Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. My comfort
Speaker 1: TV viewing lately has been those BBC historic farm shows
Speaker 1: that came out in the two thousands and the twenty teens.
Speaker 1: I haven't actually seen the first one, which is called
Speaker 1: Tales from the Green Valley. I'm not sure if that's
Speaker 1: streaming anywhere, but I have made my way through Victorian Farm,
Speaker 1: Edwardian Farm, Wartime Farm and Tudor Monastery Farm. If you've
Speaker 1: never seen these, they are filmed over a year at
Speaker 1: a living history site. There's a historian named Ruth Goodman
Speaker 1: and then archaeologist. They started out with Peter Ginn and
Speaker 1: Alex Langland's and then Tom Pinfold replaced Alex in Tutor
Speaker 1: Monastery Farm. So in each of these series they try
Speaker 1: to recreate what life was like for British farmers at
Speaker 1: a particular place in time. Uh. And they have been
Speaker 1: like my downtime viewing for the past little stretch. So
Speaker 1: watching these in the order that they came out means
Speaker 1: that I had seen a lot of fields being planted
Speaker 1: using a seed drill, which is a machine that digs
Speaker 1: a place for the seeds to grow, and it drops
Speaker 1: the seeds into that place and then it covers them up.
Speaker 1: And then I got to Tutor Monastery farm, which is
Speaker 1: set before the seed drill was used in Britain, and
Speaker 1: there's this whole scene where Peter and Tom are getting
Speaker 1: ready to sow their seeds by manual broadcasting, which just
Speaker 1: means flinging them out by hand into the field, and
Speaker 1: the narrator says something about how this is how it
Speaker 1: was done before Jethrow Tull invented the seed drill. And
Speaker 1: I had one of those records scratch mental moments because
Speaker 1: I think of Jethrow Tull as the name of a band,
Speaker 1: and while I probably, uh, you know, assumed that this
Speaker 1: band was named for a person, I definitely did not
Speaker 1: recall that the person was an eighteenth century gentleman farmer
Speaker 1: often credited with inventing the seed drill. So that became
Speaker 1: what I had to do a podcast on next. He
Speaker 1: could or could not play the jazz flute. We don't know.
Speaker 1: We actually don't know jeff Row Tull's birth date, but
Speaker 1: he was baptized on March thirty, sixteen seventy four, in Basilton, Berkshire, England.
Speaker 1: His parents were Dorothy and Jethro Tull, and they were
Speaker 1: an established farming family, but not a wealthy one. In fact,
Speaker 1: the Greater Tull family had a range of legal and
Speaker 1: financial problems, some of them connected to their work as
Speaker 1: land agents for other people. The elder jeth Row Tull
Speaker 1: also had an uncle who was also named jeff Row Tull.
Speaker 1: This other jeff Row Tull was married to a woman
Speaker 1: named Mary, and at various points j e Throw, husband
Speaker 1: of Dorothy, and Jethrow, husband of Mary, transferred lands to
Speaker 1: one another as they tried to keep it from being
Speaker 1: seized in legal action or as payment for a debt.
Speaker 1: It is all a confusing enough tangle that some early
Speaker 1: biographies thought that these two older Jethrow Tells were the
Speaker 1: same person, and a paper that I read that tried
Speaker 1: to sort all of this out used Roman numerals to
Speaker 1: differentiate them, even though they were not really Jethrow Tull.
Speaker 1: The first, second and third uh, the agriculturist Jethro Tull,
Speaker 1: that is, the Jethro Tull who this episode is about,
Speaker 1: did not disclose very much about his personal life after
Speaker 1: becoming very well known for his farming methods. Some of
Speaker 1: this is probably connected to his family history. All those
Speaker 1: debts and lawsuits would have been embarrassing and they also
Speaker 1: kind of left him on financially shaky ground. He also
Speaker 1: got a lot of criticism, which we will get to,
Speaker 1: which seems to have made him just for luck to
Speaker 1: talk about himself. So what we know about his life
Speaker 1: is mostly pieced together from his writing. Jethro Tull attended
Speaker 1: St John's College, Oxford, but there's no evidence that he
Speaker 1: earned a degree that In sixteen ninety three he was
Speaker 1: admitted as a student at Gray's Inn, which is one
Speaker 1: of the four ends of court in London. He was
Speaker 1: going to study law. This was in preparation for a
Speaker 1: career in politics, but his family's legal and debt drama
Speaker 1: combined with his own chronic illness to derail that plan.
