There were proofs that man’s inventive genius was at work among farm implements.  Worlidge mentions[347] an engine for setting corn, invented by Gabriel Plat, made of two boards bored with wide holes 4 in. apart, set in a frame, with a funnel to each hole.  It was fitted with iron pins 5 in. long to ‘play up and down’, and dibble holes into which the corn was to go from the funnels.  This machine was so intricate and clumsy that Worlidge found no use for it.  However, he recommends another instrument which certainly seems to anticipate Tull’s drill, though Tull is said to have stated when Bradley showed him a cut of it that it was only a proposal and it never got farther than the cut.[348] It consisted of a frame of small square pieces of timber 2 inches thick; the breadth of the frame 2 feet, the height 18 inches, length 4 feet, placed on four good-sized wheels.  In the middle of the frame a coulter was fixed to make a furrow for the corn, which fell through a wooden pipe behind, that dropped the corn out of a hopper containing about a bushel, the fall of the corn from the hopper being regulated by a wooden wheel in its neck.  The same frame might contain two coulters, pipes, and hoppers, and the instrument could be worked with one horse and one man.  It was considered a great advance on sowing broadcast, and by the use of it ’you may also cover your grain with any rich compost you shall prepare for that purpose, either with pigeon dung, dry or granulated, or any other saline or lixirial (alkaline, or of potash) substance, which may drop after the corn from another hopper behind the one that drops the corn, or from a separate drill’.  The corn thus sown in rows was found easier to weed and hoe, so that it is clear that this advantage was well understood before Tull’s time.

There was a great diversity of ploughs at this date, almost every county having some variation.[349] The principal sorts were the double-wheel plough, useful upon hard land, usually drawn with horses or oxen two abreast, the wheels 18 in. to 20 in. high.  The one-wheel plough, which could be used on almost any sort of land; it was very ‘light and nimble’, so that it could be drawn by one horse and held by one man, and thus ploughed an acre a day.

Then there was a ‘plain plough without either wheel or foot’, very easy to work and fit for any lands; a double plough worked by four horses and two men, of two kinds, one ploughing a double furrow, the other a double depth.

There were also ploughs with a harrow attached, others constructed to plough, sow, and harrow, but not of much value; and a turfing plough for burning sod.  Carts and waggons were of many sorts, according to the locality, the greater wheels of the waggon being usually 18 feet in circumference the lesser 9 feet.  A useful implement was the trenching plough used on grass land to cut out the sides of trenches or drains, with a long handle and beam and with a coulter or knife fixed in it and sometimes a wheel or wheels.  The following is a list of other implements then considered necessary for a farm.