Farming Calendar_, from an original MS., printed in
_Archaeologia_, xiii. 373 et seq.

[284] Cf. Tusser:

'October for wheat-sowing calleth as fast';

and

'When wheat upon eddish (stubble), ye mind to bestowe Let that be the
first of the wheat ye do sowe';

and

'Who soweth in raine, he shall reap it with tears'.

[285] The writer of the diary probably meant this work should be done
in September.

CHAPTER XII

THE GREAT AGRICULTURAL WRITERS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.--FRUIT
GROWING. A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ORCHARD

The seventeenth century is distinguished by a number of agricultural
writers whose works, as they afford the best account of the farming of
the time, we may be pardoned for freely quoting. The best known of
them were, Sir John Norden, Gervase Markham, Sir Richard Weston,
Blythe, Hartlib, Sir Hugh Plat, John Evelyn, John Worlidge, and
Houghton.

Sir John Norden printed his _Surveyor's Dialogue_ in 1608, which is in
the form of a conversation between a farmer and a surveyor, the former
at the outset telling the latter that men of his profession were then
very unpopular because 'you pry into men's titles and estates, and
oftentimes you are the cause that men lose their land, and customs are
altered, broken, and sometimes perverted by your means. And above all,
you look into the values of men's lands, wherefore the lords of manors
do reckon their tenants to a higher rent, and therefore not only I but
many poore tenants have good cause to speak against the
profession'.[286]

The surveyor attributes the increase in prices to farmers outbidding
one another for farms, for the rents of farms and prices grow
together; a statement which seems to have been quite true and disposes
of the assertion that the landlords raised the rents unfairly, for
they were quite entitled to what rent they could get in the open
market, the farmers being presumably wise enough not to offer rents
which would preclude a profit. He further blames the farmer of his day
for being discontented with his lot: in former times 'farmers and
their wives were content with mean dyet and base attire and held their
children to some austere government, without haunting alehouses,
taverns, dice, and cards; now the husbandman will be equal to the
yeoman, the yeoman to the gentleman, the gentleman to the squire, and
there is at this day thirty times as much vainely spent in a family of
like multitude and quality as was in former ages'