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CULTIVATION OP THE SOIL,
1700—1800—ORDINARY MODES OP CROPPING AND THE RESULTS.
AN English tourist who visited
Scotland in 1702, speaks thus of the general aspect of the Country at that
date:—" The surface was generally unenclosed; oats and barley the chief
grain products; wheat little cultivated; little hay made for winter, the
horses then feeding chiefly on straw and oats." "The people of the
Lowlands partly depended on the Highlands for cattle to eat, and the
Highlanders, in turn, carried back corn, of which their own country did
not grow a sufficiency."
In even the best cultivated parts of
the south of Scotland, "the arable land ran in narrow slips," with "stony
wastes between, like the moraines of a glacier." "The scanty manure was
conveyed to the field by manual labour; and the unpleasant scene has often
been attested by English travellers, of the crofter’s wife carrying the
unseemly burden on her back" "The hay meadow was a marsh where rank
natural grasses grew, mixed with rushes and other aquatic plants; and the
sour wet ground not only remained undrained, but was deemed peculiarly
valuable from the abundance with which it yielded this coarse fodder."
[The natural meadows of this country may be all comprehended ~& the
denomination of swamps and morassee, of which there are specimens in almost
every farm. Formerly these produced only hay in the country, and they are
still, almost exclusively, applied to the same purpose. It was from hay of
this kind that] It has been averred that "nine-tenths of the corn
produced in the country was raised within five miles of the coast." This
may probably be accepted as rather a loose statement, yet cultivation was
mainly confined to the lands that lay along the courses of rivers and
streams, while in the interior wide areas of unbroken waste land prevailed
extensively. It was not till near the end of last century that blackfaced
sheep were introduced into the Highlands. The only use previously made of
the hill pasture, apart from feeding wild animals, was to feed the small
black cattle sent thither during the summer months.
A precise and detailed account of the modes of tillage
practised in the north of Scotland toward the close of the seventeenth
century occurs in a letter written by Alexander Garden of Troup, and the
date of which is 1683. Mr.
Garden, in describing the usual course of husbandry, says—" The husbandman
keeps in some of his ground constantly under come and bear, dunging it
every thrie years, and, for his pains, if he reap the fourth come he is
satisfied." That is to say, if he has four returns of the seed sown he is
satisfied. This, Mr. Garden informs us, was the "intown." "Our outfields,"
he says, "when they have been grass four or five years, are plowed up, and
letting them lie a summer thus ploughed, we plow them over again, and sow
them the next spring; and in our best outfields if we reap the fourth or
fifth corn the first year we are satisfied. Yea, the third is very well
thought off." Then he tells us that they took at least three corn crops in
succession off the outfield, and if the cattle had been folded upon it
before being broken up it was
considered fit to carry another crop before it required to lie in grass
again. The laying out in grass consisted, of course, of merely letting the
land alone without ploughing or sowing in a corn crop, till the surface
grew green with whatever species of weeds were indigenous to the soil.
A specific description, applicable to a somewhat later date, sets forth
that when the "outfields" would no longer pay for seed and labour, "they
were then allowed to remain in a state of absolute sterility, producing
little else than thistles and other weeds, till, after having been rested
in this state for some years, the farmer thought proper to bring them
again under cultivation, when, from the mode of management before
described, a few scanty crops were obtained."
[the Duke of Cumberland’s
cavalry were supplied in 1746, when in Aberdeen, on his march to the
north, in pursuit of the rebel army. Even this miserable forage was not
obtained without much labour; part of it being furnished from the swamps
among the woods of Fetteresso, at the distance of 16 miles, by, at that
time, a very bad road—General View of the Agriculture of
Kincardineshire; by George Robertson. 1807.]
