winter, were introduced from the
Continent and cultivated to some extent, as were clover and some
improved grasses. But these improvements progressed but slowly, and
farming on the whole was carried on along very much the same old lines
till quite the middle of the eighteenth century. The raising of grain
was encouraged by a system of government bounties, as already stated
in another connection. From 1689 onward a bounty was given on all
grain exported, when the prevailing price was less than six shillings
a bushel. The result was that England exported wheat in all but famine
years, that there was a steady encouragement even if without much
result to improve methods of agriculture, and that landlords were able
to increase their rents. In the main, English agriculture and the
organization of the agricultural classes of the population did not
differ very much at the end of this period from that at the beginning
except in the one point of quantity, the amount of produce and the
number of the population being both largely increased.

*51. The Domestic System of Manufactures.*--Much greater skill in
manufacturing was acquired, principally, as in earlier periods,
through the immigration of foreign artisans. In Queen Elizabeth's time
a great number of such men with their families, who had been driven
from the Netherlands by the persecutions of the duke of Alva, came to
England for refuge. In Sandwich in 1561 some twenty families of
Flemings settled and began their manufactures of various kinds of
cloth; in 1565 some thirty Dutch and Walloon families settled in
Norwich as weavers, in Maidstone a body of similar artisans who were
thread-makers settled in 1567; in 1570 a similar group carrying on
various forms of manufacture settled at Colchester; and still others
settled in some five or six other towns. After 1580 a wave of French
Huguenots, principally silk-weavers, fled from their native country
and were allowed to settle in London, Canterbury, and Coventry. The
renewed persecutions of the Huguenots, culminating in the revocation
of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, sent many thousands more into exile,
large numbers of silk and linen weavers and manufacturers of paper,
clocks, glass, and metal goods coming from Normandy and Brittany into
England, and settling not only in London and its suburbs, but in many
other towns of England. These foreigners, unpopular as they often were
among the populace, and supported in their opportuni