Speaker 1: As is often the case with historical figures, we don't
Speaker 1: know the details of his illness, but it's often described
Speaker 1: as a respiratory disorder, possibly tuberculosis. Tull was called to
Speaker 1: the bar in sixteen ninety nine, but rather than practicing law,
Speaker 1: he started working on one of the tolls farms in Oxfordshire.
Speaker 1: He also got married that year to a woman named
Speaker 1: Susannah Smith on October. The pair would go on to
Speaker 1: have five children, four honors and one son. Although jeth
Speaker 1: Row Tull is most associated with the seed drill, his
Speaker 1: methods went beyond just using a machine to plant seeds
Speaker 1: instead of broadcasting them by hand. Francis Forbes was a
Speaker 1: follower of Tull's reforms, and here's how he described the
Speaker 1: quote old husbandry pre Tull. This is from the extensive
Speaker 1: practice of the new husbandry exemplified on different sorts of
Speaker 1: land for a course of years, in which the various
Speaker 1: methods of plowing, hoeing, and every other process and agriculture
Speaker 1: recommended by Mr Tull, etcetera are considered. Forbes published that
Speaker 1: in six he wrote quote in the old husbandry, the tillage,
Speaker 1: namely the plowing and harrowing is done first, the plowing
Speaker 1: to open the land, and the harrowing to make it
Speaker 1: fine and get out the weeds. Dong or other manure
Speaker 1: is then spread upon the land which is plowed in,
Speaker 1: and then the seed, as of wheat or other corn,
Speaker 1: is sown by hand broadcast which is covered by the
Speaker 1: plow or harrow. Nothing more is usually done till harvest,
Speaker 1: except weeding when the weeds are grown up pretty large.
Speaker 1: A lot of these basic steps had been documented in
Speaker 1: Virgil's Georgics, which were written in the first century b c.
Speaker 1: And that is a very long, multi volume work of
Speaker 1: verse that praised the agricultural life of rural Italy and
Speaker 1: also offered instruction on subjects like planting and tending fields
Speaker 1: and orchards, keeping bees, and raising livestock. It was definitely
Speaker 1: a didactic work, but there was debate over the centuries
Speaker 1: about whether Virgil had really intended it as a step
Speaker 1: by step set of instructions for agriculture. Regardless, by the
Speaker 1: time Tull started farming, a lot of Virgil's poetic recommendations
Speaker 1: were being taken for granted as the right way to farm.
Speaker 1: They had been incorporated into other farming and agricultural manuals.
Speaker 1: In addition to the application of manure that Forbes mentioned,
Speaker 1: there was also the burning of the stubble that was
Speaker 1: left on the field at the end of the harvest
Speaker 1: and allowing the land to periodically lie fallow. It was,
Speaker 1: in Tool's words, quote accident, not choice, that made me
Speaker 1: a farmer or rather many accidents which could not then
Speaker 1: possibly be foreseen. Those many accidents meant that he had
Speaker 1: a farm that quote I could not well dispose of,
Speaker 1: And it being about the time when plow servants first
Speaker 1: began to exalt their dominion over their masters, so that
Speaker 1: a gentleman farmer was allowed to make but little profit
Speaker 1: of his arable lands, and almost all mine being of
Speaker 1: that sort, I resolved to plant my whole farm with
Speaker 1: Saint Foyn. If you think that he sounds a little
Speaker 1: resentful of his workers in this passage, you're correct. He
Speaker 1: seems to have resented needing to hire people to do
Speaker 1: anything so same. Foin is a legume that was grown
Speaker 1: for forage, and at this point same point, seed was
Speaker 1: almost exclusively important to England, and this made it expensive
Speaker 1: and kind of hard to get an in Talls experience,
Speaker 1: once a farmer did get it, a lot of it
Speaker 1: just did not sprout. So Tall started trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to get the biggest result out of the
Speaker 1: smallest amount of seed, including examining how deeply the seeds
Speaker 1: should be planted and how much room they needed to grow.
