54 THE FERTILITY OF THE SOIL [CH. 



A further improvement was soon to take place in 

 soil fertility. A great advantage of the enclosure 

 over the common fields was that crops could now 

 be grown in autumn and winter ; obviously this 

 course was impossible when the village cattle strayed 

 at will over the land from Lammastide to Candlemas. 

 Consequently about the middle of the seventeenth 

 century turnips, clovers, and cultivated grasses came 

 in from Holland the source of many of our great 

 improvements and slowly took their place in our 

 agricultural system. Before these new crops could 

 be cultivated a great improvement was needed in 

 methods of tillage. The old implements were very 

 crude: heavy wooden ploughs turned up the earth 

 in great clods that could not be broken up by the 

 inefficient harrows ; so that after the seed had been 

 broadcasted the clods had to be broken in pieces 

 by large wooden hammers. "It is a greate labour 

 and payne to the oxen, to goo to harowe; for they 

 were better to goo to the plowe two dayes, thanne to 

 harowe one daye. It is an old saying, 'The oxe is 

 neuer wo, tyll he to the harowe goo.'... And if the 

 barleye gounde wyll not break with Harrows, but 

 be clotty, it wolde be braken with malles, and not 

 streyght downe : for than they brake the corne in-to 

 the earthe," wrote Fitzherbert in 1543. Two hundred 

 years later Tull declaims against farmers who, " when 

 they have thrown in their seed, go over it twenty 



