During the twelve first years of the last century, the average price of the best wheat at the Windsor market was L1 18s.
3 1/6d.the quarter of nine Winchester bushels.
But in the twelve years preceding 1764, including that year, the average price of the same measure of the best wheat at the same market was L2 1s.9 1/2d.
In the twelve first years of the last century, therefore, wheat appears to have been a good deal cheaper, and butcher's meat a good deal dearer, than in the twelve years preceding 1764, including that year.
In all great countries the greater part of the cultivated lands are employed in producing either food for men or food for cattle.The rent and profit of these regulate the rent and profit of all other cultivated land.If any particular produce afforded less, the land would soon be turned into corn or pasture; and if any afforded more, some part of the lands in corn or pasture would soon be turned to that produce.
Those productions, indeed, which require either a greater original expense of improvement, or a greater annual expense of cultivation, in order to fit the land for them, appear commonly to afford, the one a greater rent, the other a greater profit than corn or pasture.This superiority, however, will seldom be found to amount to more than a reasonable interest or compensation for this superior expense.
In a hop garden, a fruit garden, a kitchen garden, both the rent of the landlord, and the profit of the farmer, are generally greater than in a corn or grass field.But to bring the ground into this condition requires more expense.Hence a greater rent becomes due to the landlord.It requires, too, a more attentive and skilful management.Hence a greater profit becomes due to the farmer.The crop too, at least in the hop and fruit garden, is more precarious.Its price, therefore, besides compensating all occasional losses, must afford something like the profit of insurance.The circumstances of gardeners, generally mean, and always moderate, may satisfy us that their great ingenuity is not commonly over-recompensed.Their delightful art is practised by so many rich people for amusement, that little advantage is to be made by those who practise it for profit; because the persons who should naturally be their best customers supply themselves with all their most precious productions.
The advantage which the landlord derives from such improvements seems at no time to have been greater than what was sufficient to compensate the original expense of ****** them.In the ancient husbandry, after the vineyard, a well-watered kitchen garden seems to have been the part of the farm which was supposed to yield the most valuable produce.But Democritus, who wrote upon husbandry about two thousand years ago, and who was regarded by the ancients as one of the fathers of the art, thought they did not act wisely who enclosed a kitchen garden.The profit, he said, would not compensate the expense of a stone wall; and bricks (he meant, I suppose, bricks baked in the sun) mouldered with the rain, and the winter storm, and required continual repairs.Columella, who reports this judgment of Democritus, does not controvert it, but proposes a very frugal method of enclosing with a hedge of brambles and briars, which, he says, he had found by experience to be both a lasting and an impenetrable fence; but which, it seems, was not commonly known in the time of Democritus.Palladius adopts the opinion of Columella, which had before been recommended by Varro.In the judgment of those ancient improvers, the produce of a kitchen garden had, it seems, been little more than sufficient to pay the extraordinary culture and the expense of watering; for in countries so near the sun, it was thought proper, in those times as in the present, to have the command of a stream of water which could be conducted to every bed in the garden.Through the greater part of Europe a kitchen garden is not at present supposed to deserve a better enclosure than that recommended by Columella.In Great Britain, and some other northern countries, the finer fruits cannot be brought to perfection but by the assistance of a wall.Their price, therefore, in such countries must be sufficient to pay the expense of building and maintaining what they cannot be had without.The fruit-wall frequently surrounds the kitchen garden, which thus enjoys the benefit of an enclosure which its own produce could seldom pay for.
That the vineyard, when properly planted and brought to perfection, was the most valuable part of the farm, seems to have been an undoubted maxim in the ancient agriculture, as it is in the modern through all the wine countries.But whether it was advantageous to plant a new vineyard was a matter of dispute among the ancient Italian husbandmen, as we learn from Columella.