26 NORTH MIDLAND-WARWICKSHIRE-LANCASHIRE. [1760-1783. autobiographical fragment, "My uncle had heard of potatoes "-this was about 1750-"perhaps tasted that root. In any case, however, he procured some seed potatoes from a gentleman's gardener near Bewdley, and planted them in his garden. The plants came up, and gave every promise of an excellent crop; but when the time of potatoe harvest arrived, and the tops were well ripened, my uncle gathered a few of their balls, and to his utter disappointment found them anything but good potatoes." The stems withered during the winter. The spring came; and when the good man dug up his supposed unproductive patch, he found that the plant which Raleigh gave to Devonshire, and which was the common food of Lancashire, was worth cultivating.* In Warwickshire, the system of under-drainage was discovered accidentally by Joseph Elkington, of Princethorpe, in 1764. His fields were so wet as to rot his sheep. He endeavoured in vain to drain them by a deep trench, but could not effect any real remedy. He was meditating by the side of his drain, when a man passing with a crow-bar, the inquiring farmer took the tool, and forced it three or four feet below the bottom of his trench, with a view of discovering the nature of the sub-soil. Water burst up when he removed the crow-bar, and ran plentifully into the drain. He acted upon the hint, by boring; rendered his own land fertile; and received a reward of a thousand pounds from Parliament for the improvements consequent upon his discovery.† Staffordshire, the country of potteries and collieries, was too rapidly advancing at the end of the last century in manufactures to exhibit great changes in cultivation. Its wastes, in some parts, are still uncultivated. Cannock Chase, a low ridge of thirteen thousand acres, with the Potteries and the fires of Dudley within view, is described by Mr. Pusey as a fertile wilderness, feeding only a few starving sheep, but capable of being brought under the plough.‡ To speak of Lancashire in connection with agriculture may appear like an attempt to "give to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers." Yet Lancashire was an agricultural county at the period we profess to describe; and its slowly developing manufactures were intimately blended with the occupations of an agricultural population. We shall have to trace the association of the spinning-wheel in the village and the loom in the town, in our next chapter. Meanwhile, before the cotton æra arrived, Southern Lancashire was very imperfectly cultivating the surface of its great coal-fields. The farms were small; the implements rude; the cultivators poor and prejudiced. ChatMoss was, of course, left to its primeval state of desolation, man scarcely daring to tread where the railway now bears its thundering burthens. The middle district, with the exception of Preston, is wholly agricultural, as it was in the last century. On the north of the Ribble, the hill-farmers are a primitive race, differing little from their grandfathers and great grandfathers. Pasturing their black-faced sheep upon the moors, they care little for the quality of the land. They have no green crops, and no farm-yards for their cows in the winter. Turf is their only fuel, and their chief food is the oat * "Remains of T. W. Hill," privately printed, 1859. + Sinclair's "Code of Agriculture." "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. iv. p. 310. 1760-1783.] CHESHIRE-YORKSHIRE. 27 cake, baked on the hot hearth. What these cultivators are now may show what they were eighty years ago. We descend into the district called the Fylde, to the north of the Wyre, and we look upon operations which are now as much a modern triumph for Lancashire as the wealth of her factories. The mosses of this district amount to twenty thousand acres. "From a state of perfect sterility, producing nothing but moor-fowl and snipes, they are now being gradually converted into the most productive land of the kingdom."* Cheshire, like Lancashire, was, for a large portion of the county, in the transition state from agriculture to manufactures, in the middle of the reign of George III. Its rich pastures and its dairy-farms have only been improved in degree, but not in kind. Its arable was imperfectly cultivated, without green crops. One mode of raising the productiveness, both of arable and pasture, was forbidden by a barbarous fiscal policy. The foul or dirtied salt, produced in hundreds of tons by the salt-works of Cheshire, was utterly lost; the heavy duty laid upon refuse salt preventing its use as manure.t To attempt any minute description of the rural condition of Yorkshire, eighty or ninety years ago, divided as that great county is into three ridings, each having many peculiar characteristics of soil and climate, is far beyond the scope of our imperfect sketch of national progress in this department of industry. The great landed proprietors of the time led the way to that course of improvement which has made Yorkshire as remarkable in agriculture as in manufactures. The marquis of Rockingham, the leader of the Whig party, was more successful as a cultivator than as a politician. But, even around Wentworth House, he