ENGLISH FARMING IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY. 
HE LITERATURE of 
Agriculture in England 
is of small extent and 
antiquity. Farmers have 
never been great readers, 
and, consistently enough, 
have been very meagre 
writers. Indeed, till al- 
most our own days, edu- 
cation was deemed rather prejudicial to the interests 
of agriculture, and it was long thought that the same 
hand could never wield successfully the spade and 
the pen. Our age has exposed this fallacy, and has 
also witnessed the removal of those special obstacles 
which, in earlier times, impeded alike the advance 
of rural economy and the growth of its literature. 
At and after the Norman conquest, the land 
generally was held under the Crown by feudal 
lords, whose attention was almost wholly given to 
those antagonists of agriculture, war and the chase. 
The former devastated the country, and consumed 
its scanty population ; so that in troublesome 
times, the intervals between which were very 
short, the vassals contributed to the fertility of 
the fields almost as much after their deaths as they 
had done in their lives. 
The chase, again, was but little less detrimental 
to the interests of the farmer than were the battle 
and the raid ; for, in order to enjoy it the better, 
the forest remained untouched, or was even en- 
larged, the heath was left wild, the fen undrained, 
and the wild animals only just so much checked as 
to give keener zest to the national love of sport. 
It is not, therefore, very surprising to find the 
condition of English agriculture, during the middle 
ages, characterized as “most miserable.” And, if it 
was slow in emerging from such a state, we must 
remember that, then as now, the more active and 
energetic minds found their most congenial sphere 
in commercial enterprise ; for we need not be 
ashamed to confess that England, so long as she 
has been a great nation, lias been a “ nation 
bontiquiere .” 
Strange as it may sound to modern ears, the 
church must be credited for whatever progress 
English agriculture made before the sixteenth 
century. It proved, in most cases, a better land- 
n. 
lord than the laity ; and its system of leasing lands 
for terms of seven years, with fines on renewal, 
I was far more in advance of contemporary practice 
than it now is behind it. The regular clergy 
strove to counteract the evil influences which were 
at work around them. They reclaimed the wastes 
and cleared the forests, improved the breeds of 
sheep and cattle, and worked with greater intelli- 
gence than their neighbours, inasmuch as they 
were guided by Cato and Virgil, Columella and 
Pliny, and not by the obstructive prejudices and 
traditions which swayed the uneducated. 
But, though they very materially assisted the 
progress of agriculture, their contributions to its 
literature were rather indirect than direct. We 
learn a good deal about their system of farming 
from scattered entries and passages in the account 
rolls of various religious houses ; but no regular 
treatise has come down to us from them. In fact, 
we are indebted, singularly enough, to a member 
of the judicial bench for the first published 
work on English agriculture, written when the 
power of the Church, as an owner and cultivator 
of land, was beginning to decline. 
Sir Anthony Fitzherbert* seems to hold a sort 
of middle place between Cincinnatus and Mr. 
DTsraeli, with this difference that his work was 
composed in “the intervals of business,'’ and not 
in enforced retirement from it. His agricultural 
reputation was certainly not acquired at the 
expense of his legal fame ; for his treatise, Da 
Naturd Brevium , is as strongly commended by 
Blackstone, as his Bolce of Huslanclrie, by Mr. 
Wren-Hoskyns and similar authorities. 
The latter work is indeed full of curious 
information. It contains the experiences of a 
farmer of forty years’ standing, who, though 
ignorant of all the advantages of cross-breeding, 
yet was as practical as the right honourable 
member for Bucks, and, like him, considered 
“ shepe the most profitablest cattell that any man 
can have.” 
* Sir Anthony was the youngest son of Kalph Fitzherbert, 
of Tissington, county Derby. He was made a judge of the 
Court of Common Pleas in 1 522, and retained his seat till 
his death in 1538. 
D 
