BEHIND the modern practices of ploughing there is a long complicated history which could be illustrated from a thousand localities in England and Wales. I take an example intimately known to me: more than eleven hundred years ago, eight plough-lands around my own home in Kent were given as a present to an archbishop by a conquering king. I can identify some, if not all, of those ploughlands and walk over them to-day. I believe them to have been about 120 acres each — 960 ploughed acres in one parish 1100 years ago! My instance is no isolated one, investigation will reveal numerous parallel cases hereabouts.
Even our ancient measurements include links with ploughing: there is the furrow-long (furlong) which is the economic distance that an English ('Anglo-Saxon ') team of oxen could be driven at one stretch without a " blow " - a chance to take proper breath. And our acre, a furlong in length and 22 yards wide, is the amount that could be ploughed by one labour unit in a day. Notice that its dimensions make it a strip-like area ten times as long as wide. In ancient times the acre was somewhat different in size in different places.
But South-Eastern England provides us with much more ancient corn-plots than those I have mentioned. The Celtic inhabitants — the Britons — had squarish fields with the length nothing like a furlong, but more like 120 yards, or a little less, a distance again dictated by the employment of a smaller plough team than that used by their English successors. You can still see the outlines of these Celtic plots on the downlands of Kent and Sussex where later inhabitants have never thought it worth their while to turn the shallow soil. No doubt it was fields of this shape on more fertile soil that were pillaged in the first century before Christ by Caesar's soldiers on their foraging expeditions during his unsuccessful invasion of Britain. But these ancient fields were not the beginning, for small irregular areas of cultivation, where prehistoric man prepared the soil with his primitive implements, are to be found in wilder parts of Britain, and notably have been identified in the West — on Dartmoor. And I suspect that a reconstruction of the primitive practices of that Bronze Age farmer three thousand years ago would be more to the liking of Edward H. Faulkner than any of the so-called advances which have been made as a result of the introduction of the mouldboard plough in comparatively recent years. Certainly the digging stick would be quite incapable of producing those results which our author condemns and deplores. Since there is such a long history behind the plough, it is natural that its traditions should be strongly established and entrenched. With tradition there frequently goes unquestioning adherence to the practices of centuries whether those practices are sound or not.
If 'Ploughman's Folly' does nothing more, it calls halt to an unquestioning plodding onwards in the footsteps of that long procession of ploughmen that generation after generation has witnessed.
No industry, to-day, can afford to submit unquestioningly to tradition, and this book at least calls attention to the fact that it is time to give new point to the poet's question:
As a soil-scientist, I cannot see quite eye to eye with Mr. Faulkner in some of his concepts of soil properties, but these differences of view do not, it seems to me, in any way invalidate the arguments that are based upon them.
We commend this essay to the earnest consideration of all who are able to test and probe further into the mysteries of the relationship of plant and soil. It is clear to every humble-minded investigator that no work that promotes enquiry into fundamental principles can have been written in vain.
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