Page:VCH Herefordshire 1.djvu/485

AGRICULTURE In November 1821 William Cobbett was in the neighbourhood of Pencoyd in the southern part of the county, where everywhere was good arable land, pastures, orchards, coppices, and timber trees. One farmer he visited had four acres of swedes on four feet ridges drilled from the i ith to the 14th of May. They had been very much injured by the fly, but the gaps had been filled up by transplanting, and the ground twice ploughed between the ridges. The crop had turned out in his opinion very fine, not less than seventeen tons per acre. On another farm near, twenty tons had been grown to the acre in spite of the fly. At the end of the first quarter of the 19th century Herefordshire was still fortunate in possessing estates of from ;^400 to ^1,000 a year, on which their owners resided, and cultivated their land, so as to be an example to their neighbours. The large estates were still generally divided into farms of from two hundred to four hundred acres ; and the tenures of gavelkind and borough-english existed in a few places, but were usually nullified by will. Small farms were generally decreasing in number, 'there were few opportunities by which an industrious couple could devote ^^50 to ^100 acquired by personal labour, to stock a few acres and bring up their family' ; hence matrimony was on the decline and licentiousness on the increase. Many of the old farm-houses were of wood, ill designed and placed, though on the larger estates better ones were being erected. Cottages too, were very poor and badly built. Leases were generally still for twenty-one years, divided usually into three periods of seven years, and determinable at the end of each by landlord or tenant. As regards implements, there was practically no change since the beginning of the century, the light Lammas plough being still most used, often drawn as before by four oxen, sometimes in a line, sometimes in the old yoke. Improved implements were confined to amateurs ; there were none in general use. There was more wheat grown than any other kind of grain, generally sown on a fallow, and change of seed was often procured from the chalk hills of Oxfordshire. In the management of sound meadows and pastures a new method had been tried with great success ; the grass was mown as soon as it was in blossom before the formation of seed, the after- math was not grazed until the end of October or the beginning of November, and thereby the ground remained covered during the winter with a portion of dead herbage, through which the young grass sprang with the greatest vigour early in the next spring. Draining was still much neglected and ' practised chiefly by proprietors,' but a follower of Vaughan in the practice of irrigation had been found in the person of Mr. T. A. Knight, ' the most distinguished cultivator in the county,' who by making a weir on the Teme with proper courses for the water had irrigated 200 acres of land. In the middle of the 19th century the introduction of artificial manures had done much to lessen the evils of over and too-frequent liming which had hitherto been one of the great faults of Herefordshire farming. The use of guano, bones, and superphosphate was becoming common, and nitrate of soda was being introduced. Mr. Knight had wisely remarked in connexion with the abuse of lime, that ' the landlord who binds his tenant to a large consumption of lime without stipulating for the use of other manures, resembles the man who lets his horse to hire under a positive injunction that the rider shall use whip and spurs, but takes no precaution to insure the equally essential requisite of an abundant supply of corn and hay.' Unfortunately there were many unscrupulous vendors of artificial manures who palmed off on the farmers spurious articles which retarded the sale of the genuine. Wherever the right sort of artificial manure had been produced its use had been attended with marked success, and a writer of the day prophesied that there was ' not a county in England where their employment can be made so profitable to the occupiers of the soil over so wide an area in proportion to its extent.'^' Herefordshire has always been famous for its timber trees, especially its oaks, which have been called the ' weeds of Herefordshire,' as the elm has been called the ' Warwickshire weed.' Beale says ' our elm is of speediest growth and found in rows on our highways and at every cottager's door, except they be compelled to give place to fruit trees, and all our hills have sometimes born oaks, and I conceive most are very apt for it. But of late the iron mills have devoured our glory and defloured our groves.' ^^ In 1805 a man standing on an eminence near Mordiford and looking eastward would see woodland stretching as far as the eye could reach with a white cottage and a cultivated acre occasionally intervening. Deep and winding roads intersected the whole with a narrow track, and a bleak common completed the cheerless scene. Cobbett, while staying at Weston ' in 1 82 1, admired the rich land, the pastures ' the finest I ever saw, the trees of all kinds surpassing upon an average any that I have before seen in England,' and journeying from Ross to Hereford he noted that the trees were very fine all the way.^^ But it was some time before the county recovered from the large clearance of timber required for the navy in the great war with France. " Journ. Roy. Jgrk. Sue. Engl, (ist Ser.),xiv, 441. "^ Herefs. Orchards (ed. 1724), 21. '= Cobbett, Rural Rides (ed. 1885), i, 25. 415