616 
Smail Holdings in France. 
masses and the absence of hedges and hedgerow timber, cutting the 
lines of the landscape into squares as with us, make up a highly 
effective picture. To the agricultural eye, it suggests obvious difficulty 
in turning out stock to graze, except sheep within hurdles. 
Just as the trees are all massed into woods, so are all the farm- 
houses and cottages congregated into villages, to the serious detri- 
ment of the more distant portions of the territory of each, which 
get little or no manure. 
Unfortunately beet-root culture is rapidly diminishing in this 
district — the western division of the department of La Somme, of 
which Amiens is the chief town. As no turnips are grown, the soil, 
which is light (the sub-soil being chalk), is becoming rapidly ex- 
hausted, from the habit of taking two straw crops in succession. 
Clovers, tares, and occasional fallows, preparing for mangel, alter- 
nate with the strips of wheat, rye and spring corn. But the clovers 
are seldom fed off on the land, which only gets an occasional night- 
folding by sheep, which have picked up a precarious living off the 
grass slopes of the terraces, or any other bit of waste ground, in the 
day time. Such more remunerative crops as flax, hemp, colza, &c., 
are now rarely grown. 
In the course of a three-hours’ drive westwards from Amiens to 
Molliens-Vidame over the district described above, I am confident 
that I did not see a dozen peasants at any kind of work in tlie fields, 
and those few were mostly women. The absence of root cultivation 
would largely account for this, but there should have been a good 
deal of hoeing going on in the corn. 
On the chalk range between Hitchin and Newmarket uninclosed 
parishes presenting precisely similar features, i.e. countless narrow 
strips, varying from half an acre to an acre or two, divided by grass 
balks, are still to be seen. But in England these features are sur- 
vivals of what was, according to Mr. Seebohm, two hundred years 
ago almost universal over a great part of this country. In France, as 
every tourist can see at a glance, the narrow strips are still well-nigh 
universal, but it was reserved to Mr. Seebohm to draw attention 
to their remote antiquity. 
The legislation on the subject of land-tenure has been diame- 
trically opposite in the two countries. In England the Enclosure 
Acts have left few specimens of the primitive common field patch- 
work agriculture. In France, the influence of the Code Napoleon 
has still further subdivided the strips it found in existence. 
Having given a general description of the aspect of the country 
for many miles around Amiens (the description would apply almost 
equally to the region extending to Rheims, a hundred miles to the 
eastward), I will proceed to give a somewhat detailed description of 
the commune of Vraignes, lying a few miles westward of Molliens- 
Vidame, and adjacent to the town of Hornoy, chef-lieu du canton. 
It may be convenient that I should state here the administrative 
divisions of France, viz. : the Commune, Canton, Arrondissement, 
Department. Each commune, arrondissement, and department has 
its separate council, called respectively : Conseil Municipal, Conseil 
