1760-1783.] AGRICULTURAL CONDITION OF WILTSHIRE. 21 half at the end of the seventeenth century; of four millions and a half at the end of the eighteenth century; and of ten millions and a half at the end of the first half of the nineteenth century. Such quadrupling of the population in the course of a hundred and fifty years is an evidence of the direction of productive labour to manufacturing and commercial industry, in particular districts having an extraordinary command of raw material. We have indicated the partial growth of such employments in the reign of Anne and of George I.* We shall have to show their greater expansion in the first half of the reign of George III. But we desire first to exhibit, during the latter period, how the rapid growth of a trading population was stimulating the employment of capital in the rural districts; and, above all, what a vast field existed for its employment in the direction of science and labour to the neglected tracts and imperfect cultivation of a country capable of a wonderful enlargement of its fertility. In this rapid sketch we shall add an equally brief glance at Scotland and Ireland. William Cobbett, who had an intense enjoyment of rural life, and a power of expressing his pleasure which almost rises into poetry, says he would rather live and farm amongst the Wiltshire Downs, "than on the banks of the Wye in Herefordshire, in the vale of Gloucester, of Worcester, or of Evesham, or even in what the Kentish men call their garden of Eden." He looks with rapture upon the "smooth and verdant downs in hills and valleys of endless variety as to height and depth and shape;" he rejoices in beholding, as he rides along on a bright October morning, the immense flocks of sheep, going out from their several folds to the downs for the day, each having its shepherd and each shepherd his dog. He saw two hundred thousand South-down sheep at Weyhill-fair, brought from the down-farms of Wiltshire and Hampshire.† But upon these down-farms he was surprised to see very large pieces of Swedish and white turnips. The pastoral district was then, some thirty years ago, becoming agricultural. At the present time "the rapid extension of tillage over these high plains threatens before long to leave but little of their original sheep-walks." When the mallard was the chief tenant of the fens, and the bittern of the marshes, large flocks of great bustards ranged over the Wiltshire downs, running with exceeding swiftness, and using their ostrich-like wings to accelerate their speed. They usually fled before the sportsman and the traveller; but they have been known to resent intrusion upon their coverts of charlock or thistles, attacking even a horseman. Wesley, in his "Account of John Haine," one of his enthusiastic followers, relates what was supposed to be a supernatural appearance to reprove the poor man for a paroxysm of religious frenzy. "He saw, in the clear sky, a creature like a swan, but much larger, part black, part brown, which flew at him, went just over his head, and lighting on the ground, at about forty yards' distance, stood staring upon him." The apparition is explained by the author of the "Life of Wesley," to have been a bustard; and he quotes a relation by sir Richard Hoare, of two instances, in 1805, of the bustard attacking a man and a horse. The author of "Ancient Wiltshire" says, that a report of these incidents in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1805, " is probably the last record we Ante, vol. v. chap. i. and ii. "Rural Rides." 22 DORSETSHIRE THE PEASANTRY. [1760-1783. shall find of the existence of this bird upon our downs."* The bustard has now utterly disappeared. He stalks no longer where the furrow has been drawn. Wiltshire is said not to be remarkable in our time for a very high standard of farming. Aubrey says, of England generally, before the year 1649, when experimental philosophy was first cultivated by a club at Oxford, that it was thought not to be good manners for a man to be more knowing than his neighbours and forefathers. "Even to attempt an improvement in husbandry, though it succeeded with profit, was looked upon with an ill eye."+ He applies this character more particularly to Wiltshire. "I will only say of our husbandmen, as sir Thomas Overbury does of the Oxford scholars, that they go after the fashion; that is, when the fashion is almost out they take it up: so our countrymen are very late and very unwilling to learn or to be brought to new improvements." The late Mr. Britton, a Wiltshire man, who edited Aubrey's "Natural History," and wrote a memoir of him, says, "In the days of my own boyhood, nearly seventy years ago, I spent some time at a solitary farmhouse in North Wiltshire, with a grandfather and his family, and can remember the various occupations and practices of the persons employed in the dairy, and on the grazing and corn lands. I never saw either a book or newspaper in the house; nor were any accounts of the farming kept.