17601-783.3

LINCOLN HEATH AND THE WOLDS.

15

work went on, more or less prosperously. But the waters sometimes broke down the embankments, and scientific engineering, with all the powers of the giant steam, was not applied till very recent times. Mr. Pusey considers that "though the body of stagnant water was greatly reduced, still it was not subdued, so that the fen land was worth little, even when George III. came to the throne." * In 1800 it was stated that more than 300,000 acres in Lincolnshire suffered, on an average, a loss of 300,000l. a year for want of an efficient drainage. Mr. Rennie looked upon the wide waste with the comprehensive glance of science, and saw that the outfall to the sea was not sufficient to carry off both the waters of the low lands, and of the rising slope which surrounded the whole margin of the Fen. He made a separate channel to carry off the upland waters. The great invention of Watt pumped out the water into the artificial rivers, instead of the feeble wind-mills that did the work imperfectly in the eighteenth century, a plan first introduced in the reign of George I. The whole land has been made dry. Districts growing nothing but osiers, three feet deep in water, and reeds filled with waterfowls; watery deserts of sedge and rushes, inhabited by frogs and bitternsthese now bear splendid crops of corn. Sheep are no longer carried to islets of rank pasture in flat-bottomed boats; cows are no longer turned out of their hovels, to forage for a morsel of food, swimming rivers and wading up to their middles. The cattle were as wretched as the wild inhabitants of the isolated huts to whom they belonged.† "Since the drainage of the Fens numerous villages have sprung up where previously was nothing but a watery waste, without house or inhabitant, and several of the bordering towns have doubled their population." The effect of these vast changes upon the health of the people of this district, seventy miles in length, and from twenty to forty miles in breadth, is no less important than the additions they have made to the productive power of the country.

The fens of Lincolnshire are not the only portions of that great county which have been reclaimed from barrenness to fertility. On a sunny November morning of 1842, Mr. Pusey, having journeyed through a high level tract from Sleaford towards Lincoln, stood under a tall column by the road side, about four miles from Lincoln, on which it is recorded that it was erected for the public utility in the year 1751. That column, says the great agricultural reformer, was a land lighthouse," built "as a nightly guide for travellers over the dreary waste which still retains the name of Lincoln Heath, but is now converted into a pattern of farming." The district over which he had passed was a cultivated exuberance such as he had never seen before. Thousands after thousands of long-woolled sheep were feeding in netted folds upon the most luxuriant turnips. Every neatly built farmhouse, with its spacious courts, was surrounded with abundant ricks. And yet the farms were not large; the land showed no marks of natural fertility. Most justly does Mr. Pusey say, "This Dunston pillar, lighted no longer time back for so singular a purpose, did appear to me a striking witness of the spirit and industry which in our own days have reared the thriving homesteads around it, and spread a mantle of teeming vegetation to its very base."

16

NOTTINGHAMSHIRE-SHERWOOD-DERBYSHIRE.

[1760-1783.

Beyond Dunston pillar, he continued to see the same "beautiful farms" till he reached Lincoln. Passing through the Roman arch, he travelled by the old Ermine street for twenty miles, along North Lincoln Heath, where similar neat inclosures, heavy turnip crops, numerous flocks, spacious farm-buildings, and crowded corn-ricks, met his gaze. Through the whole day he saw to the right a long range of hills running parallel to the Heath, from south to north. These were the Wolds of Lincolnshire, where the same high farming prevailed. "This vast tract of hill land had been redeemed, like the Heath, from nearly equal desolation within living memory." About 1760, Arthur Young saw this great district of the Wolds, and writes, "it was all warren for thirty miles, from Spilsby to Caistor." In 1799 he beholds great improvement. By means of turnips and seeds there are now at least twenty sheep kept to one there before." But there were then still many miles of waste on the same range of hills; and the farmers said the land was "good for nothing but rabbits." This district, nearly as large as the county of Bedford, has now been added to the corn-land of England.*

66

In the county of Nottingham, Arthur Young saw little to admire. The quantity of good land which was in an improved state of culture was small, in comparison of the lands which were almost uncultivated. These light soils were called "forest land," being part of the vast tract of the old forest of Sherwood. In 1794, when a Report of the Agriculture of this county was published, the greater portion was still a sandy waste, divested, for the most part, of its ancient oaks, and no longer affording covert to the stag and the roe-no longer the hunting ground which would suggest memories of Robin Hood and his merry men. In the time of Camden, the woods were much thinner than of old. Few uncleared spots now remain. But half a century ago Sherwood Forest presented nothing but desolation. "As the forest was cleared of its stately trees it was left one wide waste, so naturally sterile, as scarcely to have the power of clothing itself with the scantiest vegetation; even in the present day some districts remain which bear testimony to its former sterility." But art has triumphed over nature. Where only rabbits. once browsed, large flocks of sheep are now fed. The gorse and the form have been driven out by the turnip and the alternate wheat crops. The introduction of the Swede turnip has mainly produced the improved farming of Nottinghamshire. At the extreme northern part of the county, six thousand acres of bog-land, called "The Cars," were attempted to be reclaimed about the beginning of the century. The success of the effort was very imperfect. The difficulty of drainage threatened again to throw the morass out of cultivation. The steam-engine at last effected what drains without its aid could not accomplish.‡

The agriculture of Derbyshire has derived its great impulse from the progress of the cotton manufacture. The first cotton-mill was established upon the Derwent, at Cromford, near Matlock, by Arkwright. The streams. of this beautiful county were soon employed in driving the spindles of the

* See Mr. Pusey's most interesting paper in "Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. iv. p. 287.

