This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...Reporter,1 they " would for the most part make very valuable land... in their present state, they are chiefly covered with water, and in summer throw forth the coarsest of productions; the best parts, which are those nearest the enclosed high lands, are constantly pared and burnt to produce vegetable ...
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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...Reporter,1 they " would for the most part make very valuable land... in their present state, they are chiefly covered with water, and in summer throw forth the coarsest of productions; the best parts, which are those nearest the enclosed high lands, are constantly pared and burnt to produce vegetable ashes.... The more remote parts of the common are dug up for fuel. On account of the general wetness of those commons, and their being constantly overstocked by the large occupiers of contiguous estates, or in such seasons as the depasturage is desirable in summer, to ease the inclosed land, the cattle and sheep necessarily depastured thereon at all seasons being those of the cottagers, who are for the most part destitute of provision for them in winter, are always unthrifty, and subject to various diseases, which render them very unprofitable to the occupiers." The farming of the open arable fields had, in the Reporter's opinion, deteriorated rather than progressed. "If," he says,2 " those gentlemen, whether proprietors or agents, who have any concern in the management of common fields, will examine into the present mode of occupancy of the different classes of them... they will in most cases find them in a weak impoverished state; and that the original systematic farming of them is either lost or laid aside, and that the agriculture of the common fields of this county has rather declined than improved." The Cambridgeshire Reporter,8 it may be added, formed the same opinion of the open-fields in that county, and he produces some evidence to prove that the rental of open farms had fallen since the seventeenth century. The general impression left by this mass of evidence is that the agricultural defects of the...
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