The requirements of a foreman on a farm were that he could sow, mow, stack peas, go well with 4 horses, and be accustomed to marketing; and for this when hired by the year he received 5 marks, and perhaps half a crown as earnest money. The next man got 50s., the next 46s. 6d., the fourth 35s. 'Christopher Pearson had the first year he dwelt here £3 5s. 0d. wages per annum and 5s. to a God's penny (earnest money); next year he had £4 wages, and he was both a good seedsman,' before the invention of drills a very valuable qualification, 'and did sow all our seed both the years. When you are about to hire a servant you are to call them aside and talk privately with them concerning their wage, and if the servants stand in the churchyard they usually call them aside and walk to the back side of the church and there treat of their wage. I heard a servant asked what he could do, who made this answer:

"I can sowe,
I can mowe,
And I can stacke;
And I can doe
My master too
When my master turns his backe".'

If we are to judge by the food provided for the thatchers, who were little better than ordinary labourers, the Yorkshire farm-hand fared well on plenty of simple food, his three meals a day consisting of butter, milk, cheese, and either eggs, pies, or bacon, sometimes porridge instead of milk.

Probably, however, few country gentlemen were such industrious farmers as Best; many of them passed their days mostly in hunting and fowling and their evenings in drinking, though we know too that there were exceptions who did not care for this rude existence. Deer hunting, and we must add deer poaching, was the great sport of the wealthy, but the smaller gentry had to be content with simpler forms of the chase. For fox hunting each squire had his own little pack, and hunted only over his own estate and those of his friends. He had also the otter, the badger, and the hare to amuse him. Fowling was conducted, as in the Middle Ages, by hawk or net, for the shot gun had not yet come into use, and was forbidden by an old law.[316] The partridge and pheasant, as now, were the chief game birds. After the Restoration the country gentlemen seem to have been infected by the dissipation of the Court, and farming was left to the tenant farmer and yeoman: 'our gentry', says Pepys, 'have grown ignorant of everything in good husbandry.'

The middle of the seventeenth century was the Golden Age of the yeoman who owned and farmed his land; even at the end of the Stuart period, when their decline had already begun, Gregory King estimated their numbers at 160,000 families, or about one-seventh of the population. The class included all those between the man who owned freehold land worth 40s. a year and the wealthier yeoman who was hardly distinguishable from the small gentleman. Owning their own land they were a sturdy and independent class, and they 'took a jolly pride in voting as in fighting on the opposite side of the neighbouring squire'. 'The yeomanry', wrote Fuller, 'is an estate of people almost peculiar to England;' he 'wears russet clothes but makes golden payment, having tin in his buttons and silver in his pocket He seldom goes abroad, and his credit stretches farther than his travel.' The tenant farmers were nearly as numerous, King estimating them at 150,000 families; economically they were about on a level with the yeoman, their social standing, however, was considerably inferior.

The greatest improvement of the seventeenth century, the introduction from Holland of turnips and clover, was over-estimated by its author, Sir Richard Weston; for he tells his sons that by sowing flax, turnips, and clover they might in five years improve 500 acres of poor land so as to bring in £7,000 a year.[317] To bring about this desirable consummation, he provides his sons with accounts as to the cost, one of which shows the cost of growing an acre of flax and the profit thereon, though this gentleman's estimates are clearly optimistic:

DR.£ s.d.
Devonshiring, i.e. paring and burning100
Lime0120
Ploughing and harrowing060
3 bushels of seed200
Weeding010
Pulling and binding0100
Grassing the seed from the flax060
Watering, drying, swinging, and beating4100
————
£950
========
CR.£s.d.
900 lb. of flax4000
950
————
Balance profit£30150
========

Turnips were to come after flax, and were to be given to the cows as they did in Flanders; that is, wash them clean, put them in a trough where they were to be stamped together with a spitter or small spade; and the turnips were to be followed by clover. All these, says Weston, were already grown in England, but 'there is as much difference between what groweth here and there as is between the same thing which groweth in a garden and that which groweth wild in the fields'. Worlidge soon after recommended that clover be sown on barley or oats about the end of March or in April, and harrowed in, or by itself; and says, with optimism equal to Weston's, one acre of clover will feed you as many cows as 6 acres of ordinary grass and make the milk richer.[318]

It has been noticed that the price of wool altered little during the century, and from the private accounts of Sir Abel Barker[319] of Hambleton, in the County of Rutland, we learn that in 1642 he sold his wool to his 'loving friend Mr. William Gladstone' for £1 a tod, though by 1648 it had gone up to 29s., a good price for those days. During the Civil War some of Barker's horses were carried off for the service of the State, and he values them at £8 a piece, a fair price then. Some years later, for mowing 44 acres of grass he sets down in his account £2 7s. 0d., for making the same £2 3s. 0d., and stacking it 3s.

Simon Hartlib, a Dutchman by birth and a friend of John Milton, published his Legacy in 1651, containing both rash statements and useful information. We certainly cannot believe him when he states that pasture employs more hands than tillage. His estimate of a good crop of wheat was from 12 to 16 bushels per acre, and he speaks strongly of the great fluctuations in prices, for he had known barley sell at Northampton at 6d. a bushel, and within 12 months at 5s., and wheat in London in one year varied from 3s. 6d. to 15s. a bushel. The enormous number of dovecotes was still a great nuisance, and the pigeons were reckoned to eat 6,000,000 quarters of grain annually. Hartlib recommends his countrymen to sow 'a seed commonly called Saint Foine, which in England is as much as to say Holy Hay,' as they do in France: especially on barren lands, advice which some of them followed, and in Wilts., soon after, sainfoin is said to have so improved poor land that from a noble (6s. 8d.) per acre, the rent had increased to 30s.[320] They were also to use 'another sort of fodder which they call La Lucern at Paris for dry and barren grounds'. So wasteful were they of labour in some parts that in Kent were to be seen 12 horses and oxen drawing one plough.[321]