ildon in Berkshire, heir to a good
estate, and was called to the bar in 1699, but on his marriage in the
same year settled on the paternal farm of Howberry in Oxfordshire. In
his preface to his book he throws a flash of light on country life at
a time when the roads were nearly as bad as in the Middle Ages, so
that they effectually isolated different parts of England, when he
speaks of 'a long confinement within the limits of a lonely farm, in a
country where I am a stranger, having debarred me from all
conversation'.[410]

He took to agriculture more by necessity than by choice, for he knew
too much 'the inconveniency and slavery attending the exorbitant power
of husbandry servants', and he further gives this extraordinary
character of the farm labourer of his day: ''Tis the most formidable
objection against our agriculture that the defection of labourers is
such that few gentlemen can keep their land in their own hands, but
let them for a little to tenants who can bear to be insulted,
assaulted, kicked, cuffed, and Bridewelled, with more patience than
gentlemen are endowed with.'[411] Tull wrote just before it became the
fashion for gentlemen to go into farming, and laments that the lands
of the country were all, or mostly, in the hands of rack-renters,
whose supposed interest it was that they should never be improved for
fear of fines and increased rents. Gentlemen then knew so little of
farming that they were unable to manage their estates. No doubt his
scathing remarks helped to initiate the well-known change in this
respect, and soon, over all England, gentlemen of education and
position were engaged in removing this reproach from their class. The
same complaint as to their ignorance of matters connected with their
land crops up again during the great French war, but they then had a
good excuse, as they were busy fighting the French.

Tull invented his drill about 1701 at Howberry. The first occasion for
making it, he says, was that it 'was very difficult to find a man that
could sow clover tolerably; they had a habit to throw it once with the
hand to two large strides and go twice in each cast; thus, with 9 or
10 lb. of seed to an acre, two-thirds of the ground was unplanted. To
remedy this I made a hopper, to be drawn by a boy, that planted an
acre sufficiently with 6 lb. of seed; but when I added to this hopper
an exceeding light plough that made 6 channels eight inches asunder,
into which 2 lb. to an acre be