History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 182

nevertheless borrowed, and these have to be accounted for. Certain large
assumptions have to be made, and despite the lack of supporting evidence they are
fairly safe. It must be assumed that many of the Flemings who settled in England
during the period settled eventually on the land, either in definitely placed colonies like
those on the Scottish border and in Pembroke, Gower, and Ross, or in small groups
and single families of which no record was ever made. Ralph de Diceto, in describing
the effects of Henry II's disbanding of Flemish mercenaries, speaks of the Flemings as
driven from the castle to the plough and from camps to workshops. Those who had
been drawn from agriculture to the life of a soldier returned to farming when their other
occupation was lost, and this probably happened to some extent at every
disbandment of Low Country mercenaries. It seems, too, that there must have been a
considerable immigration into the eastern counties from the Low Dutch lands opposite
across the sea, and many of these immigrants doubtless engaged in agriculture.
Again, some of the Low Dutch people who came to England to engage in other trades
and crafts might also devote part of their time to farming.
7. 2.
During the 17th century there was a very decided increase of knowledge as to the
best methods of turning land to good account. New suggestions appear in the
numerous agricultural treatises and pamphlets and, as on so many other sides of
economic life, Dutch methods were held up as an example. Gabriel Plattes, the first
theorist of modern agricultural science in England, whose chief work appeared in
1638, was undoubtedly Dutch in origin, while Simon Hartlib, the friend of Milton and
one of the most active publicists of the new movement, was a naturalized Dutchman.
The people of Holland were not much given to the growing of cereals, but they were
skilled in cattle-breeding and dairy-farming, and Englishmen were impressed with the
desirability of imitating them, by growing root crops and artificial grasses, so as to
have better means of feeding stock during the winter. Root crops appear to have been
introduced to some extent as a course of husbandry; Weston refers to them in his
Discourse of Husbandrie Used in Brabant (1652). In Elizabeth's time the only new field
crop was buckwheat or ‘brank’, which Heresbach observed was brought from North
Germany and Russia ‘not long since’; Tusser advocated it as ‘comforting to the land’
and useful for fattening all kinds of stock. The growing of hops was introduced from
the Low Countries and had become popular towards the middle of the 16th century.
In the 17th century land was taken up by men who meant to make farming pay as a
business proposition, and the result was a flood of experiments and brilliant
suggestions foreshadowing the real and practical advance of the following century.
The first experiments were not very successful, and though the 17th century had the
ideas and the new words which came with them, the practice was mainly left to the
18th century, when there was real progress in filling up the unproductive gap caused
by the fallow year. The turnip did not become really important in English farming until
after the publication of Jethro GV