ABSTRACT

The evidence for the regional livestock husbandry of Britain in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, examined in the last chapter, necessarily included many details of the techniques of management of farm animals which the husbandman practised. The manuals published by the didactic agricultural writers of the period contain, however, some information of general application which cannot here be neglected, doubtful though it may be how much of it either reflected or influenced contemporary work in the byre and fold. On the whole, these literary farmers from Fitzherbert to Markham helped the practical man who sought to improve his methods very little: none of them, as far as can now be ascertained, was in advance of the progressive contemporary practice; and some of them were labouring grotesquely behind. Fitzherbert, indeed, right at the very beginning of the period, may be an exception to this stricture; and Edward Lisle, at the very end of it, certainly was. In between these two, for a whole century and a half, the livestock husbandman was far worse served by his mentors than was the arable man by his. While the progressive Kent squire was experimenting with grazing beast from the four quarters of Britain, Leonard Mascall was still distilling the wisdom of the classical agronomists into ludicrously irrelevant handbooks for the British stockman; but while the arable husbandman of the Commonwealth and the Restoration was still mentally tied to his permanent pastures and the traditional arable crops, Blith and Weston were preaching the merits of the Dutch clovers, eulogizing sainfoin and lucerne, and sanctifying the turnip.