320 CORDEAUX: LINCOLNSHIRE AGRICULTURE. 
(3) beans, (4) fallows. The area under beans in the low country 
was enormous, the wheat stubbles being ploughed once, and the 
beans sown broadcast in the spring and never cleaned. 
The Wold farmers seem to have been much more wide-awake and 
enterprising than the men of the low country. These ‘ clay farmers,’ 
as they were called, were horribly behind the age. Riding through 
the parishes of Humberstone, Tetney, Fulstow, and Covenham, the 
Commissioner passed through, in September, a large open field in its 
fallow year, and covered with thistles past the blossom, ‘ high enough 
to hide a jackass,’ yet the manure had been spread amongst these 
for the ensuing wheat crop—and this for miles together, everywhere 
in the low country. Again, he says, from Louth to Saltfleet, and 
from Sutton to Alford, open fields and unploughed fallows, on 
September rsth, covered with thistles in beautiful luxuriance. 
The beans were harvested late in the autumn—usually got with 
much loss from the jaws of winter. These were the days of the grey 
goose, which our observant forefathers called the Bean-goose (A”ser 
segetum ), coming in great flocks in the latter Autumn to feast on the 
shelled beans in the open fields, till the time came when general 
enclosure, and a change in the rotation of the crops, finally banished 
them from all their old haunts.. With the enclosure also disappeared 
that noble bird, the Great Bustard. The last we have a record of 
was shot in Thoresby field, and sent to Sir Joseph Banks in 1818; 
this was two years before his death. 
If the condition of the low lands was bad, that of the fens was 
even worse. In 1798, in the East Fen near Spilsby, there were 
two thousand acres of water, which being a wet season, had the 
appearance of a chain of lakes surrounded by vast reed beds. 
Arthur Young was taken in a boat by Sir Joseph Banks into the very 
heart of the fen: the average depth was three to four feet, and in one 
place, a channel between two lakes, five to six feet, with two to three 
feet of black mud. In this fen were three hundred acres of 
cranberries on higher land, and these so plentiful that one man 
gathered 180 pecks in a’season. Sticklebacks were so numerous 
that a man was known to make four shillings a day by selling them 
at a halfpenny a bushel. Great pikes Juxuriated in these shallow 
meres, Sir Joseph Banks had the picture of one in his kitchen, 
which was known to be thirteen years old, weighing 31 Ibs., an 
increase of 2} lbs. annually. 
Amongst the information given by the author, is a list of the 
plants found in the peaty bogs, doubtless obtained through Sir 
Joseph Banks. This list includes many like Sonchus palustris and 
Cineraria palustris, long since extinct in the county (see list, p. 325) 
Naturalist, 
