The Old English Farming Books From Fitzherbert To Tull 1523 To 1730

By G. E. Fussell

“The Old English Faring Books” explores the history of English farming, exploring notable authors and the developments in agriculture that they were arguably responsible for. Beginning with “Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbondrye”, first published in 1523, this volume explores two hundred years of farming and farming literature, making it highly recommended for those with an interest in the history and development of modern farming techniques. Contents include: “Introduction”, “Tudor times”, “The Age of Markham”, “The Age of Hartlib”, “The Age of Worlidge and Houghton”, “The Age of Richard Bradley”, “Bibliography”, and “Appendix”. Many vintage books such as this are increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new introduction on farming.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: May 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781473383715

Book preview

The OLD ENGLISH

FARMING BOOKS

from FITZHERBERT to TULL

1523 to 1730

G. E. FUSSELL

F.R.Hist.S.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Page 30 from Reginald Scot, ‘A perfite platforme of a Hop Garden’. 1574

2. Title-page of Maxey’s book showing the dibbing-board

3. Charles I on his horse Edgar, from de la Gray, ‘The Compleat Horseman’. 1639

4. The title-page of the ‘English Farrier’. 1636

5. Title-page of Markham, ‘Way to get Wealth’. 1638

6. Showing contemporary ploughs from Blith, ‘The Improver Improv’d’. 1653

7. A sample survey of a manor from William Leybourn, ‘Planometria’, first published in 1650

8. The title-page of the first English book on potatoes

9. Worlidge’s design for a seed drill, from ‘Systema Agriculturae’. 1669. When Richard Bradley tried to make it, it would not work

10. A beehive from Moses Rusden, ‘A Further Discovery of Bees’. 1677

11. The title-page of the first English book on clover

12. The frontispiece of ‘Blagrave’s Epitome’

13. The frontispiece to ‘Blagrave’s New Additions’

14. The frontispiece of Tim Nourse, ‘Campania Foelix’. 1700

15. Perhaps the types of stock shown owe part of their appearance to poor drawing, but allowing for that, they are not imposing. From James Lambert, ‘The Countryman’s Treasure’. 1683

16. Portrait of Edward Lisle, The frontispiece of ‘Observations on Husbandry’, 2nd Ed. 1757

I

Introduction

THE first book on farming that was printed in England was Fitzherbert’s Boke of Husbondrye, and the first edition of that book was printed in 1523. In the next two centuries many writers followed in Fitzherbert’s footsteps, and indeed there is no break in the continuity of English farming text-books from his publication until the present day. Some of the writers contented themselves with one book; very few attempted to compete with Arthur Young’s output of some 250 volumes. He did not commence author until about 1760; but Jethro Tull, whose contribution to the subject is limited to a single volume, issued his Horse hoeing husbandry in 1731, and set out his theories of plant nutrition, weed control, and design of drill for sowing seed at regular intervals. Tull’s contribution marks an epoch in the progress of farming practice, and, since ‘Turnip’ Townshend was doing all he could to encourage the introduction of root crops into the common rotation at the same time, the year 1730 is a convenient date at which to conclude the present study.

Farming practice is never static, however torpid rustic people may once have seemed to superior persons from towns; but many of the writers of early farming text-books were guilty of extensive but unabashed copying from earlier writers. Fitzherbert had little enough opportunity to plagiarize. There were the classics, part of every gentleman’s education in his day; there were manuscript treatises like that of Walter of Henley and Bishop Grosstete, and there were already one or two treatises which had been issued in continental countries; but, in the main, no doubt his work, as he claims, was gathered from actual experience. His successors had better opportunities, and were not slow to avail themselves of them. Some of the matter included by translators is quite fantastic. Barnaby Googe, for instance, failed to excise a section on camels when he translated Conrad Heresbach. No less fantastic are some of the wild imaginings of the Grub street hacks who came to be employed in writing farming text-books at a later day.

