I40 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



were little better than ordinary labourers, the Yorkshire farm- 

 hand fared well on plenty of simple food, his three meals a day 

 consisting of butter, milk, cheese, and either eggs, pies, or 

 bacon, sometimes porridge instead of milk. 



Probably, however, few country gentlemen were such indus- 

 trious farmers as Best ; many of them passed their days mostly 

 in hunting and fowling and their evenings in drinking, though 

 we know too that there were exceptions who did not care for 

 this rude existence. Deer hunting, and we must add deer 

 poaching, was the great sport of the wealthy, but the smaller 

 gentry had to be content with simpler forms of the chase. For 

 fox hunting each squire had his own little pack, and hunted 

 only over his own estate and those of his friends. He had 

 also the otter, the badger, and the hare to amuse him. Fowl- 

 ing was conducted, as in the Middle Ages, by hawk or net, for 

 the shot gun had not yet come into use, and was forbidden by 

 an old law.^ The partridge and pheasant, as now, were the 

 chief game birds. After the Restoration the country gentle- 

 men seem to have been infected by the dissipation of the 

 Court, and farming was left to the tenant farmer and yeoman : 

 ' our gentry ', says Pepys, ' have grown ignorant of everything 

 in good husbandry.' 



The middle of the seventeenth century was the Golden Age 

 of the yeoman who owned and farmed his land ; even at the 

 end of the Stuart period, when their decline had already begun, 

 Gregory King estimated their numbers at 160,000 families, or 

 about one-seventh of the population. The class included all 

 those between the man who owned freehold land worth 40^'. a 

 year and the wealthier yeoman who was hardly distinguishable 

 from the small gentleman. Owning their own land they were 

 a sturdy and independent class, and they 'took a jolly pride in 

 voting as in fighting on the opposite side of the neighbouring 



' Trevelyan, England under the Stuarts, 8 sq. Though, as we have 

 seen, p. I57> the writer of the Fruiterer'' s Secrets recommends the gun for 

 scaring birds in 1604. 



