g towards the end of the sixteenth
century, says that it was the yeomen who bought the lands of
'unthrifty gentlemen;' and Moryson tells us that 'the buyers
(excepting lawyers) are for the most part citizens and vulgar
men'.[279] It became one of the boasts of England that she had a large
number of yeomen farming their own land. During the Civil War,
however, it became important to landowners to protect their properties
in the interest of children and descendants from forfeiture for
treason. The judges lent their aid, and the system of strict family
settlements was devised, under which the great bulk of the estates in
England are now held. This system favoured the accumulation of lands
in a few hands and the aggregation of great estates, and was largely
responsible for the disappearance of the small freeholder.

In reviewing the progress of agriculture in the seventeenth century,
the drainage of the fen country of Lincolnshire and the adjoining
counties must not be forgotten. It had been for centuries the scene of
drainage operations on a more or less extended scale, few of which,
however, met with success; but in the seventeenth century the growing
value of land caused a serious revival of these efforts. Attempts made
under Elizabeth and James I had only succeeded in rescuing a certain
amount of land for pasture,[280] but in the reign of Charles I the
scheme of Cornelius Vermuyden was more successful. His system,
however, was defective, and in the reign of Charles II the Bedford
Level was in a lamentable state and in danger of reverting to its
primitive condition. Many of the works too were destroyed by the
'stiltwalkers', and in 1793 Maxwell states that out of 44,000 acres of
fen land in Huntingdonshire only 8,000 or 10,000 were productive[281];
and in 1794 Stone tells us that the commons round the Isle of
Axholme were chiefly covered with water.[282] Still to Vermuyden and
his contemporaries must be assigned the credit of the first
comprehensive scheme for rescuing these fertile lands from the waters
that covered them.

At the commencement of this important century an old calendar of
1606[283] clearly sets forth the farming work of the year:--

January and February are the best months for ploughing for peas,
beans, and oats, and to have peas soon in the year following sow them
in the wane of the moon at S. Andrewstide before Christmas; which may
be compared to Tusser's advice for February,

'Go plow in the