State of Agriculture in Northumberland. 1S3 



of strong turnip-loam^ which I immediately divided into five 

 equal shares and managed in the five- course rotation, growing 

 turnips in the regular course : the other consists of heavy land 

 upon a retentive subsoil ; this I divided into seven shares, planting 

 some additional hedges to make the necessary equal divisions, 

 and introduced upon it the following rotation : — oats, beans 

 drilled and hoed, barley, naked fallow with dung, wheat, grass, 

 grass ; my object in making this arrangement was to obtain tw^o 

 years' grazing, to recruit the land after over-cropping w4th corn, 

 to keep a repetition of the same kind of grain as distant as pos- 

 sible, and to introduce a barley-crop, which was quite new to the 

 land, and which it Avas considered incapable of producing. With 

 this, however, I had no difficulty; for although such land, if 

 ploughed in the spring, would have turned up a stiff furrow, and 

 when worked, would have been cloddy and in a state most un- 

 favourable for barley, yet, w^hen ploughed into ridges after the 

 beans in the autumn, laid as dry as possible, and exposed to the 

 winter's frost, it never failed, by watching an opportunity to sow 

 it when dry, to harrow down as mellow as possible, and to produce 

 excellent crops; nor did the grass-seeds fail as they had been wont 

 to do. The produce of the farm was quickly doubled, and al- 

 though rents had fallen generally during the years that I occupied 

 it, it has advanced in the interval from 500/. to 800/., its present 

 rent. The land had a good quantity of dung at each fallowing 

 and a good liming during the first course, which was not repeated 

 till the third, 14 years after. If the beans should be removed 

 sufficiently early, and the autumn be dry enough, I should prefer 

 to apply the lime after the bean- crop to any other time; both 

 because the dung is spread upon the fallow, and because after 

 the beans, the land contains in their roots, and in the kind of 

 putrid fermentation arising from the decay of vegetable matter- in 

 a drilled crop, more material for the lime to operate upon ; but 

 as beans stand late upon the ground, it is only in some seasons 

 that this can be effected so far north. 



Farm-servants are en2:aoed on the larp;e farms in the northern 

 parts of Northumberland, as in the southern counties of Scotland, 

 in a manner very different from that of the same class in the more 

 southern counties of England ; and as the custom is little known in 

 many parts, and has evidently a great influence upon the moral 

 and social condition of the labouring classes, as well as being in 

 a great measure essential to the system of turnip-husbandry, which 

 gives so much occupation to females and young people in cleaning 

 the land, gathering and burning couch, and hoeing turnips, I 

 consider it deserving of particular notice. To conduct the opera- 

 tions of a turnip-farm in summer, and to keep at work an expe- 

 ditious threshing-machine in winter, without laying all the ploughs 



VOL. II. O 



