Studies in Bibliography: VI.-Agriculture from the Restoration to Anne
U NTIL R. Lennard found some of the results of the Royal Society' enquiry, the only guide there was to farming development in the post-Commonwealth period was a comparison of the few textbooks published then. These must be used with some care and their inadequacy is shown by the current textbooks, whose authors have used them.2 Even Godfrey Davies3 has been unable to indicate how far they might be used satisfactorily. All he can say is that since they commanded a ready sale there must have been something to be learned from them, but that where they were most original they, are probably most untrustworthy. I have demonstrated how such seventeenth-century works must be supplemented by other sources of evidence in an essay on pre-Commonwealth farming,4 and here I propose to show how far it is safe to use the didactic treatises of the late seventeenth century as a guide to the history of the development of our farming practice then. The actual number of books strictly confined to farming that was published in the half-century is small, about a dozen in all, but there were several dealing with horses, farriery which was the contemporary term for what is now known as veterinary science, botany, draining fens, fruit and forest trees, and so on. Most of these I propose to ignore, and to deal only with farming books pure and simple. Both Ernle5 and Godfrey Davies6 agree in selecting two works as the best of those which appeared during the period. These were John Worlidge's Systema Agricultura, i669, and J. Mortimer's Whole Art of Husbandry,) I707. The first is the most practical and the most systematic work on farming that had yet appeared, and the second the best and most complete work on practical farming yet published. These two books are examples of the merits and defects of textbooks when drawn upon for evidence of the contemporary state of farming. Both rely often enough on the authority of earlier works, but Worlidge has the grace to acknowledge his sources, while Mortimer rarely does, a common fault of the time and a proceeding that needs to be carefully watched to determine how far a practice described is contemporary or