Speaker 1: He later wrote, quote I observed in several fields of
Speaker 1: same coin sewn with that proportion of seed that in
Speaker 1: those parts of them which produced the best crop there was,
Speaker 1: as I counted them when the crop was taken off,
Speaker 1: but about one plant for each square foot of surface.
Speaker 1: And yet the number of seeds and seven bushels sewn
Speaker 1: on each acre being calculated, amounted to one hundred and
Speaker 1: forty to each square foot. And what was yet more
Speaker 1: observable in other parts of the same fields, where a
Speaker 1: much less number of seeds had miscarried, the crop was less.
Speaker 1: Then after I had learned perfectly how to distinguish good
Speaker 1: seeds from bad, and had by many trials found that
Speaker 1: scarce any even of the best, would succeed unless covered
Speaker 1: at a certain depth, especially in my strong land. In
Speaker 1: other words, rather than throwing large numbers of seeds to
Speaker 1: land randomly, Tull wanted to take a more controlled approach,
Speaker 1: with fewer seeds sorted to include only the best ones.
Speaker 1: I mean, it seems like, based on how much seed
Speaker 1: people were using and where the plants are growing the best,
Speaker 1: they were using like a hundred and forty times more
Speaker 1: seeds than was necessary. So to try to make this
Speaker 1: whole process more controlled, quote, I employed people to make channels,
Speaker 1: and so a very small proportion therein and cover it exactly.
Speaker 1: This way succeeded to my desire, and was in seed
Speaker 1: and labor but a fourth part of the expense of
Speaker 1: the common way. And yet the ground of seed was
Speaker 1: better planted ten acres being so well done, I did
Speaker 1: not doubt, but a thousand might have been as well
Speaker 1: done in the same manner. This sounds like a success.
Speaker 1: But the next season, when Tull instructed his workers to
Speaker 1: once again make channels and carefully so the seeds in
Speaker 1: them quote, I discovered that these people had conspired to
Speaker 1: disappoint me for the future, and never to plant a
Speaker 1: row tolerably well. Again, perhaps jealous that if a great
Speaker 1: quantity of land should be taken from the plow, it
Speaker 1: might prove a diminution of their power, I was forced
Speaker 1: to dismiss my laborers, resolving to quit my scheme unless
Speaker 1: I could contrive an engine to plant sainfoin more faithfully
Speaker 1: than such hands would do. In other words, jeth roats
Speaker 1: All concluded that his workers were doing a bad job
Speaker 1: just despite him, so he fired them and decided he
Speaker 1: would make a machine to sew his same point seed. Instead.
Speaker 1: We will talk more about that after a sponsor break.
Speaker 1: Jeffre Tull was not the first person to try to
Speaker 1: use some kind of a tool or a machine to
Speaker 1: plant his crops. I should also know, like we're talking
Speaker 1: about ways to sow large fields of one crop, not
Speaker 1: like a little garden, like a little kitchen garden, where
Speaker 1: you would have a couple of rows of different things,
Speaker 1: like things that require lots of seeds. Basic tools like
Speaker 1: planting sticks used to prepare the soil and plant the
Speaker 1: seeds and dig out root crops. Those have existed around
Speaker 1: the world for millennia. There's evidence of early seed drills
Speaker 1: in China as far back as the second century, but
Speaker 1: it is not clear when or whether those might have
Speaker 1: been introduced into Europe. The first setting boards, which used
Speaker 1: spaced holes to distribute the seeds more evenly, those day
Speaker 1: back to at least sixteen oh one. John Worlidge included
Speaker 1: a design for a seed drill in his systema Agriculture
Speaker 1: in sin but it doesn't appear that he ever actually
Speaker 1: managed to build a working model. The same is true
Speaker 1: for several seed drill designs that were patented in various
Speaker 1: parts of Europe in the late seventeenth century. When Tull
Speaker 1: decided to contrive an engine to plant his same coin,
Speaker 1: he thought about other devices that he was already familiar with,
Speaker 1: writing quote, when I was young, my diversion was music.