Before adverting to
individual views of agricultural improvement, as held by persons taking a
prominent interest in the subject, a brief glance at the general state of
cultivation during the century may be taken. And it is a curious
illustration of the slow rate of progress in those days to find that when
the close of the eighteenth century was almost come, though not a few
energetic improvers had arisen and set a better example, exactly the same
modes of tillage were in almost universal use over a great part of the
country, as at the beginning of that century. Of this we have abundant
evidence in the pages of the Old Statistical Account of Scotland,
begun to be published in 1791, and actually completed in 1798, in twenty
volumes, through the heroic perseverance of Sir John Sinclair, by whom it
was originated, and its publication super-intended, the reports for the
several parishes being drawn up chiefly by the ministers. The detailed
testimony of one of these witnesses may be accepted as nearly sufficient;
and we take the statement of the minister of Alford, in Aberdeenshire, who
is very definite and copious. Writing in 1795, he says :— "The infield or
intown lands are constantly in
white crops, unless where the farm has very little or very bad pasture,
and then, perhaps, a ridge or two is left untilled, to throw up the weeds
which ages have nourished in it to maintain the farmer’s cattle. One third
of it is manured regularly with all the dung of one year’s gathering; and
thus, in three years, all the infield on a farm has been once dunged."
This, it will be observed, is precisely the practice that was followed a
hundred years earlier, as detailed by the Laird of Troup. The writer goes
on to state that "the infield land is generally an excellent soil, full of
manure, but stocked with destructive weeds, of which wild oats and
knot-grass are among the worst. The average produce in tolerable seasons
will not," he says, "exceed from 4 to 5 bolls per acre." In regard to the
management of outfield land, the "most proper way," we are told, was to
have it divided into eleven parts which were folded upon in succession.
The cropping is thus described :—" In spring oats are sown, and as soon as
the crop is off the ground, it is again ploughed for a second, and so on
until it has borne five successive crops of oats ; and then it is left
five years lea to throw up whatever poor grass such worn out soil will
produce. The first two years the grass is as bad as possible, and though
during the other three it thickens, yet, even at the best, it gives but a
scanty bite to the cattle." As to the grain produce of the outfields, it
is said "the first three crops are nearly alike, and will rarely run
beyond four bolls per acre on an average; and, for the last two years they
dwindle down to betwixt two and three, and often less. The produce of the
untoathed fields is much inferior in quantity as well as quality; and,
indeed, the return from faughs in grain will seldom defray the expense of
labour and seed; and the farmers are tempted to plough them though it is
to their own loss, merely for the sake of the small quantity of straw
which they yield."
Another of the Old Statistical
writers speaking of outfield tillage, says, after the land had grown the
sixth grain crop in succession, "it was seldom before the fourth
year that it got a green surface." The minister of Birse speaks of some
portions of the ground having been cropped continuously, with an
occasional dunging, without having been allowed "any rest for a century."
The minister of a Buchan parish says :—" A rotation of crops is not yet
established in this district. While the heritor only plows where he cannot
get grass to grow any longer, the tenant sometimes plows as long as corn
of any kind will grow." Another minister, who had made some inquiry on the
subject, got this statement from one farmer—" On my farm there was a field
of four acres which, for twenty-five years during my residence there,
yielded alternately full crops of grain, viz., beans, peas, and oats,
without any manure. I have reason to think my predecessor for five or
seven years employed it in the same manner." This rare field always grew a
conspicuously rich crop however; but "another farmer candidly told me,"
says the writer, "that from twelve boils of oats which he sowed last crop,
there was only produced twenty boils ; and of crop 1793 he had not three
returns."
Samples of fields which had grown
ten, fifteen, or twenty grain crops in succession with little or no
manuring were not confined to a single district, nor to a single county;
for we hear of them in Banff and Kincardineshires, as well as in
Aberdeenshire, toward the close of the century. It was in the first named
county, and in the parish of Alvah, that fields to which lime had been
applied, were reckoned fit to yield from twelve to nineteen crops of oats
in succession. And it was to Kincardineshire the old school farmer
belonged, who, on being complimented on the good appearance of his crop,
said—" It’s nae marvel, for it’s only the auchteent crap sin’ it gat
gweedin’ (dunging)." In some of the old leases, it was formally stipulated
that " there shall not be more than five crops of oats in succession." |
