s what is perhaps the first mention of a poultry farm,
and strangely enough it seems to have paid. 'I have been credibly
informed that a good farm hath been wholly stocked with poultry,
spending the whole crop upon them and keeping severall to attend them,
and that it hath redounded to a very considerable improvement'.[298]
Incubators of a very rude sort were used, three or four dozen eggs
being placed in a 'lamp furnace made of a few boards', and hatched by
the heat of a lamp or candle.

It must strike the reader that the accusation levelled against the
English farmer, of having made little progress in his art from the
Middle Ages to the commencement of the reign of George III is hardly
warranted. Their knowledge and skill in their business were evidently
such as to make considerable progress inevitable, and then as now they
were in some cases assisted by their landlords, as in Herefordshire,
where Lord Scudamore, after the assassination of his friend the Duke
of Buckingham, devoted his energies to the culture of fruit, and with
other public-spirited gentlemen turned that county into 'one entire
orchard', besides improving the pastures and woods[299]; though
Hartlib laments that gentlemen try so few experiments for the
advancement of agriculture, and that both landowners and farmers
instead of communicating their knowledge to each other kept it
jealously to themselves.[300] The chief hindrance to landlord and
tenant was that the heavy hand of ancient custom lay upon them, with
its antiquated communistic system of farming, which still in the
greater part of the land of England utterly prevented good husbandry
and stifled individual effort. It was one of these Herefordshire
gentlemen. Rowland Vaughan, who in 1610 wrote what is probably the
first account of irrigation in England, though the art was mentioned
by Fitzherbert and must have been known in Devon and Hampshire long
before his time; indeed, it is another instance of the then isolation
of country districts that he speaks as if he had made a new discovery.
He tells us that 'having sojourned two years in his father's house,
wearied in doing nothing and fearing his fortunes had been overthrown,
he cast about what was best to be done to retrieve his reputation'.
And one day he saw from a mole-hill on the side of a brook on his
property a little stream of water issuing down the working of the
mole, which made the ground 'pleasing green', and from this he was led
on to