Clare Island Survey — Agriculture arid its History. 6 13 



and next upon the three-field or " open " systems. Hitherto the practice on 

 " inclosed " farms was to crop a field continuously for six or eight years till it 

 was exhausted. Now was adopted the four-course rotation, wheat, turnips, 

 barley, and clover, which had the advantage of producing plenty of winter- 

 food for stock, from which followed plenty of manure, and from which 

 followed the elimination of the old exhaustion and the need for leaving the 

 land to nature for a term of years. This four-course rotation, modified to 

 suit local conditions and lengthened by sowing clown longer-lived grasses 

 with the clover, has been the groundwork of British tillage farming down to 

 the present day. 



But the two new crops were disastrous to the three-field system. The 

 turnip seemed an ideal crop for the fallow, because the land could be 

 cleaned and tilled and a crop grown at the same time. But the turnip 

 could not be got out of the ground in time to prepare for and sow the 

 winter wheat. Nor could red clover be grown on the fallow, for then the 

 land could not be cleaned at all. So, as the " inclosed " farming grew better 

 and better, while the three-field farming stood still, the agitation for 

 " inclosing " the village fields grew stronger and stronger. At the present 

 day the old English villages and their three fields have all disappeared 

 excepting a very few, the most notable of which is perhaps Laxton in 

 Nottingham. 



It need scarcely be stated that, although the three-field system was an 

 advance upon the earlier semi-nomadic system in which, while the people lived 

 in settled villages a new piece of land was tilled every year, it was a very 

 effective barrier to further progress. But it had one momentous result in 

 this that it made the Englishman a tillage farmer rather than a grazier. 

 For the very reason that his home was surrounded by tillage-fields", through 

 which he must pass before reaching the pastures and forest beyond, he 

 acquired, so to speak, the faculty "to plough and to sow and to reap and 

 to mow," as if by a kind of hereditary instinct. But because of its rigid 

 framework and the inflexibility of its rules, the three-field system barred 

 any radical change in agricultural methods. Improvements, therefore, were 

 confined to the " inclosed " farmers — a circumstance which led eventually, as 

 already stated, to the downfall of the three-field village system. 



Only a few of the more important changes in British agriculture, 

 subsequent to those already mentioned, need be noted before passing on 

 to that of the Celts. The earliest improvements we read of were such 

 as were likely to have had their origin in the reclamation of waste and 

 untilled lands. These were draining, the application of marl and liming. 

 In Walter Blith's " English Improver Improved," published iu 1653, 



