LORD LEICESTER’S ELEVEN-COURSE SHIFT. 57 
grubber cultivator is used at intervals until late in June or 
July, when the vegetation will be found to have so far perished 
that it can be ploughed in. The land is then handled in the 
usual manner, and six pints per acre of rape seed is drilled in, 
18 in, apart. Having been duly horse-hoed, the green rape is 
fed off by hoggets (wée tegs), and during the winter, corn, cake, 
or hay, is given in addition as may be thought desirable. It is 
then once more ploughed, which leaves it a good store of both 
humus and nitrogen for the next course. 
The second course consists of oats, which poor land, treated 
as above mentioned, reproduces in very much larger quantities 
than it has before under the old system. The straw is found 
to be similarly affected. Upon the oat stubbles we visited 
weeds were astonishingly scarce. 
The third course is commenced by treating the oat stubble 
in the same manner as is customary under the four-course 
shift, in preparing for roots. Ploughing, grubbing, and harrow- 
ing, destroying any seeds that may lie dormant in the land, 
and getting all in readiness for a crop of hardy common 
turnips drilled in on the flat in July. These are horse-hoed, 
cross-hoed with horse apparatus, and sometimes cut out by 
hand and singled, but this latter system of cutting out is rather 
the exception than the rule, the cost of labour being thereby 
materially increased. In walking over this course of turnips, 
which was being fed off by ewes and lambs, we noted, with 
some surprise, the total absence of twitch or any other weeds 
from the field. 
For the fourth course the land, after the roots have been fed 
off, is ploughed and sown with barley. Here again we noted 
a divergence from the common practice ; six pecks (one and 
a-half bushels) only per acre is drilled into this inferior land, 
instead of the larger quantity of from eight to ten pecks. The 
average crop during the season of 1895 (by no means a favour- 
able one) showed over ten sacks per acre, which exceeded 32s. 