had to contend with those obsinate prejudices which beset the rich and noble, as well as the poor and lowly, improver. The marquis had to deal with "a set of men of contracted ideas, used to a stated road, with deviations neither to the right nor left." Arthur Young is not describing legislators, but farmers. "His lordship finding that discourse and reasoning could not prevail over the obstinacy of their understandings, determined to convince their eyes." He showed the agriculturists of the West Riding, in the management of two thousand acres of his own lands, what would be the result of draining, of cultivating turnips properly, of using better implements. "Well convinced that argument and persuasion would have little effect with the John Trot geniuses of farming, he determined to set the example of good husbandry as the only probable means of being successful." + In the East Riding we may trace, in the pages of Arthur Young, the beginnings of that extension of the area of cultivation, which has converted a quarter of a million of acres of almost barren hills-the chalk district of the Wolds-into a country of luxuriant harvests, and of pasture and green crops for innumerable herds and flocks. There was a great improver at work upon these wild moors in 1770. Sir Digby Legard, who resided at Ganton, on the edge of the Wolds, experimented upon five thousand acres of uninclosed "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. x. p. 22. + Aikin's "Manchester," p. 45. "Northern Tour," vol. i. pp. 307 to 353. 28 THE MOORS-IMPROVERS. [1760-1783. wold-land near his house. About five hundred acres were in tillage. The land was let at a shilling an acre. The annual value of the corn and wool of the five thousand acres was under 1000l., and they maintained a hundred inhabitants. He was sanguine enough to believe that the same land might, at no great expense, be so cultivated as in a few years to produce a five-fold increase of corn, support twice the number of cattle, and be let at eight times its then rent. Mr. George Legard, in his Prize Essay on the farming of the East Riding, says, "It can be proved that in the very district to which sir Digby Legard refers, the produce of wheat has been doubled, that of oats has been increased five-fold, of barley six-fold; and that wherever skill and capital have been applied to these uncultivated hills, rent has been advanced. even as much as twenty-fold." * Arthur Young rides on, during his Tour, amidst the waste places and the cultivated grounds of Yorkshire, with alternate feelings of regret and of exultation. He passes from Newton by the road " across Hambledon, a tract of country which has not the epithet black given it for nothing; for it is a continued range of black moors, eleven or twelve miles long, and from four to eight broad. It is melancholy to travel through such desolate land, when it is so palpably capable of improvement." After traversing a vast range of dreary waste, he looks down "upon an immense plain, comprehending almost all Cleveland, finely cultivated, the verdure beautiful." About Newbigill he sees "many improvements of moors, by that spirited cultivator, the earl of Darlington." On the road from Bowes to Brough, he deplores that, of a line of twelve miles, through a country exhibiting a fine deep red loam, not more than nine miles are cultivated. "It is extremely melancholy to view such tracts of land, that are indisputably capable of yielding many beneficial crops, lie totally waste; while in many parts of the kingdom farms are so scarce and difficult to be procured, that one is no sooner vacant than twenty applications are immediately made for it." § At Swinton, near Masham, where Mr. Danby had a colliery, upon the edge of his vast moorlands which did not yield him a farthing an acre, Arthur Young saw an example of improvement which showed him of what the land was capable. The proprietor had allowed some of the more industrious of his colliers each to inclose a field out of the moors. Upon one of these humble improvers the agricultural tourist has conferred a fame as truly deserved as that of the Cokes and Bedfords of that age. James Croft, one of the colliers, thirteen years before Young visited the district, began his husbandry by taking an acre of moor. By indefatigable labour he soon raised oats and barley, and obtained fine grass land. He next took eight acres, which he could not cultivate all at once, for the land was full of large stones. But he finally succeeded. When his eulogist saw him he was at work upon eight acres more, attacking the most enormous stones, cutting them in pieces, carrying them away, and then bringing mould to fill the holes up. He had thus brought nine acres into excellent cultivation. He was clearing eight more acres of fresh land, paring and burning, confident of deriving from them an additional support for his family. Had James Croft assistance either of money or "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. ix. p. 95. § Ibid., p. 206. 1760-1783.] JAMES CROFT, THE AGRICULTURAL COLLIER. 