middle of the eighteenth century there was practically nothing but open[1] country from Spilsby to Caistor, and the great-grandfather of the present earl of Yarborough records the fact that in riding from Spilsby to his home at Brocklesby, several miles beyond Caistor, he encountered only two fences. All this tract is now a sea of waving corn, with patches of green turnips and seed fields, and keeping twenty sheep where one was kept before. In Gayton and Tathwell were rabbit warrens as late as 1800, and round Brocklesby, Cabourne, and Swallow there were miles of gorse. But there was a great change fifty years later, when 30,000 acres of Lord Yarborough's estate were converted into good turnip land, dotted with handsome farm buildings, on which £150,000 had been spent, and surrounded by lofty stacks, the fields being divided by neat clipped thorn fences. What a difference from the waste of gorse and bracken, tenanted chiefly by rabbits and foxes, the whole land then letting for but 3s. an acre! The first step at reclamation was to grub up the gorse, and to pare and burn the rough peaty grass, at a cost of a guinea an acre. Then came a dressing of chalk, 80 cubic yards to the acre, and costing 66s., which was followed by sixty bushels of bones, at 1s. 3d. a bushel, another item of nearly £4. The Wolds have been chalked twice over, without which the turnips are destroyed by the excrescence called 'fingers and toes,' but even the first outlay of the tenant amounted to more than £8 an acre, a large sum for the individual farmer, and a very large sum when the size of the farms is taken into account. The farms were not let on lease, nevertheless the tenant was ready to sink as much as £8,000 on a farm at Brocklesby through well-merited confidence in the owner. For generations, though only on a yearly tenure, the farms on Lord Yarborough's estate passed from father to son, and a case is recorded that when a farmer died and left a son but three years of age, two neighbouring tenants undertook, and were allowed by the landlord, to manage a farm for the infant, in trust until his majority. At one time the parish of Limber, consisting of 4,000 acres, was let to four tenants at 2s. 6d. an acre, and all four became bankrupts. Since it became enclosed and well farmed the tenants have done exceptionally well, and considerable fortunes have been made. Mr. R. Dawson, who occupied the entire parish of Withcall, 2,000 acres of plough-land, was one of the first who ventured a heavy outlay on his land, his yearly bill for bones alone being from £1,500 to £1,800. Mr. Dawson's management was the perfection of farming, and he left a large fortune at his death. The magnitude of his holding may be realized when it is stated that you could often see one field of turnips 350 acres in extent. There was once a field there 600 acres in extent. The practice on the farms three-quarters of a century ago was much the same as now. The sheep were wintered on turnips, the cattle, bought at two years old for the most part, were wintered in the yards and fed liberally on oil-cake, their mission being to convert the straw into manure. As much as £600 would be spent on oil-cake in a year on some of the big farms. If the beasts repaid half they had eaten, the farmers were satisfied in those days. Sometimes three-year-old beasts were bought, and beginning with
- ↑ Practically the whole of the Ormsby estate was under cultivation in 1636, and a map of Harrington and Brinkhill shows that they too were farmed as early as 1600. There were two large open arable fields in each of these parishes, one of which was sown with corn each year. The rest was cow pasture, horse closes, &c.
