A HISTORY OF RUTLAND The class of farmer known as the ' farm spoiler,' the man who goes from farm to farm exhaustin-T each, was not unknown then, for Crutchley says that most gentlemen of landed property had farms upon their estates in a ruinous condition from such gentry, but the spirit of improvement had increased very much of late years among occupiers of land generally. At the end of the 1 8th century the holdings were not usually very large, one rented at ^^300 or ;^400 being excep- tional, and there were a" great many very small ones. The farm-houses were mostly good, but very inconvenient, being often congregated in villages, a survival of the old common-field system, and the barns cow-houses, etc., were poorly constructed, and their accommodation inadequate. There were many cottages with sufficient land attached for keeping one or two cows, and where- ever this custom prevailed, great benefit was derived from it in the increased comfort of the cottagers themselves and in the lower poor rates paid by owners and occupiers. The rent of cottages varied considerably : in some villages it was possible to obtain a comfortable house with a good garden for /i a year, and the formers of the county were generally well-disposed to the poor, though few allowed their labourers to sow potatoes in the unused corners of the fields as was then customary in many districts. Several gentlemen in the county set an excellent example by farming part or a whole of their land, and were considered the best managers in the county. The open fields, which still occupied so considerable an area, were under the old course of two crops and a fallow, but upon most of the light soils a great improvement had taken place about 1790 by turnips being cultivated on part of the fallows, and fed off with sheep. In some of the open fields in the eastern part of the county, after the fallow, barley with broad clover was sown ; the second year the clover was mown, the third year fed with sheep, then broken up and sown with wheat. The manure was always spread on the fallows, which were never ploughed till spring, for winter ploughing was considered hurtful, and the crops immediately after the fallows were good and clean, but the succeeding ones very much the reverse. Long beam swing ploughs with four or five horses in single file were common, all crops were sown broadcast, and none but the turnips ever hoed. The open-field system was obviously inconvenient and unproductive, to contemporaries as to us, and it is astonishing that many of the best lands in the country should have been suffered to lie so long in an unprofitable state. The end of it however was approaching, for in 1808 we are told there were only eight common-field parishes in the county, an improvement no doubt greatly helped by the high prices then prevailing because of the war."^ On the inclosed lands tillage was almost entirely confined to the light soils, the red loam and the limestone, on the former of which the Norfolk four-course system was customary : (i) turnips ; (2) barley and clover ; (3) clover mown ; (4) wheat ; and on the latter after breaking up the clover there came two crops of spring corn, then turnips followed by barley sown with rye-grass and clover, which were allowed to remain three or four years and grazed principally by sheep. On the light soils light single-wheel and two-furrow ploughs were much used, and two horses only abreast were frequently employed. Crops on the uninclosed land were very uncertain, but on the inclosed, 32 bushels of wheat 36 of barley, 64 of oats, and 40 of beans were an average crop on the red soil, and 24 of wheat, 28 of barley, 36 of oats, on the limestone. The red Lammas wheat, grown almost exclusively in Rutland, was quite famous, and sold largely in Leicestershire for seed at good prices. Thirty-two bushels an acre of wheat was then a good crop, as contemporary writers often estimate the average crop at twenty bushels. Wheat at this time was seldom drilled, and was reaped by the sickle and thrashed with the flail, the price in the county in 1808 being from 755. to 84$. a quarter, about the same as in Mark Lane. Barley was 381. to 42J., oats 305., beans 42^. to 521.'^ Horse-hoeing was practically unknown even for turnips ; beans for instance were hand-hoed, and weeded by the spud and hook, some little by sheep. Potatoes were raised in very small quantities, merely sufficient being grown for domestic use, but in this respect Rutland differed little from the rest of England, for they were not cultivated generally in the field until the Napoleonic war. The favourite turnip was called the White Norfolk Tankard, but the only person in the county to use the drill was Lord Winchilsea, who consequently obtained fine crops. Fifteen to 20 loads of farmyard dung per acre was the common allowance of manure for it, supplemented on the red lands by some lime. The crop was rolled with the plain wooden roll, and hand-hoed two or three times. In 1794 three-fifths of the inclosed land of the county was in permanent pasture, one-half being good feeding land and the rest inferior and used for store cattle, almost the whole of it laid down in the great high ridges, still to be seen in many parts of England, which caused the furrows to be wet and unproductive, and the grass on the tops to be poor and thin. It was asserted by Parkin- son that the management of grazing lands at the commencement of the 19th century was 'much " Richard Parkinson, Gen. Fietv of the Agric. of Rut. 5. "The average price for 1808 of barley was 43*. id., of oats us. 4a'.; Statistics of Bd. of A^ic. (1905), 119. 244