Despite plagiarism and fantasy there was a public for these works. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England was employed on farming: other industries played a minor part in the life of the people, but the market for farm products was expanding, and enterprising men were anxious enough to learn of new methods and to adopt them if they seemed likely to be profitable. The historian must, however, be warned that little that the writers say should be accepted as current unless it is definitely stated to have been the usual kind of farming done in a particular place. And he should be wary of dating such carefully described practices as contemporary with the issue of the book he is reading unless he has made certain that the evidence was not taken wholesale from some earlier book.

This is not without difficulty. Many of the books ran through several editions, and some of the editions, especially those issued after the author’s death, were annotated, expanded, and brought up to date by later editors. Fitzherbert’s Husbandry, for example, was a popular work until the end of the sixteenth century and was reprinted several times during that time, as will be gathered from the body of this work. The plain reissue of a book by a later editor, or as it was then, by a later enterprising printer, does not present an insuperable problem; but the necessary comparison of texts may be tedious.

A much more exacting puzzle is set by a writer like Gervase Markham. He was not only a voluminous scribe, but he took full advantage of the market and some advantage of the various publishers who undertook him. Some of his books are little more than reprints of earlier issues with a different title and issued from a different house: but I think that an exact bibliographical analysis of his productions has become impossible through his chicane reinforced by the effluxion of time. Someone else may be more successful in the elucidation of this subject than I have been.

Enough has, however, been said to indicate what I have tried to do in this handbook. First and foremost, of course, I have tried to supply a collation of all the editions of these works that were printed during the period laid down, slightly more than two centuries, from 1523 to 1730.

In order to avoid the use of footnotes and particularly to avoid what would be almost continuous reference to the same authorities by way of footnote, a distraction of attention that is unnecessary in a work of this kind, I have added a bibliography of general sources as an appendix and shall, where necessary, refer to the writers by name in the text. Only where a special reference to a particular book is required will a footnote be used.

And for the convenience of any reader who wishes to pursue the life-story or analyse the writings of an author further I have included an appendix giving details of my own contributions to this end made during the past two decades.

II

Tudor Times

FARMING is a vastly inclusive word. Not only does it comprehend the cultivation of crops and the breeding of domestic livestock for food and for draught, but it includes the user of land and the conditions which govern that user, and may even be taken to cover the lives and living of the farmers, and the men who own and work the land. It means a great deal to us in the modern world—more perhaps just recently than for a century almost—but it meant much more to our ancestors three or four centuries ago.

So important as it is recognized to be by us, by so much more was it to them because most of them depended directly upon the soil for their livelihood, and many of the smallish balance indirectly upon it. Their practice was, however, a matter of tradition, mixed by the brighter spirits with a little tentative but rather temerarious, in their contemporaries’ opinion, experiment: it was handed on by word of mouth rather than the written word, and, in the sixteenth century when it began to occupy writers, the printing press was in its elementary stages. Nevertheless some difficulty presents itself in deciding just what to include in a bibliography of this kind. The limitations I have set myself will become immediately apparent to the reader who takes a glance through the title index, so I will not labour the point.

The first English book on farming to come off the presses was Fitzherbert’s Husbandry, issued in 1523. Before then several magnificent volumes had appeared on the Continent. The first of these, the first printed book on agriculture, was the Liber ruralium comodorum of Petrus Crescentius printed by John Schussler of Augsburg under date 1471. Before then there were only handwritten manuscripts, necessarily limited in number, and now rare indeed.

At first [as the Rothamsted Catalogue says] even the printed books can hardly have been popular; they must always have been costly. The Augsburg volume [of which they have a copy] is a magnificent folio printed from beautiful type with elaborate capital letters drawn and gorgeously coloured by hand. . . . For the next fifty years the agricultural books were of the same order of magnificence; all show the rich craftsmanship of renaissance times. After Augsburg Italy led the way in early agricultural publications.

The first original work in French bears a later date than Fitzherbert’s books.

