FOOTNOTES: 

[238] Description of Britain, iii. 2.

[239] Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (New Series), xvii. 235.

[240] Moryson, Itinerary (ed. 1617), iii. 179.

[241] Archaeologia xiii. 371.

[242] In 1650 it was much cultivated about London.

[243] Collections on Husbandry and Trade, ii. 468.

[244] Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 398.

[245] Cunningham, Industry and Commerce, ii. 38.  The Statute of Labourers of 1351 made the same effort, see p. 43.

[246] Thorold Rogers, History of Agriculture and Prices, iv. 120; and Work and Wages, p. 389.

[247] See above.

[248] Thorold Rogers, Work and Wages, pp. 390-1.

[249] Archaeologia, xi. 200.

[250] Thorold Rogers, Six Centuries of Work and Wages, p. 396.

[251] Cullum, Hawsted, p. 215.  It is strange to find food reckoned so highly; if the common labourer at Hawsted received his food, he was only paid 5d. a day in winter, and 6d. in summer; if one man’s food was reckoned at half his wages, how far did the other half go in feeding and clothing his family?

CHAPTER XI

1600-1700

CLOVER AND TURNIPS.—­GREAT RISE IN PRICES.  MORE ENCLOSURE.—­A FARMING
CALENDAR

The seventeenth century was one of considerable progress in English agriculture.  The decay of common-field farming was enabling individual enterprise to have its way.  The population was rapidly growing; by 1688 the returns of the hearth tax prove that the northern counties were nearly as thickly populated as the southern, and prices during the first half were continually rising, though after that they remained almost stationary, since the effect of the influx of precious metals from the New World was exhausted.  In the first half of the century John Smyth ascribes the advance of rents to the Castilian voyages opening the New World, whereby such floods of treasure have flowed into Europe that the rates of Christendom are raised near twentyfold’.

But the greatest agricultural event of the century was the introduction of clover and the encouragement of turnips as grown in Holland, by Sir Richard Weston, about 1645.  No doubt the turnip was already well known in England.  Tusser and Fitzherbert both mention it, apparently as a garden root only; but Gerard in his Herbal, 1597, says it grew in fields ’and divers vineyards or hoppe gardens in most places of England’, which certainly points to an effort having been made generally to use it as a field crop whenever an enclosed space gave it some protection from the depredations of the common herds.  However, its cultivation must have declined, as long after this it was regarded as a