In reviewing the progress of agriculture in the seventeenth century, the drainage of the fen country of Lincolnshire and the adjoining counties must not be forgotten.  It had been for centuries the scene of drainage operations on a more or less extended scale, few of which, however, met with success; but in the seventeenth century the growing value of land caused a serious revival of these efforts.  Attempts made under Elizabeth and James I had only succeeded in rescuing a certain amount of land for pasture,[280] but in the reign of Charles I the scheme of Cornelius Vermuyden was more successful.  His system, however, was defective, and in the reign of Charles II the Bedford Level was in a lamentable state and in danger of reverting to its primitive condition.  Many of the works too were destroyed by the ‘stiltwalkers’, and in 1793 Maxwell states that out of 44,000 acres of fen land in Huntingdonshire only 8,000 or 10,000 were productive[281]; and in 1794 Stone tells us that the commons round the Isle of Axholme were chiefly covered with water.[282] Still to Vermuyden and his contemporaries must be assigned the credit of the first comprehensive scheme for rescuing these fertile lands from the waters that covered them.

At the commencement of this important century an old calendar of 1606[283] clearly sets forth the farming work of the year:—­

January and February are the best months for ploughing for peas, beans, and oats, and to have peas soon in the year following sow them in the wane of the moon at S. Andrewstide before Christmas; which may be compared to Tusser’s advice for February,

     ’Go plow in the stubble, for now is the season
     For sowing of fitches of beans and of peason.’

’Clean grounds of all such rubbish as briars, brambles, blackthorns, and shrubbs’ (then more often choking the ground than now), which are to be fagoted as good fuel for baking and brewing.

‘Do not plough in rainy weather, for it impoverisheth the earth.’

March and April.  Take up colts from grass to be broken.  Sow beans, peas, and oats.  In these months are all grounds where cattle went in the last winter to be furthed (apparently managed) and cleared and the mole-hills scattered, that the fresh spring of grass may grow better.  All hedges and ditches to be made betwixt ‘severals’, evidently enclosures as distinguished from common fields.  From March 25 to May 1 summer pastures are to be spared, that they may have time to get head before summer cattle be put in.  In the meantime such cattle are to be bestowed in meadows till May Day, and after that date such meadows are to be cleansed and spared until the crops of hay be taken off.  From now till midsummer sell fat cattle and sheep, and with the money buy lean cattle and sheep.  Sow barley.