Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/451

 spread over the same area of country as England itself. The proportion of open fields on these plantations was barely one-fifth of the whole. When the soil would no longer bring forth maize and wheat, which were cultivated after the third crop of tobacco, it was permitted to grow up again in underwood. As a result of this custom, a great extent of land which had been cleared at one time was covered with much thicker woods than the land remaining in prim&aelig;val forest. In England, vast tracts were held by individual proprietors, but owing to the habit of leasing, which threw the tillage of an extensive surface into numerous hands, only a small part of the country was suffered to relapse into its original condition.

Not even England, however, had in the seventeenth century carried the cultivation of the soil to a moderate degree of perfection; the agriculture of the mother country throughout this century being very little advanced upon that of the fourteenth. This resulted in part from the narrow policy prevailing in that age, of requiring the tenant farmer to pay additional rent whenever he increased the value of the land which he leased by making improvements at his own expense. The first steps towards those modes of tillage which have in the nineteenth century converted England into one of the garden spots of the world, was taken in 1645, in which year the system in operation in Holland was introduced. Its adoption, however, was local, partial, and not persistent. According to the plan generally pursued in the mother country at this time, the land was sown for two years in wheat, and in the third year it was allowed to lie fallow. The application