Landmarlis in British Farming. 
15 
translation of the same work into English verse was extant in 
1420. Grostete’s version of Walter de Henley’s treatise on 
husbandry, and the appearance of Fleta, which is a sort of land- 
owner’s manual and bailiffs vacle mecum, attest the gi’owing 
interest in agriculture as a commercial venture. 
But during the period from the accession of Edward II. to 
that of Henry VII. [1307-1485], farming progress sustained 
a rude check. Long-continued foreign and civil wars, frequent 
famines, repeated outbreaks of plague and pestilence, diminished 
the supply of labour. As the demand exceeded the supply, hired 
labourers required higher wages. Landlords who had exonerated 
their tenants from personal services, and had commuted them 
for fixed money payments, found that they could no longer 
cultivate their own land with profit. They endeavoured to 
revert to the old labour dues, or to raise the quit-rents, 
in order to dispense with the necessity, or procure the means, 
of hiring agricultural labourers. Neither the attempt nor the 
resistance was unnatural. The famine price of food in 1379, 
and the poll-tax of the same year, brought the discontent of the 
industrial classes to a climax. One main object of the insurrec- 
tion of Wat Tyler was the destruction of the Court-Kolls, 
which contained the legal evidence of the labour-rents of copy- 
holders and customary tenants. No sooner was the rising 
suppressed than the attempt was made to adjust by statute the 
disturbed relations between capital and labour. Fresh outbreaks 
were only averted by the Wars of the Roses, and by the dawn 
of the new era which was established at the accession of 
Henry VII. 
Second (Tudor) Period — 1485 to 1600. 
The population had dwindled in the 180 years which preceded 
the battle of Bosworth Field. During the Wars of the Roses, 
villages had been plundered and burned, lands devastated, 
labourers killed, farms abandoned. Gardening died out under 
the stress of Civil War. Queen Catharine, in the reign of 
Henry VIII., was obliged to send to Flanders for a salad. 
Onions and cabbages were found in the ploughman’s broth in 
the thirteenth century; they were, in the reign of Henry VIII., 
chiefiy imported from the Continent. The sister art of agri- 
culture was at a still lower ebb. Rentals of farms had declined 
nominally, and to a greater extent really, upon the rates of the 
thirteenth century. Arable land fetched half as much as 
meadow land. The scarcity and expense of labour, the number 
of fallows, the unvarying rotation of unenclosed farms, the small 
return of corn per acre, the difiiculty of procuring manure, the 
