TULL AND THE NEW HUSBANDRY 175 



the principles formulated in his famous book revolutionized 

 British agriculture, though we shall see that it took a long 

 time to do it. He has indeed been described as ' the greatest 

 individual improver agriculture ever knew '. He first realized 

 that deep and perfect pulverization is the great secret of 

 vegetable nutrition, and was thus led on to perfect the system 

 of drilling seed wide enough apart to admit of tillage in the 

 intervals, and abandoning the wide ridges in vogue, laid the 

 land into narrow ridges 5 feet or 6 feet wide. He was born 

 at Basildon in Berkshire, heir to a good estate, and was called 

 to the bar in 1699, but on his marriage in the same year 

 settled on the paternal farm of Howberry in Oxfordshire, 

 his preface to his book he throws a flash of light on 

 country life at a time when the roads were nearly as bad 

 as in the Middle Ages, so that they effectually isolated 

 different parts of England, when he speaks of 'a long confine- 

 ment within the limits of a lonely farm, in a country where I am 

 a stranger, having debarred me from all conversation '.^ 



He took to agriculture more by necessity than by choice, 

 for he knew too much ' the inconveniency and slavery attending 

 the exorbitant power of husbandry servants', and he further 

 gives this extraordinary character of the farm labourer of his 

 day : ' 'Tis the most formidable objection against our agricul- 

 ture that the defection of labourers is such that few gentlemen 

 can keep their land in their own hands, but let them for a little 

 to tenants who can bear to be insulted, assaulted, kicked, 

 cuffed, and Bridewelled, with more patience than gentlemen 

 are endowed with.'^ Tull wrote just before it became the 

 fashion for gentlemen to go into farming, and laments that 

 the lands of the country were all, or mostly, in the hands of 

 rack-renters, whose supposed interest it was that they should 

 never be improved for fear of fines and increased rents. 

 Gentlemen then knew so little of farming that they were 



* Preface to Horse-hoeing Husbandry (ed. 1733). 

 ''■ Horse-hoeing Husbandry, p. vi. 



