[280] Cunningham, _Industry and Commerce_, i. 187.
[283] _Farming Calendar_, from an original MS., printed in _Archaeologia_, xiii. 373 et seq.
'October for wheat-sowing calleth as fast';
'When wheat upon eddish (stubble), ye mind to bestowe Let that be the first of the wheat ye do sowe';
'Who soweth in raine, he shall reap it with tears'.
[285] The writer of the diary probably meant this work should be done in September.
THE GREAT AGRICULTURAL WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--FRUIT GROWING. A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ORCHARD
The seventeenth century is distinguished by a number of agricultural writers whose works, as they afford the best account of the farming of the time, we may be pardoned for freely quoting. The best known of them were, Sir John Norden, Gervase Markham, Sir Richard Weston, Blythe, Hartlib, Sir Hugh Plat, John Evelyn, John Worlidge, and Houghton.
Sir John Norden printed his _Surveyor's Dialogue_ in 1608, which is in the form of a conversation between a farmer and a surveyor, the former at the outset telling the latter that men of his profession were then very unpopular because 'you pry into men's titles and estates, and oftentimes you are the cause that men lose their land, and customs are altered, broken, and sometimes perverted by your means. And above all, you look into the values of men's lands, wherefore the lords of manors do reckon their tenants to a higher rent, and therefore not only I but many poore tenants have good cause to speak against the profession'.[286]
The surveyor attributes the increase in prices to farmers outbidding one another for farms, for the rents of farms and prices grow together; a statement which seems to have been quite true and disposes of the assertion that the landlords raised the rents unfairly, for they were quite entitled to what rent they could get in the open market, the farmers being presumably wise enough not to offer rents which would preclude a profit. He further blames the farmer of his day for being discontented with his lot: in former times 'farmers and their wives were content with mean dyet and base attire and held their children to some austere government, without haunting alehouses, taverns, dice, and cards; now the husbandman will be equal to the yeoman, the yeoman to the gentleman, the gentleman to the squire, and there is at this day thirty times as much vainely spent in a family of like multitude and quality as was in former ages'; a complaint that has been common in all ages. Contrary to what is the practice to-day, and apparently to common sense, the surveyor recommends that open drains be made as narrow above as at the bottom, at the most not more than a foot and a half broad.[287] Hops, he says, were then grown in Suffolk, Essex, and Surrey, 'in your loose and spongie grounds, trenched.' 'Carret' roots were raised in Suffolk and Essex, and beginning to increase in all parts of the realm[288]; but if he alludes to their cultivation in the open field the statement must be taken with considerable qualification, as they were not so grown generally until the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the next.