Landmarhs in British Farming. 
21 
Elizabeth Mordaunt, who married the eldest son of the Duke of 
Gordon in 1706, inaugurated the improvement of Scotch farm- 
ing; she introduced the practice of fallowing, and English 
ploughs and ploughmen. Lord Bolingbroke, as the leader of 
the Country Party, posed as a farmer. “ Tup Harry is Mutton- 
Master,” is the announcement in the Hyp-Doctor for 1731. 
Dawley Farm (Bolingbroke’s residence), it adds, “ has long been 
famous for a great Cry and little Wool.” Even Pope loved “ to 
play the politician among cabbages and turnips.” 
The improvement which was effected in Scotland was no 
less great than tai'dy. When Ray the botanist visited the east 
coast of Scotland in 1660, he noticed that there was “ little or 
no fallow ground in Scotland. The men seemed to be very lazy.” 
“Their houses are pitiful cots. They have neither good bread, 
cheese nor drink. They cannot make them, nor will they learn.” 
Alexander Garden of Troup describes the method of farming in 
1683. The land was divided into infield and outfield. The 
infield was kept “ constantly under come and bear, the husband- 
man dunging it every thrie years, and, for his pains, if he reap 
the fourth come he is satisfied.” The outfields were allowed to 
grow green with weeds and thistles, and after four or five years 
were twice ploughed and sown with corn. Three crops were 
taken in succession, and then, when the land no longer repaid 
seed and labour, it was allowed to revert to its weeds and 
thistles. Sir Archibald Grant of Monymusk, in Aberdeenshire, 
says that, in 1716, turnips in fields grown by the Earl of Rothes 
and a few others were objects of wonder, that wheat was con- 
fined to East Lothian, that there were few enclosures, no 
repaired roads, few wheel-carriages. On his paternal estate 
there was not one acre enclosed, nor any timber upon it, but a few elm, 
sycamore, and ash about a small kitchen-garden adjoining to the house, and 
some straggling trees at some of the farm-yards, with a small copse-wood 
not enclosed, and dwarfish, and browsed by sheep and cattle. All the farms 
ill-disposed and mixed ; difierent persons having alternate ridges ; not one 
wheel-carriage on the estate, nor indeed any one road that would allow it, 
and the rent about 600 /. sterling per annum ; grain and services commuted 
into money. The whole land raised and uneven, and full of stones, many of 
them very large, of a hard iron quality, and all the ridges crooked in shape 
of a S, and very high and full of noxious weeds, and poor, being worn out 
by culture without proper manure or tillage. The people poor, ignorant, 
and slothful, and ingrained enemies to planting, enclosing, or any improve- 
ments, or cleanness. 
Improvements were close at band. In 1633, Scotch land- 
lords had been enabled to get their tithes valued, and to redeem 
them. In 1695 a Scotch Act had been passed for division of 
commons and consolidation of intermixed properties. In 1697 
appeared the first, a Scotch, treatise on agriculture. Donaldson 
