268 THE TURNIP CROP. 



it is somewhat uncertain whether the "rape" or the 

 "turnip" is the plant alluded to. Be that as it may, 

 with the authors already quoted, we are distinctly in- 

 formed by the great botanist Kay, in 1686, that at 

 that date they were grown everywhere, in the fields as 

 well as the gardens, for the sake of their roots. Lisle, 

 in his Observations on Husbandry, at the beginning of 

 the eighteenth century, speaks of them as being in field 

 cultivation; but the first and principal improvement in 

 their mode of treatment appears to be due to Lord Charles 

 Townshend, of Rainham, in Norfolk, in 1730, whose 

 successful system of cultivation gave them a status as a 

 crop which they did not possess before. In a recent 

 number of the Quarterly, 1 in a clever and interesting 

 article on the progress of British agriculture, the subject 

 is thus alluded to : " A new source of agricultural wealth 

 was discovered in turnips, which, as their important qua- 

 lities became known, excited in many of their early culti- 

 vators much of the same sort of enthusiasm as they did 

 in Lord Monboddo, who, oil returning home from the 

 circuit, went to look at a field of them by candle-light. 

 Turnips gradually replaced the old fallows, filled the cattle 

 mangers with food in winter, and, when fed off on the 

 light soils by sheep, consolidated while they manured 

 them, and prepared the way for corn crops on wastes that 

 had hitherto only carried rabbits or geese." 



About this period Jethro Tull published his first work 

 on Horse-hoeing Husbandry, a system peculiarly appli- 

 cable to turnip cultivation, and which no doubt aided very 

 much in its success, as we find that they had acquired a 

 regular place in the rotations of Norfolk long before they 

 were known in other parts of the kingdom. Yet it must be 

 admitted that we are indebted to the farmers of the north 

 for the successful development of turnip husbandry, and 



1 Quarterly Review, No. 210. 



