194 HISTORY OF AGRICULTURE 



occupied by the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, 

 Manufactures, and Commerce, which offered premiums for 

 such objects as the cultivation of carrots in the field for stock, 

 then little practised; for gathering the different sorts of grass 

 seeds and keeping them clean and free from all mixture with 

 other grasses, a very rare thing at that time ; for experiments 

 in the comparative merits of the old and new husbandry ; for 

 the growth of madder ; £10 for a turnip-slicing machine, then 

 apparently unknown, and for experiments whether rolling or 

 harrowing grass land was better, ' at present one of the most 

 disputed points of husbandry.' 



In spite of this progress, many crops introduced years before 

 were unknown to many farmers. Sainfoin, cabbages, pota- 

 toes, carrots, were not common crops in every part of England, 

 though every one of them was well known in some part or 

 other ; not more than half, or at most two-thirds, of the nation 

 cultivated clover. Many, however, of the nobility and gentry 

 in the north had grown cabbages with amazing^'success, lately, 

 30 guineas an acre being sometimes the value of the crop. 



Half the cultivated lands, in spite of the progress of enclosure 

 for centuries, were still farmed on the old common-field system. 

 When anything out of the common was to be done on common 

 farms, all common work came to a standstill. ' To carry out 

 corn stops the ploughs, perhaps at a critical season ; the fallows 

 are frequently seen overrun with weeds because it is seed time ; 

 in a word, some business is ever neglected.' ^ As for the outcry 

 against enclosing commons and wastes, people forgot that the 

 farmers as well as the poor had a right of common and took 

 special care by their large number of stock to starve every 

 animal the poor put on the common.^ 



About the same time that Young wrote these words there 

 appeared a pamphlet written by ' A Country Gentleman' on 

 the advantages and disadvantages of enclosing waste lands 

 and common fields, which puts the arguments against en- 



' Rural Economy, p. 26. ' Farmer's Letters (3rd ed.), p. 89. 



