CHAPTER XIII
EUROPEAN SOCIETY IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
AGRICULTURE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
[Sidenote: General Backwardness]
If some "Rip Van Winkle" of the sixteenth century could have slept for two centuries to awake in 1750, he would have found far less to marvel at in the common life of the people than would one of us. Much of the farming, even of the weaving, buying, and selling, was done just as it had been done centuries before; and the great changes that were to revolutionize the life and work of the people were as yet hardly dreamed of. In fact, there was so much in common between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, that the reader who has already made himself familiar with the manor and the gild, as described in Chapter II, will find himself quite at home in the "old regime," as the order of things in the eighteenth century is now termed.
One might still see the countless little agricultural villages and manor houses nestling among the hills or dotting the plains, surrounded by green fields and fringed with forest or wasteland. The simple villagers still cultivated their strips in the common fields in the time-honored way, working hard for meager returns. A third of the land stood idle every year; it often took a whole day merely to scratch the surface of a single acre with the rude wooden plow then in use; cattle were killed off in the autumn for want of good hay; fertilizers were only crudely applied, if at all; many a humble peasant was content if his bushel of seed brought him three bushels of grain, and was proud if his fatted ox weighed over four hundred pounds, though a modern farmer would grumble at results three or four times as good.
[Sidenote: "Gentlemen Farmers" and "Husbandry">[
[Sidenote: "Rotation of Crops">[
There were some enterprising and prosperous landowners who used newer and better methods, and even wrote books about "husbandry," as agriculture was called. The Dutch, especially, learned to cultivate their narrow territory carefully, and from them English farmers learned many secrets of tillage. They grew clover and "artificial grasses"—such as rye—for their cattle, cultivated turnips for winter fodder, tilled the soil more thoroughly, used fertilizers more diligently, and even learned how to shift their crops from field to field according to a regular plan, so that the soil would not lose its fertility and would not have to be left idle or "fallow" every third year.
[Sidenote: Survival of Primitive Methods]
These new methods were all very fine for "gentlemen farmers," but for the average peasant the old "open-field" system was an effective barrier to progress. He could not plant new crops on his strips in the grain fields, for custom forbade it; he could not breed his cows scientifically, while they ran in with the rest of the village cattle. At best he could only work hard and pray that his cows would not catch contagion from the rest, and that the weeds from his neighbor's wheat- patch might not spread into his own, for between such patches there was neither wall nor fence.