It must strike the reader that the accusation levelled against the English farmer, of having made little progress in his art from the Middle Ages to the commencement of the reign of George III is hardly warranted.  Their knowledge and skill in their business were evidently such as to make considerable progress inevitable, and then as now they were in some cases assisted by their landlords, as in Herefordshire, where Lord Scudamore, after the assassination of his friend the Duke of Buckingham, devoted his energies to the culture of fruit, and with other public-spirited gentlemen turned that county into ’one entire orchard’, besides improving the pastures and woods[299]; though Hartlib laments that gentlemen try so few experiments for the advancement of agriculture, and that both landowners and farmers instead of communicating their knowledge to each other kept it jealously to themselves.[300] The chief hindrance to landlord and tenant was that the heavy hand of ancient custom lay upon them, with its antiquated communistic system of farming, which still in the greater part of the land of England utterly prevented good husbandry and stifled individual effort.  It was one of these Herefordshire gentlemen.  Rowland Vaughan, who in 1610 wrote what is probably the first account of irrigation in England, though the art was mentioned by Fitzherbert and must have been known in Devon and Hampshire long before his time; indeed, it is another instance of the then isolation of country districts that he speaks as if he had made a new discovery.  He tells us that ’having sojourned two years in his father’s house, wearied in doing nothing and fearing his fortunes had been overthrown, he cast about what was best to be done to retrieve his reputation’.  And one day he saw from a mole-hill on the side of a brook on his property a little stream of water issuing down the working of the mole, which made the ground ‘pleasing green’, and from this he was led on to what he calls ‘the drowning of his lands’.  This was so successful that he improved the value of his estate from L40 to L300 a year, and his neighbours, who of course had first scoffed at him, came to learn from him.  Not many years after ‘drowning’ was said to have become one of the most universal and advantageous improvements in England.[301] Vaughan says that he had counted as many as 300 persons gleaning in one field after harvest, and that in the mountains near eggs were 20 a penny, and a good bullock 26s. 3d., but this was a backward region.[302]

Between 1617 and 1621 the price of wheat fell from 43s. 3d. to 21s. a quarter, and immediately affected the payment of rent.[303] Mr. John Chamberlain, in February, 1620, wrote to Sir Dudley Carleton, ’We are here in a strange state to complain of plenty, but so it is that corn beareth so low a price that farmers are very backward to pay their rents and in many places plead disability:  for remedy whereof the Council have written letters into every shire