S06

HISTORY OP ENGLAND.

CHAP.

III.

State ofAgricul-ture.

The.fact that the sum raised in England by taxation has,"in a time not exceeding two long lives, been multiplied thirty-fold, is strange, and may at first sight seem appalling. Butthose who are alarmed by the increase of the public burdensmay perhaps be reassured when they have considered the in-crease of the public resources. In the year 168u>, the value ofthe produce of the soil far exceeded the value of all the otherfruits of human industry. Yet agriculture was in what wouldnow be considered as a very rude and imperfect state. Thearable land and pasture land were not supposed by the bestpolitical arithmeticians of that age to amount to much morethan half the area of the kingdom.* The remainder was be-lieved to consist of moor, forest, and fen. These computa-tions are strongly confirmed by the road books and maps ofthe seventeenth century. From those books and maps it isclear that many routes which now pass through an endlesssuccession of orchards, hay-fields, and bean-fields, then ranthrough nothing but heath, swamp, and warren.** In thedrawings of English landscapes made in that age for the GrandDuke Cosmo, scarce a hedgerow is to be seen, and numeroustracts, now rich with cultivation, appear as bare as SalisburyPlain.*** At Enfield, hardly out of sight of the smoke of thecapital, was a region of five and twenty miles in circumference,which contained only three houses and scarcely any inclosed

* King’s Natural and Political Conclusions. Davenant on the Balanceof Trade.

** See the Itinerarium Anglia!, 1575, by John Ogilby, CosmographerRoyal. He describes great part of the land as wood, fen, heath on bothsides, marsh on both sides. In some of his maps the roads throughinclosed country are marked by lines, and the roads through uninclosedcountry by dots. The proportion of uninclosed country, which, if culti-vated, must have been wretchedly cultivated, seems to have been verygreat. From Abingdon to Gloucester, for example, a distance of fortyor fifty miles, there was not a single inclosure, and scarcely one inclo-sure between Biggleswade and Lincoln.

*** Large copies of these highly interesting drawings are in the noblecollection bequeathed by Mr. Grenville to the British Museum.