,
who wrote in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, says woad
was in his time cultivated by companies of people, men, women, and
children, who hired the land, built huts, and grew and prepared the
crop for the dyer's use, then moved on to another place.[346]

There were proofs that man's inventive genius was at work among farm
implements. Worlidge mentions[347] an engine for setting corn,
invented by Gabriel Plat, made of two boards bored with wide holes 4
in. apart, set in a frame, with a funnel to each hole. It was fitted
with iron pins 5 in. long to 'play up and down', and dibble holes into
which the corn was to go from the funnels. This machine was so
intricate and clumsy that Worlidge found no use for it. However, he
recommends another instrument which certainly seems to anticipate
Tull's drill, though Tull is said to have stated when Bradley showed
him a cut of it that it was only a proposal and it never got farther
than the cut.[348] It consisted of a frame of small square pieces of
timber 2 inches thick; the breadth of the frame 2 feet, the height 18
inches, length 4 feet, placed on four good-sized wheels. In the middle
of the frame a coulter was fixed to make a furrow for the corn, which
fell through a wooden pipe behind, that dropped the corn out of a
hopper containing about a bushel, the fall of the corn from the hopper
being regulated by a wooden wheel in its neck. The same frame might
contain two coulters, pipes, and hoppers, and the instrument could be
worked with one horse and one man. It was considered a great advance
on sowing broadcast, and by the use of it 'you may also cover your
grain with any rich compost you shall prepare for that purpose, either
with pigeon dung, dry or granulated, or any other saline or lixirial
(alkaline, or of potash) substance, which may drop after the corn from
another hopper behind the one that drops the corn, or from a separate
drill'. The corn thus sown in rows was found easier to weed and hoe,
so that it is clear that this advantage was well understood before
Tull's time.

There was a great diversity of ploughs at this date, almost every
county having some variation.[349] The principal sorts were the
double-wheel plough, useful upon hard land, usually drawn with horses
or oxen two abreast, the wheels 18 in. to 20 in. high. The one-wheel
plough, which could be used on almost any sort of land; it was very
'light and nimble', so that it could be drawn by one horse