[Footnote 82:  Although Varro advises the first ploughing in the spring, the ancients were not unmindful of the advantages of winter ploughing of stiff and heavy clay.  Theophrastus, who died in B.C. 287, advises it “that the earth may feel the cold.”  Indeed, he was fully alive to the reasons urged by the modern professors of agronomy for intensive cultivation.  “For the soil,” he says (C.P.  III, 25), “often inverted becomes free, light and clear of weeds, so that it can most easily afford nourishment.”

King Solomon gives the same advice, “The sluggard will not plough by reason of the winter, therefore shall he begin harvest and have nothing.” Proverbs, XX, 4.]

[Footnote 83:  The Romans understood the advantages of thorough cultivation of the soil.  As appears from the text, they habitually broke up a sod in the spring, ploughed it again at midsummer, and once more in September before seeding.  Pliny prescribes that the first ploughing should be nine inches deep, and says that the Etruscans some times ploughed their stiff clay as many as nine times.  The accepted Roman reason for this was the eradication of weeds, but it also accomplished in some measure the purpose of “dry farming”—­the conservation of the moisture content of the soil, as that had been practised for countless generations in the sandy Valley of Mesopotamia.  Varro makes no exception to this rule, but Virgil was here, as in other instances, induced to depart from Varro’s wisdom, with the result that he imposed upon Roman agriculture several thoroughly bad practices.  Thus, while he applies Varro ploughing rules to rich land and bids the farmer “exercetque frequens tellurem atque imperat arvis,” he says (Geo. I, 62) that it will suffice to give sandy land a single shallow ploughing in September immediately before seeding, for fear, forsooth, that the summer suns will evaporate whatever moisture there is in it!  Again, Virgil recommends, what Varro does not, cross-ploughing and burning the stubble and Virgil’s advice was generally followed.

In William Benson’s edition (1725) of the Georgics “with notes critical and rustick,” it is stated that “the husbandry of England in general is Virgilian, which is shown by paring and burning the surface:  by raftering and cross-ploughing, and that in those parts of England where the Romans principally inhabited all along the Southern coast Latin words remain to this hour among shepherds and ploughmen in their rustick affairs:  and what will seem more strange at first sight to affirm though in fact really true, there is more of Virgil’s husbandry put in practice in England at this instant than in Italy itself.”  That this was the fact in the thirteenth century is clear from the quotations we have made from Walter of Henley’s Dite de Hosebondrie.  Cf. also Sir Anthony Fitzherbert and the account of the manorial system of farming in England in Prothero’s English Farming Past and Present.