AGRICULTURE RUTLAND, the smallest county in England, only contains about one hundred and forty- eight square miles, and its extreme length from north-east to south-west is about twenty miles ; its greatest breadth from east to west about sixteen. Its surface is undulating, consisting of ridges of high ground running east and west with rich valleys between the principal being the valley of Catmose to the south of Oakham, and on the north- east is an elevated table-land bordered on the south by the valley of the Wash. The highest point in the county is Manton, between Oakham and Uppingham. The climate is not so moist as that of counties nearer to the rain-clouds of the Atlantic. In the east and south-east the soil is generally light and shallow; the rest of the county consists mainly of a strong rich loam, and in the vale of Catmose the soil is either clay, or loam, or a mixture of the two. The table-land to the north is formed of the great Oolite, which is also found in the rising ground to the south from Stamford to near Uppingham, and the rest of the county is ferruginous sands, with, in many places, super- posed masses of transported gravel. The prevailing redness of the soil, which colours the streams as well, is derived from the ferruginous limestone of the hills, and is said to give its name to the county, but this is very doubtful. The principal industry is agriculture. Some account of the agriculture of Rutland during the Middle Ages will be found in the article on the Social and Economic History of the county, but a number of record sales made at different markets in Rutland from the 14th century onwards have been collected by Professor Thorold Rogers in his Hist, of Agriculture and Prices,^ and may be analysed here. At this period the larger proportion of the arable land of England (and there is no reason to suppose that Rutland differed from the rest of the country) was cultivated on the open-field system, the lord of the manor with the freeholders and villeins all having their strips of land in the three common arable fields, their portions of the meadow land, and their rights in the common pasture and the woodlands. The first Inclosure Act was passed in 1235, but there was no marked tendency towards inclosures until the end of the 15th century. Rutland was considered a rich county agriculturally, if we may judge by the assessment to the wool tax made in 1341, when it was assessed at one sack to 855 acres, one of the highest assessments in England, Leicestershire being rated at a sack to 1,535 acres, and Nottinghamshire at one to 1,605. The year 1344 was one of very low prices for grain everywhere, but Market Overton had the distinction of providing one of the lowest prices for wheat in England, 2s. ^d. a quarter, though in the course of the farming year, which then was reckoned from one Michaelmas to another, it reached t,s. 2^/., the average, however, for England being 31. i)d., about 2s. ^d. below the general price of wlieat during the 14th century. At the same market barley was also low, 2s. id. to 2s. yl. a quarter; oats were is. i>d. to is. Sd., rye 2s., and pulse is. ^d. to is. 6d. On the other hand, wool, then the great product of the English farmer, famous all over Europe, was very dear, selling for 4J. 2d. a stone of 14 lb., about 3^;^. a lb., which has to be multiplied by about fifteen to give its equivalent in modern money. It was also sold at j^d. a fleece, which shows that the local fleece was above the average weight of the time, namely i^ lb. These prices, high as they were, were not abnormal, and in 136 1, also at Market Overton, wool sold at higher rates, 4.S. gd. a stone and 8^d. a fleece. Oxen,^ which were valued chiefly for draught purposes, fetched gs. to 141. 6d. each, a fair price then ; a bull was sold for ijs. and muttons or wethers at is. 6d. each, a little over the average. Apples were only ^d. a bushel, also an ordinary price. The wages of the labourer had not yet been affected by the Great Plague of 1348—9, and from the same record it ' Vol. ii, 118 et seq. ' The ox of this period was probably the small animal now found in Scotland and mountainous districts, weighing about 400 lb. 239
