familiar with drill-ploughs and horse-hoes." Gray, in 1766, was surprised at the beauty of the road to Canterbury. "The whole country is a rich and well cultivated garden; orchards, cherry grounds, hop grounds, intermixed with corn and frequent villages." Arthur Young enters Sussex in a pleasant mood. The roads from Rye to Hawkhurst were good; the villages numerous, with neat cottages and well-kept gardens. He speaks as if such a sight were rare : "One's humanity is touched with pleasure to see cottages the residence of cheerfulness and content." The iron furnaces of wooded Sussex were not then superseded by the coal of the midland districts. The Downs then carried that breed of sheep whose value has never been impaired. The Isle of Wight did not disappoint his expectation of finding "much entertainment in excellent husbandry." Of the New Forest, that vast tract which has so long been suffered to run to waste, under the pretence of furnishing a supply of oak for the navy, Arthur Young said, what many have since repeated, "there is not a shadow of a reason for leaving it in its present melancholy state." Much of the pictur esqueness which Gilpin described is gone. The hundreds of hogs, under the care of one swineherd, led out to feed on the beech-mast during the "pawnage month" of October, no longer excite the wonder of the pedestrian. Some of the old romance of Hampshire has also vanished. The deer-stealers of the time of George I., known as the Waltham Blacks,-for whose prevention a special statute was made, §-were not quite extinct in the days of Gilbert White. They are gone, with the Wolmer Forest and Waltham Chase that tempted their depredations. In Berkshire the king was setting a good example to the agricultural portion of his subjects, and earning the honourable name of "Farmer George." In the Great Park of Windsor he had his "Flemish Farm," and his "Norfolk Farm." He was a contributor to Young's "Annals of Agriculture," under the signature of "Ralph Robinson." Meanwhile the Forest of Windsor exhibited one of the many examples of a vast tract wholly neglected or imperfectly cultivated. It comprised a circuit of fifty-six miles, containing twenty-four thousand acres of uninclosed land. It was not till 1813 that an Act of Parliament was passed for its inclosure. Much of this district was that desolate tract of sand, known as Bagshot Heath and Easthampstead Plain; but very large portions, where only fern and thistles grew, were capable of cultivation. "Eastern Tour," vol. iii. p. 108. * "Eastern Tour," vol. iii. p. 125. + Letter to Wharton. § 21 Geo. I. WINDSOR FOREST. 317 Much has been turned into arable; more has been devoted to the growth of timber, under the direction of the Office of Woods and Forests. Vast plantations have been formed of oak and fir; plains, where a large army might have manœuvred fifty years ago, are covered with hundreds of thousands of vigorous saplings; heaths, where a few straggling hawthorns used to be the landmarks of the traveller, are now one sea of pine. The farms, scattered about the seventeen parishes of the Forest, were small. The cultivation was of a very unscientific character. The manners of the farmers and their in-door laborers were as primitive as their turf fires. This obsolete homeliness is as rare now as the thymy fragrance of the thin smoke that curled out of the forest chimneys. The large kitchen, where the master and mistress dwelt in simple companionship with their men and their maidens; the great oaken-table which groaned with the plentiful Sunday dinner-the one dinner of fresh meat during the week: the huge basins of milk and brown bread for the ploughman and the carter and the plough-boy before they went a-field; the cricket after work in summer, and the song and chorus in the common room as the day grew shortthese are pleasant to remember amidst the other changed things of a past generation. "The scenes which live in my recollection can never come back; nor is it fitting that they should. With the primitive simplicity there was also a good deal of primitive waste and carelessness. Except in the dairy, dirt and litter were the accompaniments of the rude housekeeping. The fields were imperfectly cultivated; the headlands were full of weeds. I have no doubt that all is changed, or the farm would be no longer a farm." ** Once upon a Time," by Charles Knight. CHAPTER XVIII. Agricultural condition of the South Western Counties.-Wiltshire.-Dorsetshire.-Devonshire. Somersetshire.- Cornwall.-Wales.-The West Midland Counties.-The North Midland.-Yorkshire.-Improvers of the Moors.-James Croft, an agricultural collier. Northern Counties. -Durham.- Northumberland.-Westmorland. - The Lake District.-Agricultural condition of Scotland.-The Lothians-Sheep flocks.— Ayrshire.-Burns.-Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire.-North-western parts.-Agricul tural condition of Ireland.-The potato cultivation. CONFINING, for the present, our general view of the remaining moiety of England to its pastoral and agricultural condition before the end of the eighteenth century, we proceed to the South Western, the West Midland, the North Western, and the North counties; also including Wales. Those divisions of the country contained a population of about two millions and a half at the end of the seventeenth century; of four millions and a half at the end of the eighteenth century; and of ten millions and a half at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. Such quadrupling of the population in the course of a hundred and fifty years is an evidence of the direction of productive labour to manufacturing and commercial industry, in particular districts having an extraordinary command of raw material. We have indicated the partial growth of such employments in the reign of Anne and of George I.