196 A HISTORY OF GARDENING IN ENGLAND 



Queen's and Pembroke, Cambridge, show good designs of this 

 kind of sundial. 1 



Gardeners from all times have had great difficulties to con- 

 tend with in the extirpation of garden pests. Their minds 

 were chiefly exercised in devising schemes for keeping down 

 the moles. When Queen Elizabeth paid a visit to Theobalds, 

 and Lord Burghley prepared a masque in her honour in Mayj 

 1591, speeches were recited before her, composed by George 

 Peele, describing the processes of making the garden, and 

 comparing its beauties to the virtues of the Queen. The first 

 speech was that of the " Mole-catcher," which began thus : 

 " I cannot discourse of knots and mazes, sure I am that the 

 ground was so knotty that the gardener was amazed to see it, 

 and as easy had it been, if I had not been, to make a shaft of 

 a cammock 2 as a garden of that croft." 3 The ordinary mole- 

 catchers were paid by the number of moles they caught, 

 " usually I2d. a dozen for all the olde moles they catch, and 

 6d. a dozen for younge ones. Now as for those who send pur- 

 posely for a mole-catcher to gette a single mole in a howse, 

 garden or the like, they will seldom take lesse than 2d. and some- 

 times 3d. for her if they gette her, because they have payment 

 onely for those they catch and if they misse the lose is theires." 4 

 The farmer Henry Best, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, who 

 made these notes, has also left the account of what he paid 

 himself to the mole-catchers. In " 1628, April 28, paid to 

 John Pearson for killing moules in the carre one and a half 

 dozen olde ones I3^d., two dozen young ones 6d.," and so on. 

 Several curious recipes for killing moles are found in old 

 gardening books. Sharrock gives the following " Remedies 

 against Moles " 6 : " By watering moles are drowned or driven 

 up into so narrow a compass that they may be easily taken. 

 Mr. Blith relates one spring, about March, a mole-catcher and 



1 Cantabrigia and Oxonia Illustrata, David Loggan, 1675. A sundial of 

 this description in box and yew has lately been planted in Mr. Leopold 

 Rothschild's garden at Ascott, near Leighton Buzzard. 



2 = a crooked tree. 



3 Dramatic and Poetical Works of R. Greene and G. Peele, by Dyce, 1861. 



4 Rural Economy in Yorkshire, 1641, Surtees Society, 1857. 



6 An Improvement in the Art of Gardening, by Robert Sharrock, 3rd 

 edition 1694. 



