248 
Farming of Oxfordshire. 
to employ an en<yine constantly, the threshing'-maclunes are 
mostly portable. The common practice is to hire one for the 
day, the proprietors finding stoker and feeder, and charging 
from 20s. to 255. per day. Clayton and Shuttlcworth's engines 
are most deseryedly the fayonrites, but Hart's threshing-machine 
is preferred : it separates the chaff from the caving, and saves a 
hand or two in the \vinnowing process. The greatest incon- 
venience in Avorking portable engines is that the strap is apt to 
break, twist, or Hy off the pulley. Another objecti(m is, that 
most engines and machines are too large : they require more 
hands to work them than a small farmer can command ; they get 
over more work than can be veatly executed ; and some ma- 
chinery, if well supplied, will thresh a small rickyard in two 
days. This is not often wanted. Three-horse engines and 
smaller barn works, less lofty and cumbrous, would be more 
suited to the wants of the small farmers in Oxfordshire. Sta- 
tionary engines have many advantages over portable ones ; they 
are less expensive, require less fuel, and are less liable to want 
repairs ; but with occupations in their present state, and with 
farm buildings badly situated, there is no probability that they 
will become general in the south of the county. Hardly any 
threshing-machines are propelled by water-power : there is one 
at Tracey farm, on the Tew estate, and the stream which is 
diverted for that purpose irrigates 7 acres of grass land. 
The greatest iuipiovements that have taken place in Oxford- 
shire farming, since the last report, are those produced by the 
extension of inclosures. The only wonder is, that tlie advantages 
being so manifest, any parish should be left uninclosed through- 
out tlie county. Persons living at a distance cannot comprehend 
tlie miseries of common field. They could hardly credit that a 
parish containing 1000 acres should be cut up into 1200 or 1300 
strips, that the whole parish must be cropped on one course, and 
that the meadows belong to one individual from the 1st of 
May to the 1st August, and are afterwards commonable to the 
whole of the parish. Then there is the loss by trotting from one 
piece of land to another ; the trouble occasioned to the farmer 
in overlooking a small farm ; the certainty of distemper, such as 
the pleuro-pneumonia in cattle, or the foot-disease in sheep, 
being disseminated, if once, introduced, over the whole parish : 
tlie impossibility of draining detached half-acres, and the con- 
stant source of quarrels from trespassing and ploughing on 
another's land. In souie open-field parishes the lands are large 
and the meadows not Lammas ground. Here the benefits deriv- 
able from inclosing are not so great, yet numerous advantages 
would well repay the trouble and cost of an allotment. 
Very frequently, on an inclosure taking place, fences are not 
