CHAPTER XXII 
ARABLE LAND 
IT is extremely difficult to realise the sort of country 
which our forefathers have made into the England of 
to-day. 
It is quite unusual to find even a few square yards 
which have never been “huzzed and maazed” with the 
plough, altered and transformed by scientific and other 
manures, or grazed and depastured by cattle, sheep, 
donkeys, horses, and swine. 
England seems to have been a wild woodland of badly 
grown oak forest, with fern brakes or dense tangled 
thickets of blackthorn and bramble. On the hills there 
would be great moors, sometimes with heather 7 feet 
high. The valleys were broad marshes and fenlands, 
with occasional patches of alder, birch, and willow, and 
interrupted by old backwaters and lagoons, which were 
fringed with graceful thickets of bulrushes and other 
reeds. 
The change of a country like this to the “awful 
orderliness” of modern England was no easy matter. 
Strenuous labour, perhaps continued for several genera- 
tions, was required before this savage natural land 
became good arable. 
If in the National Gallery one studies carefully the 
landscapes painted about 1789 to 1810, it is at once 
obvious that the England of that day was not in the 
least like that of 1909. 
The roads were mere mud. To be “stuck in the 
mud” was no unusual experience for gentlemen’s 
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