Ilistunj of Ihe English Landed Interest. 
739 
The reader should be further reminded of 
“ That noble Chaucer, in those former times, 
Who first enriclied our English with his rhymes.” 
lie has left us perfect, ever fresh illustrations of his period 
1328-1400) drawn to the life : the Canterbury Pilgrims — the 
knight, the yeoman, the Franklin, or Vavasour, the country 
gentleman of the period, the poor parson of a parish, the plough- 
man, and the miller. We have our forefathers and great 
granddames all before us sketched from life as they were in 
Chaucer’s days. 
The Tudor period is fully and graphically treated of by Mr. 
Gamier — the decline of feudalism, the growth of a middle class, 
the stampede then as now of the rural population towards the 
towns. He points out in his preface how under the sun there 
is nothing new — the three acres and a cow of our day is only 
a revival of the prevailing cry in the glorious reign of the great 
Eliza, four acres and a cottage. The forty-third year (IGOl) 
of this glorious reign is ever memorable because of the first 
poor law enactment. The dominating fact of this Tudor era is 
of course the momentum of the intellect-aw^akening Reforma- 
tion : and recalls the contemporary Oxford College distich and 
toast — 
“ Here’s to our founder, Ileurieus Octavus, 
Who always took away more than he gave us.” 
hlr. Gamier has been advised by one of his critics to reprint 
in his projected work on agriculture Tusser’s “ Five Hundred 
Points of Husbandry ; ” to this I demur. I know Tusser’s 
jingling rhymes well ; they are useful no doubt, from a literary 
point of view, in giving historical colour, but I consider them, 
in an agricultural educational sense, practically valueless. A 
man of good education, alternately Church song-man and farmer, 
Tiisser appears to have been a desultory character. Here is a 
contemporary, or nearly contemporaiy, epigram published 1G08 
— ad. Tussenun — 
“ Tusser, they tell me, when thou wert alive. 
Thou, teaching thrift, thyselfe could’st never thrive.” 
The towering intellect of Lord Bacon was in some measure 
directed towards English agriculture and the laws affecting land. 
With wonderful power of packing thought, he gives terse defi- 
nitions such as could only flow from his all-comprehensive 
mind ; amongst other things he defines copyhold, courts, tenure, 
user and property in land, how gotten or transferred. The 
