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 A HISTORY OF RUTLAND From the private letter book of Sir Abel Barker " of Hambleton, who was High Sheriff of Rutland in 1646, it appears that wool in 1642 was £1 a tod, Mr. Abel Barker, as he was then, selling 530 tods at that price to his 'loving friend Mr. William Gladwine,' and the same gentleman in buying wheat orders it to be ' brined after the Lincolnshire fashion to avoyd blasting.' In 1648 his wool had gone up to zgs. a tod. During the Civil War some of Mr. Barker's horses were carried off and employed for the service of the State, and he values them at ;^8 a-piece, a fair price at the time but 25 quarters of oats which were also taken were only valued at los. a quarter, the average price' then being several shillings higher. Some years later for mowing 44 acres of grass he sets down in his account " £2 js. ; for making the same £2 3;., and stacking it 31., and about the same time he bought a ' steere ' of parson Clarke for £1 5X., a low price. A heifer with her calf was sold for £2 4*- In the inventory of the goods of Viscountess Campden of Brooke, made in 1680, occur the following items : — 172 sheep and 8 beasts 96 13 4 200 tod of wool .......•- 200 o o 15 swine. . . . . . . . • • 7100 As sheep were then worth about gs. each and oxen £^ this was near the ordinary price, and the wool was the same price as that sold by Mr. Barker in 1642 ; indeed, the price of wool during the 1 7th century was almost stationary. In 1692 wheat at Oakham was 27/. 4^. a quarter, but next year it had risen to as high as 46^., and the year after it was as low as 24J. Hay also was subject to the same fluctuations, in 1694-5 selling at Oakham for 30/. a ton, and in the last three quarters of 1696-7 at 14J., while in 1697-8 it had gone up to 24/. Between 1 71 5 and 1765 prices fell considerably, crops generally being abundant and England still an exporting country in many agricultural products ; consequently we are not sur- prised to find that at Stamford in 1733 wheat was only 23J. to 24^. 6d. a quarter, barley 13;., and oats ioj. Arthur Young during his six months' tour" was in the neighbourhood of Casterton in 1769, where the soil is clay and a poor sandy loam, ' what they call creech,' where farms varied greatly in size from ;^20 a year to £s^0, rents also varying much from 5;. and Js. an acre for open-field land to £1 an acre for that which was inclosed. The usual course of cropping was (i) fallow; (2) wheat ; (3) trefoil and clover mixed for two years ; (4) barley or wheat ; {5) turnips ; (6) barley. Four ploughings were considered necessary for wheat, and a seeding of 2j bushels produced a crop of 20 bushels per acre, worth in Mark Lane about 4OJ. a quarter. The average barley crop was 32 bushels, and they ploughed once for oats, sowed 4 bushels per acre, and, as a rule, obtained 40 bushels in return, the price of which was then from i6j. to 20s. a quarter. Beans, sown broad- cast and never hoed, produced from twenty-four to twenty-eight bushels per acre, and turnips, hoed once, were always grown for the sheep. In 1 77 1, according to the Kennel accounts of the Exton Foxhounds,^'' oats were pur- chased at from 14/. to i8j. a quarter, and beans at from 355. to 4.0s. In 1782 the former had fallen to from in. to 16s. a quarter, and the latter to from 24J. to 29^., a significant proof of bad roads, as in Mark Lane oats were from 15J. to 34/., and beans about 355. By the same accounts we learn that shoeing a horse from 1753 to 1789 cost the low price of is. a month. A large quantitv of sainfoin, as Young tells us, was sown generally with barley after turnips, and the farmers reckoned on its lasting twenty years, mowing it once a year and getting for twelve years or so about two loads per acre, a load being a ton. In the cultivation of sainfoin, turnips, and clover Rutland was in advance of many parts of England, where it was at this time unknown ; and it was no doubt the proximity of the county to Leicestershire, one of the most progressive of English counties agriculturally, that conferred upon it this advantage. When Young made his tour English farming was undergoing a great revolution. Hitherto the farm had been considered merely as the support of the farmer and his family, and a very small proportion of the produce was sold off; now, owing to the rise of manufacturing towns which had to be fed, farms were converted into manufactories of bread and meat for the townspeople. A great impetus was thus given to the inclosure of wastes, the extinction of open fields, the partition of commons, and the consolidation of holdings, 3,000,000 acres of land being inclosed during the 1 8th century, and twice as much " Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. v, 387 et seq. " MS. accounts of Sir Abel Barker, bart., in the possession of E. W. P. Conant, esq. "/?«/. Mdg. ii, 181. " Young, Six Months^ Tour through the North of Engl. (ed. 2), i, 66. " Rut. Mag. i, 260. 242