The use of the spade was long looked askance at by English husbandmen; old men in Surrey had told Hartlib that they knew the first gardeners that came into those parts to plant cabbages and 'colleflowers', and to sow turnips, carrots, and parsnips, and that they gave £8 an acre for their land. The latter statement must be an exaggeration, as it is equivalent to a rent of about £40 in our money; but we may give some credence to him when he says that the owner was anxious lest the spade should spoil his ground, 'so ignorant were we of gardening in those days.' Though it was not the case in Elizabeth's time, by now the licorice, saffron, cherries, apples, pears, hops, and cabbages of England were the best in the world; but many things were deficient, for instance, many onions came from Flanders and Spain, madder from Zealand, and roses from France.[322] 'It is a great deficiency in England that we have not more orchards planted. It is true that in Kent, and about London, and in Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, and Worcestershire[323] there are many gallant orchards, but in other country places they are very rare and thin, I know in Kent some advance their ground from 5s. per acre to £5 by this means', and 30 acres of cherries near Sittingbourne had realized £1,000 in one year. His recipe for making old fruit trees bear well savours of a time when old women were still burnt as witches. 'First split his root, then apply a compost of pigeon's dung, lees of wine, or stale wine, and a little brimstone'. The tithes of wine in Gloucestershire were 'in divers parishes considerably great', and wine was then made in Kent and Surrey, notably by Sir Peter Ricard, who made 6 or 8 hogsheads yearly.[324] There is no doubt that the vine has been grown in the open in England from very early times until comparatively recent ones. The Britons were taught to plant it by the Romans in A.D. 280.[325] In Domesday there are 38 examples of vineyards, chiefly in the south central counties. Neckham, who wrote in the twelfth century, says the vineyard was an important adjunct to the mediaeval mansion.[326] William of Malmesbury praised the vines and wine of Gloucestershire; and says that the vine was either allowed to trail on the ground, or trained to small stakes fixed to each plant. Indeed, the mention of them in mediaeval chronicles is frequent.
Two bushels of green grapes in 1332 fetched 7s. 6d.[327] Richard II planted vines in great plenty, according to Stow, within the upper park of Windsor, and sold some part to his people. The wine made in England was sweetened with honey, and probably flavoured and coloured with blackberries.[328] At the dissolution of the monasteries there was a vineyard at Barking Nunnery. 'We might have a reasonable good wine growing in many places of this realme', says Barnaby Googe, about 1577, 'as doubtless we had immediately after the Conquest, tyll, partly by slothfulnesse, partly by civil discord long continued, it was left, and so with time lost.... There is besides Nottingham an ancient house called Chylwel in which remaineth yet as an ancient monument in a great wyndowe of glasse, the whole order of planting, proyning, stamping, and pressing of vines. Upon many cliffes and hills are yet to be seen the rootes and old remaines of vines.' Plot, in his Natural History of Staffordshire,[329] says 'the vine has been improved by Sir Henry Lyttelton at Over (Upper) Arley, which is situate low and warm, so that he has made wine there undistinguishable from the best French by the most judicious palates, but this I suppose was done only in some over hot summer, and Dr. Bathurst made very good claret at Oxon in 1685, a very mean year for the purpose.' In 1720 the famous vineyard at Bath of 6 acres, planted with the 'white muscadene' and the 'black Chester grape,' produced 66 hogsheads of wine worth £10 a hogshead, but in unfavourable years grew very little.'[330] Mr. Peter Collinson, writing from Middlesex in 1747, says, 'the vineyards turn to good profit, much wine being made this year in England;' and again in 1748, 'my vineyards are very ripe; a considerable quantity of wine will this year be made in England.'[331] However, the attempt made to grow vines on the undercliff at Ventnor at the end of the eighteenth century by Sir Richard Worsley ended in dismal failure, and it is probable that the English climate in its normal years seldom produced good grapes out of doors whatever it may have done in exceptionally hot ones, unless we assume that it has changed considerably, for which there is little ground.
Hartlib was no friend of commons; they made the poor idle and trained them for the gallows or beggary, and there were fewest poor where there were fewest commons,[332] as in Kent—a statement re-echoed by many observant writers; he also recommends enclosures, because they gave warmth and consequent fertility to the soil. He tells us that an effort had been made by James I to encourage the growth of mulberry trees and the breeding of silkworms, the lords-lieutenant of the different counties being urged to see to it, but it had little effect.[333]
The number of different sorts of wheat was by this time considerable. Hartlib gives the white, red, bearded ('which is not subject to mildews as others'); some sorts with two rows, others with four and six; some with one ear on a stalk, others with two; the red stalk wheat of Bucks; winter wheat and summer wheat. There were also twenty varieties of peas that he knew, and the white, black, naked. Scotch, and Poland oats. Markham adds the whole straw wheat, the great brown pollard, the white pollard, the organ, the flaxen, and the chilter wheat.
There was a sad lack of enterprise in the breeding of stock now and for many generations before; indeed, it may be doubted if this important branch of farming, except perhaps in the case of sheep, was much attended to until the time of Bakewell and the Collings. In Elizabeth's time a Frenchman had twitted England with having only 3,000 or 4,000 horses worth anything, which was one of the reasons that induced the Spaniards to invade us.[334] 'We are negligent, too, in our kine, that we advance not the best species.'
The size of cattle at this date, however, seems to have been greater than is often stated. The Report of the Select Committee on the Cultivation of Waste Lands in 1795, states that the average weight, dressed, of cattle at Smithfield in 1710 was only 370 lb.,[335] yet the Household Book of Prince Henry at the commencement of the seventeenth century says that an ox should weigh 600 lb. the four quarters, and cost about £9 10s., a sheep about 45 lb., so that the latter were apparently relatively smaller than the oxen. In 1603 oxen were sold at Tostock in Suffolk weighing 1,000 lb. apiece, dead weight.[336] According to the records of Winchester College, the oxen sold there in the middle of the century averaged, dressed, about 575 lb.; in 1677, 35 oxen sold there averaged 730 lb. 'Some kine,' it was said at the end of the century, 'have grown to be very bulky and a great many are sold for £10 or £12 apiece; there was lately sold near Bury a beast for £30, and 'twas fatted with cabbage leaves. An ox near Ripon weighed, dressed, 131/4 cwt.'[337] They were, of course, chiefly valued as beasts of draught, and no doubt the one Evelyn saw in 1649, 'bred in Kent, 17 foot in length, and much higher than I could reach,' was a powerful animal for this purpose. The young ones were taught to draw by yoking two of them, together with two old ones before and two behind, with a man on each side the young ones, 'to keep them in order and speak them fair,' for if much beaten they seldom did well: for the first two or three days they were worked only three or four hours a day, but soon they worked as long as the older ones, that is from 6 to 11, then a bait of hay and rest till 1, with work again till 5, at least in Lancashire. They were kept in the yoke till nine or ten years old, then turned on to the best grass in May, and sold to the butcher.[338]
FOOTNOTES:
[286] Surveyor's Dialogue (ed. 1608), p. 2.
[287] Surveyor's Dialogue, p. 188.
[288] Ibid. p. 207.