46 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE. Part I. 



they may be employed] how they may be bettered, reformed] and amended." The 

 famous meadows near Salisbury are mentioned ; and when cattle have fed their fill, hogs, 

 it is pretended, " arc made fat « iili the remnant, namely, with the knots and sappe of 

 the grasse." So many extravagant assertions have been made about these meadows by 

 several of our early writers, that we ought to receive their statements with some degree 

 of scepticism, wherever they seem bO approach the marvellous. " Clover grass, or the 

 grass honeysuckle " (while clover), is directed to be sown with oilier hay-seeds. " Car- 

 rot-roots " were then raised in several parts of England, and sometimes by farmers." 

 London street-dung and stable-dung were carried to a distance by water; though it 

 appears from later writers to have been got almost for the trouble of removing. And 

 leases of twenty-one years are recommended for persons of small capital, as better than 

 employing it in purchasing land ; an opinion that prevails very generally among our 

 present farmers. 



24S. Jtces seem to have been great favourites with these early writers ; and among others, 

 there is a treatise by Butler, a gentleman of Oxford, called the Feminine Monarchic, or 

 Hie Iliston/ of Bees, printed in 1609, full of all manner of quaintness and pedantry. 



249. Marlcham, Mascall, Gabriel Plattes, Weston, and other authors, belonged to this 

 period. In Sir Richard Weston's Discourse on the Husbandry of Brabant and Flanders, 

 published by Hartlib, in 1645, we may mark the dawn of the vast improvements which 

 have since been effected in Britain. This gentleman was ambassador from England to 

 the Elector Palatine and King of Bohemia, in 1619, and had the merit of being the first 

 who introduced the great cheer, as it was then called, into English agriculture, about 

 1645, and probably turnips also. In less than ten years after its introduction, that is, 

 before 1655, the culture of clover, exactly according to the present method, seems to 

 have been well known in England, and had made its way even to Ireland. 



250. A great mam/ tvorics on agriculture appeared during the time of the common- 

 wealth, of which Blythe's Improver improved and Hartlib's Legacy are the most valu- 

 able. The first edition of the former was published in 1649, and of the latter in 1650; 

 and both of them were enlarged in subsequent editions. In the first edition of the 

 Improver improved, no mention is made of clover, nor in the second of turnips; but, in 

 the third, published in 1662, clover is treated of at some length ; and turnips are recom- 

 mended as an excellent cattle crop, the culture of wliich shoidd be extended from the 

 kitchen-garden to the field. Sir Richard Weston must have cultivated turnips before 

 this ; for Rlythe says, that " Sir Richard affirmed to himself, he did feed his swine with 

 them ; they were first given boiled, but afterwards the swine came to eat them raw," and 

 " would run after the carts and pull them forth as they gathered them ;" an expression 

 which conveys an idea of their being cultivated in the fields. 



251. Blythe's bonk is the first systematic work in which there are so?ne traces of the convertible husbandry, 

 so beneficially established since, by interposing clover and turnip between culmiferous crops. He is a 

 great enemy to commons and common fields; and to retaining land in old pasture, unless it be of the 

 best quality. His description of different kinds of ploughs is interesting ; and he justly recommends such 

 as were drawn by two horses (some even by one horse), in preference to the weighty clumsy machines 

 which required four horses or oxen, or more. Almost all the manures now used seem to have been then 

 well known ; and he brought lime himself from a distance of twenty miles. He speaks of an instrument 

 which ploughed, sowed, and harrowed at the same time; and the setting of corn was then a subject of 

 much discussion. " It was not many years," says Blythe, " since the famous city of London petitioned 

 the parliament of England against two anusancies or offensive commodities, which were likely to come 

 into great use and esteem ; and that was Newcastle coal, in regard of their stench, &c. ; and hops, in 

 regard they would spoyle the taste of drinck, and endanger the people !" 



'J5S. Hartlib's Legacy is a very heterogeneous performance, containing among some very judicious 

 directions, a great deal of rash speculation. Several of the deficiencies which the writer (K. Child) 

 complains of in English agriculture, must be placed to the account of our climate, and never have been 

 nor can be supplied. 



253. Houghton s valuable Collections of Husbandry have been already mentioned. (237.) 



254. U'orlidgc's Systema slgricullurce was published in 1668 ; it treats of improve- 

 ments in general, of enclosing meadows and pastures, and of watering and draining 

 them, of clovers, vetches, spurry, Wiltshire long-grass (probably that of the meadows 

 of Salisbury), hemp, flax, rape, turnips, &c. A Persian wheel was made by his direc- 

 tion in Wiltshire, in 1665, that carried water in good quantity above twenty feet high, 

 for watering meadows, and another near Godalming in Surrey. Sowing clover and 

 other seeds preserved the cattle in tire fatal winter of 1673, in the southern parts of Eng- 

 land ; whereas in the western and northern, through defect of hay and pasture, the 

 greater part of their cattle perished. Hops enough were not planted, but we imported 

 them from the Netherlands of a quality not so good as our own. The authors he chiefly 

 quotes are Weston, Hartlib, and Blythe. 



255. Among other writers of this century may be mentioned Bacon, who, in his natural 

 history, has some curious observations on agriculture ; Ray, the botanist, whose works 

 are rich in facts ; and Evelyn, a great encouragcr of all manner of improvements, as 

 well as a useful writer on planting. 



256. Some of the works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are now very scarce, 



