152 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



the profits.^ An acre of good flax was worth from £'] to ^12 ; 

 but if* wrought up fit to sell in the market ' from £\^ to £20. 



Woad was considered a ' very rich commodity', but accord- 

 ing to Blyth it robbed the land if long continued upon it, 

 although if moderately used it prepared land for corn, drawing 

 a ' different juice from what the corn requires '. It more than 

 doubled the rent of land, and had been sold at from £6 to 

 £%o a ton, the produce of an acre. John Lawrence, who 

 wrote in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, says woad 

 was in his time cultivated by companies of people, men, 

 women, and children, who hired the land, built huts, and grew 

 and prepared the crop for the dyer's use, then moved on to 

 another place.^ 



There were proofs that man's inventive genius was at 

 work among farm implements. Worlidge mentions^ an 

 engine for setting corn, invented by Gabriel Plat, made of two 

 boards bored with wide holes 4 in. apart, set in a frame, with 

 a funnel to each hole. It was fitted with iron pins 5 in. long 

 to 'play up and down', and dibble holes into which the corn 

 was to go from the funnels. This machine was so intricate 

 and clumsy that Worlidge found no use for it. However, 

 he recommends another instrument which certainly seems to 

 anticipate TuU's drill, though Tull is said to have stated when 

 Bradley showed him a cut of it that it was only a proposal 

 and it never got farther than the cut.* It consisted of a frame 

 of small square pieces of timber a inches thick ; the breadth of 

 the frame 2 feet, the height 1 8 inches, length 4 feet, placed on 



^ Worlidge, Sy sterna Agriculitirae, p. 38. Plot, however, in his Natural 

 History of Staffordshire, 1686, says hemp and flax were sown in small 

 quantities all over the county, p. 109. 



^ New System of Agriculture (ed. 1726), p. 113. Woad is still grown ' in 

 some districts in England ' (Morton, Cyclopaedia of Agriculture, ii. 1159), 

 but in the Agricultural Returns of 1907 apparently occupies too small an 

 acreage to entitle it to a separate mention. 



^ Worlidge, Systema Agriculturae, p. 43. 



* Tull, in his Horseshoeing Husbandry (p. 147), speaks of the drill as if 

 already in u?e. 



