The country was divided into six agricultural divisions, the northern one being represented by Yorkshire in two volumes.  In the first of these, the preface is dated from Pickering, December 21st, 1787, and the second chapter is devoted to an exceedingly interesting account of the broad valley to which Marshall gives the title “The Vale of Pickering.”  When he died in 1818 he was raising a building at Pickering for a College of Agriculture on the lines he had laid down in a book published in 1799.

His proposal for the establishment of a “Board of Agriculture, or more generally of Rural Affairs” was carried out by Parliament in 1793, and so valuable were his books considered that in 1803 most of them were translated into French and published in Paris under the title of “La Maison rustique anglaise.”  The inscription on Marshall’s monument in the north aisle of Pickering church which states that “he was indefatigable in the study of rural economy” and that “he was an excellent mechanic, had a considerable knowledge of most branches of science, particularly of philology, botany and chemistry” is not an over statement of his merits.

[Illustration:  The Ingle-Nook in Gallow Hill Farm near Brompton.  Where Wordsworth stayed just at the time of his marriage with Mary Hutchinson.]

In the year 1800 the little farm at Gallow Hill near Brompton was taken by one Thomas Hutchinson whose sister Mary kept house for him.  She was almost the same age and had been a schoolfellow of the poet Wordsworth at Penrith and had kept up her friendship with his family since that time, having visited them at Racedown and Dove Cottage, while the Wordsworths had stayed at the Hutchinson’s farm at Sockburn-on-Tees.  There was nothing sudden or romantic therefore in the marriage which took place at Brompton in 1802.  Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy went down from London to the pretty Yorkshire village in September, and stayed at the little farmhouse, whose parlour windows looked across the Vale of Pickering to the steep wolds on the southern side.  The house, as far as I can discover, has not been altered in the century which has elapsed, and the cosy ingle-nook in the room on the right of the entrance remains full of memories of the poet and his betrothed—­his “perfect woman, nobly planned.”  On the fourth of October the wedding took place in Brompton Church.  The grey old steeple surrounded and overhung by masses of yellow and brown foliage in the centre of the picturesque, and in many respects, ideal little village, must have formed a perfect setting for the marriage of one who was afterwards to become the Poet Laureate of his country.  The register for the years 1754-1810 contains the following entry:—­

“Banns of Marriage ...

William Wordsworth of Grasmere in Westmoreland, Gentleman, and Mary Hutchinson of Gallow Hill in the Parish of Brompton were married in this Church by Licence this fourth Day of October in the year one thousand eight Hundred and two by me John Ellis officiating min^r.