Before this Sir Thomas Littleton’s Tenures had been printed. A number of fifteenth-century manuscript copies of this book, the subject-matter of which is obvious from its title, exist; but it was first printed in English in the early sixteenth century, although the date of 1495 is allotted, under question, to the first printed edition, ‘Printed for R. Pynson’ at Rouen. The first London edition, supposed to have been issued in 1510, was Leteltun teners newe correcte, printed by ‘R. pynson’ (B.L. folio), which contains on its title-page a print of Henry VII and his court. A second B.L. folio was issued in London by Pynson in 1516, and both the copies of these London editions in the British Museum Library have manuscript notes. Other editions were issued by R. Redman: London 1530 (?), Mydylton, and several by Tottel.

But this was not strictly speaking a farming book. In the more confined sense of the word Fitzherbert’s two books, The Boke of Husbondrye and Surveying, are the first published. The authorship of these two books was for some time in doubt, opinion being divided between the two brothers Sir Anthony and John Fitzherbert. In an early paper I regret to say that I subscribed to John, but later investigation has convinced me that the original adscription to Sir Anthony is correct. Sir Anthony was a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and claims that his book is the result of forty years’ experience of farming. His brother, John, is a man unknown to Fuller, is not mentioned in his Worthies, and evidently was an obscure country squire. Doubtless Sir Anthony had plenty of opportunity of learning about the different methods of farming in use in different parts of the country as he travelled the circuit because farming was the one subject in which everyone was interested in his day, and he would also have ample opportunity of practising the art during the very lengthy vacations which were a privilege of his profession.

The earliest known edition of The Boke of Husbondrye was printed by Pynson in 1523 and the next by Berthelet: the former small quarto and the latter duodecimo. Both are in black letter, and a very high price was paid by the British Museum for a copy of the first. Some eight editions were issued before the end of the sixteenth century, and, although it was not again reprinted until the last quarter of the eighteenth century, its matter was used without acknowledgement by the more unscrupulous writers of the seventeenth century. The book deals exhaustively with the best principles of arable farming of the time, describes the tools and discusses the capital required, and is moreover a conspectus of the life of a contemporary farmer and his family and servants, and many of the methods are fundamentally those which all later generations of farmers must perforce follow. The book of Surveying, which first appeared in the same year as The Boke of Husbondrye, is also the first treatise of its kind in our language, and it, like many other books on this subject, contains a great deal of matter of service to farmers in particular as well as to the agricultural community in general. Fitzherbert’s two books demonstrate a thorough knowledge of practical farming, as I have said, and recommend a thorough standard of industry, especially for the wives of farmers, not, as G. C. Brodrick put it in 1881, unworthy of study in the then present day, so little had the basic principles of farming changed in 350 years. The books show that the value of manuring was even then fully appreciated, that draining was practised, if not everywhere, at least in some places. Their author points out that ‘an housbande cannot well thrive by his corne, without he have other cattell, or by his cattel without corne’, a principle that held good until the coming of artificial manures and concentrates from overseas. He gives special directions for carrying out each farming operation at the proper season. Ricks should be kept under cover and/or raised on a scaffolding to keep vermin away. Rollers were used to ‘role their barley grounds after a shower of rayne, to make ground even to mow’. Ploughs of various kinds were used in different situations; some adapted to hilly ground which ‘wyll tourn the sheld bredith at every landsende, and plough all one way’. Like most other farming writers, Fitzherbert believed in inclosure as a means of improving farming practice and states in the Surveying that the value set upon manure was such as to raise the price of inclosed land to 8d. where it had been let at 6d. per acre before inclosure ‘by reason of the compostyng and dongyng of the cattell that shall go and lie upon it both day and nighte’.

Besides Fitzherbert’s, three other books on surveying were published in the sixteenth century; the first by Syr Richarde Benese, the second by Leonard Digges, and the third by Valentine Leigh. Of the first there are three editions in the century, printed in 1540, 1562, and 1564, and Rothamsted has one; it dates under query 1537, and another queried 1563; of the second there are many editions, the earliest of which is dated 1556; of the third there are four, the earliest published in 1577. Syr Richarde Benese, Canon of Merton Abbey in Surrey, entitled his book The maner of measurynge all maner of lande, and the earliest edition, an octavo, was printed by James Nicholson, London, while the two later, also octavo, were published by Thomas Colwell, London. Leonard Digges, in the explicit fashion of