To 
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IMPROVEMENTS IN TILLAGE 551 
great principle of the so-called new husbandry was to in- AD. 1639 
troduce the cultivation of roots and seeds in such a fashion ~'"*" 
as to supplement corn-growing. There was no desire to 
substitute anything else for corn-growing, as pasture-farming 
had been substituted for arable cultivation in the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries. The point maintained throughout so as to 
was, that, if careful attention were given to the qualities of ghz a ve 
the soil, and energy were expended on the working of the husbandry 
land, these root and grass crops might be introduced so as 
to render unnecessary the fallow shift, every second or third 
year. Thus, what he commonly recommends, is a course of 
turnips, barley, clover and wheat, an arrangement which 
may be said to be a development of alternate cropping and 
fallowing. He preferred, however, that the land should be 
two years under clover, which thus gave a five-course 
husbandry’. He was, of course, well aware that this rotation 
of crops would only prove satisfactory where the land was 
carefully cultivated: in particular if the turnips were not 
properly tilled, there was reason to fear that the land would 
never be free from weeds. A great impulse had been given 
to the introduction of the new husbandry by the example of 
Jethro Tull, who invented a drill for sowing, and devised a 
method of cultivating turnips, which was sound in principle? 
and which he found successful in practice. 
In this way, cattle-breeding, which along with dairy whi 
farming and poultry farming had been the department in prvi 
which the small farmers had a special advantage®, came to oe es 
be an important element in capitalistic land management, ¥d cattle. 
and attracted the attention of improvers. Through the 
Middle Ages, sheep had been chiefly bred for the sake of their 
wool, and cattle for the sake of their powers of draught as 
oxen; but in the latter half of the eighteenth century these 
points were treated as subsidiary, and the breeding of sheep 
and cattle was pursued with reference to the food supply* 
Mr Bakewell of Leicester appears to have been the pioneer 
in both sheep-breeding and cattle-rearing; and he was 
1 Northern Tour, 1. 165. Turnips, barley, clover (2), and wheat. 
2 Horseshoeing Husbandry (1773). 
8 H. Levy, Entstehung und Riickgang des landwirthschaftlichen Grossbetriebes 
in England, 6-10. 4 Prothero, op. cit. 51.