430 AGRICULTURE. 



able time. The high price of labor, and the conversion of so 

 much land to tillage, gave rise to different impolitic statutes, 

 prohibiting the exportation of grain, while a great demand was 

 created for wool by the manufacturers of the Netherlands, which 

 tended to enhance the value of pasture lands, and to depopulate 

 the country. The flocks of individuals, in these times, some- 

 times exceeded twenty thousand, and an edict was issued by 

 Henry VIII. restricting them to a tenth of that number. Had 

 the restraints imposed upon the exportation of grain been trans- 

 ferred to wool, the internal consumption would have soon regu- 

 lated the respective forces of those articles ; the proportion 

 between arable and pasture lands would soon have been 

 adjusted, and the declining cultivation of the country restored. 

 An improved cultivation was reserved, however, for a future 

 period, when persecution extirpated manufactures from the 

 Netherlands ; then, when the exportation of English wool had 

 subsided, and its price diminished, the farmer or landholder, 

 disappointed of his former exuberant profits, discovered the 

 necessity of resuming the plow, and restoring his pastures to 

 culture. 



Of the state of agriculture in Scotland, during the fifteenth 

 and sixteenth centuries, little can be stated. According to 

 Major, a native of Berwick, the peasants neither enclosed, nor 

 planted, nor endeavored to ameliorate the sterility of the soil. 

 According to Finney's " Moryson," the produce of the country 

 consisted chiefly of oats and barley, but it would appear from 

 Chalmers that wheat was cultivated in Scotland, at least upon 

 the Church lands, as early as the thirteenth century. Different 

 laws were enacted for planting groves and hedges, pruning 

 orchards and gardens, and forming parks for deer ; but it is not 

 the barren injunctions of statutes that will excite a spirit of 

 improvement in a country. 



From the Time of Henry VIII. to the Revolution in 1688. - 

 Agriculture, soon after the beginning of the sixteenth century, 

 partook of the general improvement which followed the inven- 

 tion of the art of printing, the revival of literature, and the 

 more settled authority of government ; and, instead of the 

 occasional notices of historians, we can now refer to regular 

 treatises, written by men who engaged eagerly in this neglected 