20 29 labour? He had done everything with his own hands. He had worked in the mine from twelve o'clock at night to the noon of the next day. "From the time of leaving off work in the mine, till that of sleeping, he regularly spent in unremitting labour on his farm." The enthusiasm of Arthur Young on beholding this marvel of industry becomes eloquent: "Such a conduct required a genius of a peculiar cast. Daring in his courage, and spirited in his ideas, the most extensive plans are neither too vast nor too complicated to be embraced with facility by his bold and comprehensive imagination. The greatest, and indeed the only, object of his thoughts is the improvement of the wilds that surround him, over which he casts an anxious but magnanimous eye, wishing for the freedom to attack, with his own hands, an' enemy, the conquest of whom would yield laurels to a man of ample fortune." * Out of such stuff as James Croft was made of, has arisen that wondrous race of enterprising men of the North who-some from beginnings as humble as this cultivator of the moors-have largely contributed to build up the material prosperity of their country; have contended with prejudice, with jealousy, with dishonesty; have been ridiculed as projectors under the once popular nickname of "conjurors; "—the daring men who, whether as creators of canals and railways, inventors of machines, organizers of factories, adventurous merchants, or spirited cultivators, have brought to their tasks the same qualities as James Croft brought-"a penetration that sees the remotest difficulty; a prudence and firmness of mind that removes every one, the moment it is foreseen." † Young says of his agricultural collier, "his ideas are clear and shining; and though his language is totally unrefined and provincial, insomuch that some attention is necessary to comprehend the plainest of his meaning, yet whoever will take the pains to examine him will find him a genius in husbandry." Considerable attention would certainly have been necessary, if the intelligent Yorkshireman had expressed himself, as to the troubles of a Craven cultivator, in what is represented to have been the language of the country at the beginning of the present century. To the question of farmer Giles, "Whear's yawer Tom ?" neighbour Bridget thus replies: "He's gaan aboon two howers sin weet fadder to git eldin, nabody knaws how far; an th' gaite fray th' moor is seea dree, unbane, and parlous; Lang Rig brow is seea brant, at they're foarced to stang th' cart; an th' wham, boon t' gill heead, is seea mortal sumpy an soft, at it taks cart up tot knaff ommost iv'ry yerd. Gangin ower some heealdin grund, they welted cart ower yesterday, an brack th' barkum, haams, and two felks." The author of "The Craven Dialect says that the inhabitants of this district, pent up by their native mountains, and principally engaged in agricultural pursuits, "had no opportunity of corrupting the purity of their language by the adoption of foreign idioms." He expresses a regret, with which few will sympathize, that, "since the introduction of commerce, and in consequence of that a greater Ibid., p. 299. "Northern Tour," vol. ii. p. 298. From "The Craven Dialect," 1824, p. 6. The following are from the "Glossary" of this curious volume: eldin, fuel; gaite, road; dree, tedious; unbane, distant; parlous, perilous; brant, steep; stang, to put a lever on the wheel; wham, bog; boon, or bane, near; gill, glen; sumpy, wet; tot, the whole; knaff, nave; heealdin, sloping; welted, overturned; barkum, collar made of bark; felks, felloes of a wheel. 30 NORTHERN COUNTIES-DURHAM. [1760-1783 intercourse, the simplicity of the language has, of late years, been much corrupted." The dialect of Craven has taken its departure with the herds of wild white cattle, whose cows hid their young in the ferns and underwood of the wastes of Craven, and whose bulls were hunted by large assemblages of horsemen and their followers on foot, with something of the grandeur of the chase of the middle ages. * The four Northern Counties have many points of interest, especially in the character of their population. Durham was a very neglected agricultural district in the second half of the last century. "Within a comparatively recent period, a large portion of this county was uninclosed and uncultivated, and lay either in wide tracts of desolate moor, or in more sheltered, though equally neglected, 'stinted pastures.'"+ The land under cultivation was universally in want of draining. The farm-yard manures were insufficient, for little stock was kept. The county was indeed famous for a breed of cattle known as the Durham short-horns-animals which were fattened into wonderful size, and were sold at fabulous prices. This breed has been improved into the most esteemed stock of England. Arthur Young is indignant at the wretched breed of sheep that ranged over the Northumberland moors, in flocks as large as forty thousand, which did not pay for their keep more than a shilling or two per head. The millions of acres of improveable moors he holds to be "as waste as when ravaged by the fury of the Scottish borderers." Northumberland contained "large districts, which even within the last eighty years were in a state of nature, * Culley, in Bewick's "Quadrupeds." +"Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. xvii. p. 93. |