The improvement of native agriculture in relation to population and public health / by Sir A. Daniel Hall.

  • Hall, A. Daniel (Alfred Daniel), Sir, 1864-1942.
Date:
1936
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The improvement of native agriculture in relation to population and public health / by Sir A. Daniel Hall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    a more definite system of fixed agriculture which has left its marks upon the land even to this day. Many of these tribes, not however all, both then and in the later Saxon invasions, brought with them a form of land tenure which was widespread over Europe, and indeed seems to be part of the inheritance of a considerable section of the Aryan folk. This was the strip system of arable farming whereby the cultivated land was divided into three fields, one devoted to winter corn—wheat or rye, another to spring corn as barley or beans, while the third was left fallow. In each of these fields every member of the community possessed the use of a certain number of units of land, which he cultivated for the appointed crop and took the produce. Outside the three fields was an area of communal grazing. How far the tenure was originally communal is still a matter of dispute; at any rate in Britain it emerges in his¬ tory as the manorial system in which there is an overlord owning the whole group of fields and waste, but subject to the customary tenures of the cultivators. The historical aspect is outside my consideration, but from the point of view of the conservation of fertility we find two crops grown for food, and thus exhausting, followed by one year of rest, when the growth of weeds would have some re¬ cuperative effect. In so far as beans were grown on the spring-corn field these wTould also bring about some re¬ cuperation. While there is evidence of some use of the live stock to restore fertility to the arable land by folding them there at night after they had been grazing by day on the waste, and at other times by confining them at night and after¬ wards collecting the dung for manure, yet these restorative measures were of small efficiency and the level of production that could be maintained was very low. Walter of Henley, writing in the thirteenth century, and another almost con¬ temporary author, when the system was in full vogue, speak of threefold up to fivefold returns for wheat, rather more for rye and barley, if the crops were successful. We shall not be far out if we take for an index an average yield of io bushels of wheat per acre for a sowing of 2 to 3 bushels. The pressure of population and the desire to get a cash