Speaker 1: I had also the curiosity to acquaint myself thoroughly with
Speaker 1: the fabric of every part of my organ, but as
Speaker 1: little thinking that ever I should take from thence the
Speaker 1: first rudiments of a drill. After dismissing his workers for
Speaker 1: not sowing the seeds. To his satisfaction, Tull quote examined
Speaker 1: and compared all the mechanical ideas had ever entered my imagination,
Speaker 1: and it last pitched upon a groove, tongue, and spring
Speaker 1: in the soundboard of the organ. With these a little altered,
Speaker 1: and some parts of two other instruments, as far into
Speaker 1: the field as the organ is added to them, I
Speaker 1: composed my machine. It was named a drill because when
Speaker 1: farmers used to sew their beans and peas into channels
Speaker 1: their furrows by hand, they called that action drilling. Tell
Speaker 1: first used this machine in seventeen oh one, and, as
Speaker 1: he wrote decades later, quote, it planted that far much
Speaker 1: better than hands could have done, and many hundred acres besides,
Speaker 1: and thirty years experience shows that same foin thus planted
Speaker 1: brings better crops and lasteth longer than son same foin.
Speaker 1: So this device had a grooved, rotating cylinder that would
Speaker 1: carry the seeds from a hopper above to a funnel underneath.
Speaker 1: The cylinder was also the axle for the drills wheel,
Speaker 1: so it turned as the wheels did. There was a
Speaker 1: plow towards the front of the drill that created a
Speaker 1: channel for the seeds to drop into, and then there
Speaker 1: was a harrow in the back of the drill and
Speaker 1: that covered the seeds up. So this meant that the
Speaker 1: seeds were dropped in a straight line to a specific
Speaker 1: depth and then covered all at once, as long as
Speaker 1: your horse was going in a straight line while pulling it.
Speaker 1: So it's Hall's words, his drill did this quote with
Speaker 1: great exactness and expedition. Tall made various refinements to the
Speaker 1: device itself and how it was used, ultimately ending up
Speaker 1: with a process in which two or three rows of
Speaker 1: plants were planted between eight and ten inches apart. Those
Speaker 1: two or three rows were on ridges that were four
Speaker 1: to six ft apart, leaving enough room for a horse
Speaker 1: to walk down on the field without trampling anything. In
Speaker 1: Tull's mind, this was just a huge improvement over manually
Speaker 1: broadcasting seeds. Even if somebody was pretty good scattering seeds
Speaker 1: by hand, there was typically too much seed in some
Speaker 1: places and too little in others. If the field was
Speaker 1: furrowed ahead of time to accommodate the seeds, some of
Speaker 1: the seeds landed in the furrows, but other ones didn't.
Speaker 1: Seed that was too deep in the soil might not
Speaker 1: grow as well, and if it was too shallow it
Speaker 1: was more likely to be eaten by birds. Planting in
Speaker 1: rows also made it easier to get into the field
Speaker 1: to check on the crop and to remove weeds and
Speaker 1: to harvest, and as Tull noted, a field that was
Speaker 1: fully planted with this method required far fewer seeds than
Speaker 1: manual broadcasting did. But other farmers who saw what he
Speaker 1: was doing, a lot of them thought he was letting
Speaker 1: a lot of plantable land go to waste by leaving
Speaker 1: these four to six foot gaps in between his rows.
Speaker 1: Tell farmed in Oxfordshire for about ten years before moving
Speaker 1: to Prosperous Farm in Shelburne, Berkshire, which was another farm
Speaker 1: that had been in the Tall family, and sometime in
Speaker 1: the early seventeen teens he traveled to Italy and France
Speaker 1: for the sake of his health. He returned to England
Speaker 1: after somewhere between two and four years, but these dates
Speaker 1: are again unclear, with the only clue to try to
Speaker 1: pin it down being the baptism of his daughter Sarah
Speaker 1: in October of set Something That's whole noticed while in
Speaker 1: Italy and France was how carefully the vineyards were planted
Speaker 1: and managed. The soil in between the rows was carefully
Speaker 1: tilled to the point of being pulverized, and workers meticulously
Speaker 1: hoed the earth around the plants as well. Tall came
Speaker 1: to the conclusion that this pulverized soil was providing more
Speaker 1: nutrients to the plants. Basically, he thought that the soil itself,
Speaker 1: tiny tiny particles of soil were what the plants were
Speaker 1: eating through what he called lacteal mouths on their roots.
Speaker 1: He decided that soil, and only soil, was what plants
Speaker 1: needed to survive, not something in the soil, not water,
Speaker 1: not air, not sunlight, just very very finely tilled soil.
