AGRICULTURE
IN giving a brief account of the Agriculture of Bucks, it seems desirable to review shortly its history. Several well-known writers have given their impressions of it, though none of them speak in very flattering terms. One, Edward Lawrence, a Surveyor to the then Duke of Buckingham, in a book published 1727, gives some insight into the circumstances of that period. Rents appear to have been from ten to fifteen shillings an acre or more, the tenant paying rates and taxes, while the covenants of the leases were very stringent. A great deal of the land was unenclosed, and there were many ' common-fields,' both of arable and pasture. The four-course shift seems to have prevailed and was generally: ist, fallow; and, wheat or barley ; 3rd, beans or peas ; 4th, barley or oats. There were special covenants regulating the growth of woad, weld (one of the mignonette family giving a beautiful yellow dye), madder, etc., the cultivation of which must have been very remunerative, for the ' woad men ' were willing to pay £2 a year extra rent per acre for the privilege of growing them. Labourers' wages were a shilling a day in summer, and 9d. and 10d. in winter, while domestic servants received about 3 a year. Arthur Young, writing in 1771, seems to have only seen the Aylesbury side of the county, while on his riding tour through the Midlands. He found rents varying from 6s. to 20s. an acre, with an average of about 14s. He condemned the system of farming, the dirty condition of the crops, and also the unenclosed state of most of the land. The course in that district was: 1st, fallow; 2nd, wheat; 3rd, beans ; a wasteful system, which merited his censure. The very shallow ploughing, and the deep ridge and furrow, both in arable and pasture, without any underground draining, were also severely condemned. With keen insight he declared that, if the landlords would enclose and drain the land, ' All this vale would make as fine meadows as any in the world.' In common with Lawrence, he protested against the tenants gathering the cow-dung off the fields to dry and burn, and the latter warned stewards to see that the tenants did not use too much of the pig-dung to wash their linens with ! Farming must have improved soon after Young's day, for Cobbett, in his Rural Rides in 1826, speaks eloquently and enthusiastically of all that he saw in the Aylesbury district ; and Youatt, writing some eight years later, compares the Vale of Aylesbury to the justly celebrated Pevensey Level and Romney Marsh.
Coming to the present time we find that Bucks, like most other
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