+"Eastern Tour," vol. i. p. 427.

"Journal of Royal Agricultural Society," vol. vi.

1760-1783.]

SURREY-MIDDLESEX-KENT.

17

spinning frame. Large factories were established in rural districts. The new population gave a stimulus to the industry of the cultivator. "Agriculture and manufactures joined hands." *

Our glance at the rural economy of the South-Eastern Counties must be very rapid. Surrey has made no remarkable strides in improvement. Its "barrens" are probably now more extensive than in any other county of southern England. The mutton of Banstead Downs used to be famous; but a great landowner of that district says that this Common, as well as Walton Heath, not now worth 3d. or 4d. an acre, would be worth 14s. an acre if inclosed. We should, perhaps somewhat selfishly, grudge this gain; for round a metropolis of three millions of people we want the old wide breathingMiddlesex is described in the Agricultural Survey of 1798, as abounding in Commons, the constant rendezvous of gipsies and strollers, and the resort of footpads and highwaymen. Finchley Common and Hounslow Heath were, at the end of the last century, the terror of all travellers. Gibbets, by the way-side, told their horrible tale of the absence of prevention and the ineffectiveness of punishment. The grass farms to the north of London were the admiration of Arthur Young in 1770. Enfield Chase, a vast useless tract of fine land, he regarded as a nuisance. East Kent, and the Isle of Thanet, have the admiration of this excellent judge: "This tract of country has long been reckoned the best cultivated in England, and it has no

slight pretensions to that character. Their drill-husbandry is most peculiar; it must astonish strangers to find such numbers of common farmers, that have more drilled crops than broad-cast ones, and to see them so familiar

18

SUSSEX-HANTS-BERKSHIRE.

[1760-1783. with drill-ploughs and horse-hoes.*" Gray, in 1766, was surprised at the beauty of the road to Canterbury. "The whole country is a rich and well cultivated garden; orchards, cherry grounds, hop grounds, intermixed with corn and frequent villages." + Arthur Young enters Sussex in a pleasant mood. The roads from Rye to Hawkhurst were good; the villages numerous, with neat cottages and well-kept gardens. He speaks as if such a sight were rare: "One's humanity is touched with pleasure to see cottages the residence of cheerfulness and content."‡. The iron furnaces of wooded Sussex were not then superseded by the coal of the midland districts. The Downs then carried that breed of sheep whose value has never been impaired. The Isle of Wight did not disappoint his expectation of finding “much entertainment in excellent husbandry." Of the New Forest, that vast tract which has so long been suffered to run to waste, under the pretence of furnishing a supply of oak for the navy, Arthur Young said, what many have since repeated, "there is not a shadow of a reason for leaving it in its present melancholy state." Much of the picturesqueness which Gilpin described is gone. The hundreds of hogs, under the care of one swineherd, led out to feed on the beech-mast during the "pawnage month" of October, no longer excite the wonder of the pedestrian. Some of the old romance of Hampshire has also vanished. The deer-stealers of the time of George I., known as the Waltham Blacks,-for whose prevention a special statute was made,§ -were not quite extinct in the days of Gilbert White. They are gone, with the Wolmer Forest and Waltham Chase that tempted their depredations.

In Berkshire, the king was setting a good example to the agricultural portion of his subjects, and earning the honourable name of "Farmer George." In the Great Park of Windsor he had his "Flemish Farm," and his "Norfolk Farm." He was a contributor to Young's "Annals of Agriculture," under the signature of "Ralph Robinson." Meanwhile the Forest of Windsor exhibited one of the many examples of a vast tract wholly neglected or imperfectly cultivated. It comprised a circuit of fifty-six miles, containing twenty-four thousand acres of uninclosed land. It was not till 1813 that an Act of Parliament was passed for its inclosure. Much of this district was that desolate tract of sand, known as Bagshot Heath and Easthampstead Plain; but very large portions, where only fern and thistles grew, were capable of cultivation. Much has been turned into arable; more has been devoted to the growth of timber, under the direction of the Office of Woods and Forests. Vast plantations have been formed of oak and fir; plains, where a large army might have manoeuvred fifty years ago, are covered with hundreds of thousands of vigorous saplings; heaths, where a few straggling hawthorns used to be the landmarks of the traveller, are now one sea of pine. The farms, scattered about the seventeen parishes of the Forest, were small. The cultivation was of a very unscientific character. The manners of the farmers and their in-door labourers were as primitive as their turf fires. This obsolete homeliness is as rare now as the thymy fragrance of the thin smoke that curled out of the forest chimneys. The large kitchen, where the master and mistress dwelt in simple companionship with their men and

1760-1783.]

WINDSOR FOREST.

19

their maidens; the great oaken-table which groaned with the plentiful Sunday dinner-the one dinner of fresh meat during the week; the huge basins of milk and brown bread for the ploughman and the carter and the plough-boy before they went a-field; the cricket after work in summer, and the song and chorus in the common room as the days grew short-these are pleasant to remember amidst the other changed things of a past generation. "The scenes which live in my recollection can never come back; nor is it fitting that they should. With the primitive simplicity there was also a good deal of primitive waste and carelessness. Except in the dairy, dirt and litter were the accompaniments of the rude housekeeping. The fields were imperfectly cultivated; the headlands were full of weeds. I have no doubt that all is changed, or the farm would be no longer a farm." *