* We shall have to show their greater expansion in the first half of the reign of George III. But we desire first to exhibit, during the latter period, how the rapid growth of a trading population was stimulating the employment of capital in the rural districts; and above all, what a vast field existed for its employment in the direction of science and labour to the neglected tracts and imperfect cultivation of a country capable of a wonderful enlargement of its fertility. In this rapid sketch we shall add an equally brief glance at Scotland and Ireland. William Cobbett, who had an intense enjoyment of rural life, and a power of expressing his pleasure which almost rises into poetry, says he would rather live and farm amongst the Wiltshire Downs, "than on the banks of the Wye in Herefordshire, in the vale of Gloucester, of Worcester, or of Evesham, or even in what * Ante, vol. iv. chap. xix. and xx. AGRICULTURAL CONDITION OF WILTSHIRE. 319 the Kentish men call their garden of Eden." He looks with rapture upon the "smooth and verdant downs in hills and vallies of endless variety as to height and depth and shape;" he rejoices in beholding. as he rides along on a bright October morning, the immense flocks of sheep, going out from their several folds to the downs for the day, each having its shepherd and each shepherd his dog. He saw two hundred thousand South-down sheep at Weyhill-fair, brought from the down-farms of Wiltshire and Hampshire.* But upon these down-farms he was surprised to see very large pieces of Swedish and white turnips. The pastoral district was then, some thirty years ago, becoming agricultural. At the present time "the rapid extension of tillage over these high plains threatens before long to leave but little of their original sheep-walks." When the mallard was the chief tenant of the fens, and the bittern of the marshes, large flocks of great bustards ranged over the Wiltshire downs, running with exceeding swiftness, and using their ostrich-like wings to accelerate their speed. They usually fled before the sportsman and the traveller; but they have been known to resent intrusion upon their coverts of charlock or thistles, attacking even a horseman. Wesley, in his "Account of John Haine," one of his enthusiastic followers, relates what was supposed to be a supernatural appearance to reprove the poor man for a paroxysm of religious frenzy. "He saw, in the clear sky, a creature like a swan, but much larger, part black, part brown, which flew at him, went just over his head, and lighting on the ground, at about forty yards' distance, stood staring upon him" The apparition is explained by the author of the "Life of Wesley," to have been a bustard; and he quotes a relation by sir Richard Hoare, of two instances, in 1805, of the bustard attacking a man and a horse. The author of "Ancient Wiltshire " says, that a report of these incidents in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1805, "is probably the last record we shall find of the existence of this bird upon our downs." The bustard has now utterly disappeared. He stalks no longer where the furrow has been drawn. Wiltshire is said not to be remarkable in our time for a very high standard of farming. Aubrey says, of England generally, before the year 1649, when experimental philosophy was first cultivated by a club at Oxford that it was thought not to be good manners for a man to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers. "Even to attempt an improvement in husbandry, "Rural Rides." "Quarterly Review," vol. ciii. p. 135. Southey-"Life of Wesley," vol, ii. p. 124 and p. 192. though it succeeded with profit, was looked upon with an ill eye.” He applies this character more particularly to Wiltshire. I will only say of our husbandmen, as sir Thomas Overbury does of the Oxford scholars, that they go after the fashion; that is, when the fashion is almost out they take it up: so our countrymen are very late and very unwilling to learn or to be brought to new improvements." The late Mr. Britton, a Wiltshire man, who edited Aubrey's "Natural History," and wrote a memoir of him, says, “In the days of my own boyhood, nearly seventy years ago, I spent some time at a solitary farmhouse in North Wiltshire, with a grandfather and his family, and can remember the various occupations and practices of the persons employed in the dairy, and on the grazing and corn lands. I never saw either a book or newspaper in the house; nor were any accounts of the farming kept.† Dorsetshire, the great county of quarries and of fossil remains of the Portland stone of which St. Paul's was built, and of the Purbeck marble whose sculptured columns adorn the Temple Church and Salisbury Cathedral-Dorsetshire was eighty years ago a district where agricultural improvements had made little progress. Arthur Young describes its bleak commons, quite waste, but consisting of excellent land; its downs, where sheep were fed without turnip culture; its three courses of corn-crop, and then long seasons of weeds. The Dorsetshire farmers, he replies, held his lessons in contempt, as the warreners and shepherds of Norfolk would have held them half a century before; and would have "smiled at being told of another race arising who should pay ten times their rent, and at the same time make fortunes by so doing." The downs were not broken up, to any extent, until our own days. The foxes and rabbits have at last been banished from the wastes where a few sheep used to feed amidst the furze and fern. Where one shepherd's boy was kept, five men are now employed. From 1734 to 1769, there had been about five thousand acres inclosed; from 1772 to 1800, about seven thousand acres. During the first half of the eighteenth century, more than fifty thousand acres had been inclosed.§ Cranborne Chase, where twelve thousand deer ranged over the lands, and the labourers were systematically poachers, was not inclosed till 1828. The condition of the Dorsetshire peasantry, which was a public reproach, appears to have been essentially connected with "very large tracts of foul land," and with "downs that occupied a large portion of the county." The "mud↑ Ibid., p. 103. "Natural History of Wiltshire," Preface, edit. 1847. "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. iii. p. 440. |