ABSTRACT
Of these three-which incidentally are really always found in co-operation-the last is the most obvious and may be quickly disposed of. Better methods of husbandry engaged attention throughout the Tudor period. Books were written to instruct improving farmers how to go about it. Sir Anthony Fitzherbert, one of his Majesty's judges, published works on husbandry and surveying in 1523; the shrewd Thomas Tusser's Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry went through five editions between 1557 and 1580. Other Elizabethan textbooks on the use of marl, the special problems of the newly introduced hops, and similar points indicate the strength of the desire for the better use of land and new inventions to exploit it. Gradually the horse replaced the ox before the plough and cart. But the advance was slow and far from general. Cumbersome and inefficient ploughing, harvesting methods which wasted much of the straw, and the persistence of the open field \\-·ith its narrow strips prevented really large-scale innovations. Hops, for instance, as a new crop which required compact fields where a man could experiment, established themselves in Kent where fields had always been enclosed. But all reservations allowed for, it is a fact that many Tudor landlords, small and great, tried to improve the yield of their lands by becoming better farmers. The foundations were being laid for the scientific farming of the eighteenth century.