‡ Dorsetshire, the great county of quarries and of fossil remains-of the Portland stone of which St. Paul's was built, and of the Purbeck marble whose sculptured columns adorn the Temple Church and Salisbury Cathedral— Dorsetshire was eighty years ago a district where agricultural improvements had made little progress. Arthur Young describes its bleak commons, quite waste, but consisting of excellent land; its downs, where sheep were fed without turnip culture; its three courses of corn-crops, and then long seasons of weeds. The Dorsetshire farmers, he implies, held his lessons in contempt, as the warreners and shepherds of Norfolk would have held them half a century before; and would have "smiled at being told of another race arising who should pay ten times their rent, and at the same time make fortunes by so doing." § The downs were not broken up, to any extent, until our own days. The foxes and rabbits have at last been banished from the wastes where a few sheep used to feed amidst the furze and fern. Where one shepherd's boy was kept, five men are now employed. From 1734 to 1769, there had been about five thousand acres inclosed; from 1772 to 1800, about seven thousand acres. During the first half of the eighteenth century, more than fifty thousand acres had been inclosed. || Cranborne Chase, where twelve thousand deer ranged over the lands, and the labourers were systematically poachers, was not inclosed till 1828. The condition of the Dorsetshire peasantry, which was a public reproach, appears to have been essentially connected with " very large tracts of foul land," and with " downs that occupied a large portion of the county." The "mud-walled cottages, composed of road-scrapings and chalk and straw," made the Dorsetshire gentlemen take shame to themselves in 1843; and many set about remedying the Southey "Life of Wesley," vol. ii. p. 124 and p. 192. "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. iii. p. 440. Ibid., p. 103. 1760-1783.] DEVONSHIRE-SOMERSETSHIRE. 23 evil, in the conviction that agricultural prosperity and a wretched and demoralized population could not exist together. Aubrey has an interesting story of the agriculture of the middle of the seventeenth century. "The Devonshire men were the earliest improvers. I heard Oliver Cromwell, Protector, at dinner at Hampton Court, 1657 or 8, tell the lord Arundell of Wardour, and the lord Fitzwilliam, that he had been in all the counties of England, and that the Devonshire husbandry was the best." In 1848, it is written, "It cannot be denied that the farming of Devon is at the present time inferior to that of most of the counties of England." And yet a large proportion of the Devonshire population are, as they always have been, agricultural. The quantity of waste land is very great. Dartmoor contains a quarter of a million of acres, about one half of the wastes of Devonshire. The severity of the climate of Dartmoor is attributed as much to the want of drainage as to its great elevation. Any attempts at cultivating these sterile regions would have been commercially useless in the eighteenth century, when so many fertile districts remained uncultivated. The absolute necessity of supplying the great mining and metal-working population of South Wales with the farm produce that cannot be raised in their own boundaries, may eventually clothe even the barrens of North Devon with fertility. § Somersetshire presented to Arthur Young a signal instance of neglect in its vast ranges of waste. High land and low land were equally unimproved. Leaving Bridgewater on his road to Bath, he passed "within sight of a very remarkable tract of country called King's Sedgmoor." He described this as a flat black peat bog, so rich that its eleven thousand acres wanted nothing but draining to be capable of the highest cultivation. "At present," he says, "it is so encompassed by higher lands that the water has no way to get off but by evaporation. In winter it is a sea, and yields scarce any food, except in very dry summers." || King's Sedgmoor had probably been little changed since 1685, when Monmouth looked from the top of Bridgewater Church on the royal army encamped in the morass, amidst ditches and causeways, and speculated upon a night march by which he should surprise his enemy.¶ Much of this moorland is now under arable cultivation, and contains some of the richest grazing-land of the country.