r, a
more rapid method of getting poultry to the great market, by means of
carts of four stages or stories, one above another, to carry the birds
in, drawn by two horses, which by means of relays travelled night and
day, and covered as much as 100 miles in two days and one night, the
driver sitting on the topmost stage.

Hop growing in 1729, according to Richard Bradley, paid well; he says,
'ground never esteemed before worth a shilling an acre per annum, is
rendered worth forty, fifty, or sometimes more pounds a year by
planting hops judiciously. An acre of hops shall bring to the owner
clear profit about L30 yearly; but I have known hop grounds that have
cleared above L50 yearly per acre.' At this date 12,000 acres in
England were planted with hops.

The great market for hops was Stourbridge Fair, once the greatest mart
in England and still preserving much of its former importance: 'there
is scarce any price fixed for hops in England till they know how they
sell in Stourbridge Fair.'[397] Thither they came from Chelmsford,
Canterbury, Maidstone, and Farnham, where the bulk of the hops in
England were then grown, though some were to be found at Wilton near
Salisbury, in Herefordshire, and Worcestershire. Round Canterbury
Defoe says there were 6,000 acres of hops, all planted within living
memory[398]; but the Maidstone district was called 'the mother of hop
grounds', and with the country round Feversham was famous for apples
and cherries.

The finest wool still, it seems, came from near Leominster, where the
sheep in Markham's time were described as small-boned and black-faced,
with a light fleece, and apparently they still had the same appearance
at the beginning of the eighteenth century[399]; and large-boned
sheep with coarser wool were to be found in the counties of Warwick,
Leicester, Buckingham, Northampton, and Nottingham; in the north of
England too were big-boned sheep with inferior wool, the largest with
coarse wool being found in the marshes of Lincolnshire.

About this time wool had fallen much in price: 'Has nobody told you,'
writes a west country farmer to his absentee landlord in 1737, 'that
wool has fallen to near half its price, and that we cannot find
purchasers for a great part of it at any price whatsoever. When most
of our estates (farms) were taken wool was generally 7d., 8d., or more
by the pound; the same is now 4d. and still falling.'[400] But the
latter price was exceptionally low; Smith[