- 

 owners and farmers instead of communicating their knowledge 

 to each other kept it jealously to themselves. 3 The chief 

 hindrance to landlord and tenant was that the heavy hand of 

 ancient custom lay upon them, with its antiquated communistic 

 system of farming, which still in the greater part of the land 

 of England utterly prevented good husbandry and stifled 

 individual effort. It was one of these Herefordshire gentlemen, 

 Rowland Vaughan, who in 1610 wrote what is probably the 

 first account of irrigation in England, though the art was 

 mentioned by Fitzherbert and must have been known in 

 Devon and Hampshire long before his time ; indeed, it is 



1 Sy sterna Agriculturae, p. 152. J Evelyn, Pomona (ed. 1664), p. 2. 

 3 Compleat Husbandman (ed. 1659), p. 75. 