** The Quantock Hills are described by Young as wholly waste; as eighteen thousand acres yielding nothing. This range is now smiling with farms and gentlemen's residences, with woods and plantations. Exmoor, consisting of twenty thousand acres, was crown land, yielding a scanty picking to a few hundred ponies, and summer feed to sheep from neighbouring farms. Even from the time of its inclosure, improvements have been very slowly curtailing the range of the black-cock. The wild stag has not disappeared. A dwindled breed of sheep, kept chiefly for their wool, still occupy the sheep walks. "Sometimes," says Mr. Pusey, "you find a large piece of the best land * "Natural History of Wiltshire," p. 103, Britton's edit. + Ibid., p. 486. § See an interesting paper in "Journal of Bath and West of England Society," vol. xiii. 1860. "Eastern Tour," vol. iv. p. 13. Ante, vol. iv. p. 395. ** "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. xi. p. 698. EXMOOR-CORNWALL. [1760-1783. inclosed with a high fence, and you hope that the owner is about to begin tilling his freehold. On the contrary, the object of this improvement is to keep out the only sign of farming, the sheep, and to preserve the best of the land (because where the land is best the covert is highest) an undisturbed realm for the black-cock." And yet Mr. Pusey saw that Exmoor consisted in great part of sound land; and a farmer said to him, "here is land enough idle to employ the surplus population of England." Every black-cock, in Mr. Pusey's opinion, had cost more than a full-fed ox.* In Somersetshire the disproportion between the population and the amount of agricultural employment is very great. For every 100 acres in this county there were 41 persons returned in the census of 1841; in Norfolk there were 32 persons, and in Lincoln 22, taking the average of the several counties.† Of Cornwall, it need only be remarked that its agriculture, at the end of the last century, was a very secondary object. Fishers and miners constituted the great body of the population. At the present time not more than 7 per cent. are agricultural. The farms were small, as they still are, chiefly cultivated by the occupier and his family. Corn crop formerly followed corn crop till the soil would yield no more. unknown till 1815. But improvement is making its way against old preThe turnip-culture was judices; and the Cornish cultivator may in time be as remarkable for intelligence as the Cornish miner. South Wales, before the war of the French Revolution, grew little corn, and pasturage was the main occupation. The peasantry lived chiefly upon oatmeal and barley-meal. The war came, and corn was grown for export to "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. iv. p. 209. + Ibid., vol. xi. p. 754. 1760-1783.] WALES-WEST MIDLAND COUNTIES. 25 England. The iron works and copper works multiplied; and then South Wales in time became an importing district. North Wales was almost exclusively pastoral. The small sheep ran upon the mountains for three or four years Welsh Sheep. till they were sold to drovers. The lean black cattle could not be fattened where they grew, but were drafted off to the border fairs. A little tillage gradually mingled with the pasturage; but all the modern system of economizing manures for cereal crops, and of feeding stock with green crops, was utterly unknown. Like the cultivators of most mountainous districts, remote from towns, the farmers and the labourers were equally prejudiced and obstinate in their adherence to old practices. Much of this conceit still abides, with the hard diet, and the coarse home-made frieze, of former days. The West Midland counties present few, if any, remarkable agricultural features which it may be proper to notice, with the view to mark the contrast between the past and the present. In Gloucestershire the sheep farms upon the Cotswolds, and the dairies in the valley of the Severn, are not peculiar to recent times. Cider and Perry are produced, as of yore. The Gloucestershire farmer planted his beans, and sometimes his wheat, in drills, before drilling-machines were invented. The Gloucestershire labourer, slowly as he moves, has kept that slow movement with his team, like others of the west, from time immemorial. Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Worcestershire, have not started into good cultivation in the course of half a century, but have gone on steadily improving. One singular example of the slowness with which novel cultivation was extended, and new products were used, has been recorded, by an octogenarian, of his native county of Worcester. The late Mr. Thomas Wright Hill-a man most deservedly venerated in his own day, and whose sons have done service to their country which will not speedily be forgotten-says in an |