Speaker 1: In his mind, the roll of water in this equation
Speaker 1: was to carry the tiny soil particles closer to those
Speaker 1: lacteal mouths. The cartoon that has formed in my head
Speaker 1: is so delightful right now. Tall decided to try pulverizing
Speaker 1: the soil around his crops it prosperous farm, where much
Speaker 1: of the land was relatively shallow and chalky. He developed
Speaker 1: a horse drawn plow for this purpose, using it in
Speaker 1: that gap between his rows while workers manually hod the
Speaker 1: soil around the plants themselves. He thought new roots had
Speaker 1: more mouths than old roots, so if a plant's roots
Speaker 1: were broken by all this hoeing, that was okay. It
Speaker 1: just meant new roots would grow in to replace them,
Speaker 1: complete with more mouths. Tall tried this method on several
Speaker 1: different crops that farm, including turnips, potatoes, and wheat, and
Speaker 1: he reported that it was enormously successful in terms of
Speaker 1: efficiency and yield, and as a bonus, it allowed him
Speaker 1: to replace some of his higher paid workers with women
Speaker 1: and children who he could pay a lot less, since
Speaker 1: their jobs mostly involved moving clods of dirt out of
Speaker 1: the way if they fell in a bad spot after plowing,
Speaker 1: and in his opinion, this method eliminated the need for manure,
Speaker 1: something he was extremely pleased about since he thought manure
Speaker 1: spread weeds. He claimed that this method allowed him to
Speaker 1: grow wheat in the same field for thirteen years without
Speaker 1: using manure or allowing the soil to lie fallow. He said, quote,
Speaker 1: the finer land is made by tillage, the richer will
Speaker 1: it become, and the more plants will it maintain, or
Speaker 1: more briefly, tillage is manure. So to be fair, the
Speaker 1: details about how plants grew and what it took to
Speaker 1: nourish them were poorly under stood in Britain at this point.
Speaker 1: All around the world for the whole history of agriculture,
Speaker 1: people had been using techniques like crop rotation, planting different
Speaker 1: types of plants together, and using things like manure, urine,
Speaker 1: fish parts, and other materials to restore the soil. But
Speaker 1: while people knew that these steps usually led to a
Speaker 1: better harvest, they didn't know why they worked exactly. Today
Speaker 1: we understand that specific nutrients are critical to plant growth,
Speaker 1: especially phosphorus, potassium, and nitrogen, but when Tall was farming,
Speaker 1: only phosphorus had even been discovered. Europeans also only had
Speaker 1: a partial understanding of photosynthesis, and as we noted earlier,
Speaker 1: a lot of the conventional farming wisdom was drawn from
Speaker 1: Virgil that was more than seventeen hundred years old. That
Speaker 1: doesn't mean it was necessarily bad. It's just been around
Speaker 1: for a really long time. Did not have the benefit
Speaker 1: of newly developed ideas and discoveries. Right, But even with
Speaker 1: all of that in mind, tells ideas about plants being
Speaker 1: better able to consume very fine particles of pulverized soil,
Speaker 1: we're just not correct. His intensive hoeing definitely helped remove
Speaker 1: weeds that would have competed with his crops for nutrients,
Speaker 1: and it probably allowed water to penetrate more easily, especially
Speaker 1: if rainfall, and do meant that that soil never totally
Speaker 1: dried out. But he was not making it easier for
Speaker 1: plants to take in soil particles through these tiny theoretical
Speaker 1: root mouths, and hoeing definitely did not take the place
Speaker 1: of replenishing the soils. Nutrients was something like manure. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think a big reason that he was able to
Speaker 1: make that thirteen years of wheat in the same field
Speaker 1: number one. We're taking his word on that, right, but
Speaker 1: it was still as great in year thirteen as it
Speaker 1: had been in year one. But the fact that he
Speaker 1: had these big spaces in his rose probably meant that
Speaker 1: the soil was not being exhausted as it would have
Speaker 1: been if it had been packed more tightly together with plants.
Speaker 1: In one Tell published some of his ideas in a
Speaker 1: work called The New horse Hoeing Husbandry, or an Essay
Speaker 1: on the Principles of Tillage and Vegetation, wherein is shown
Speaker 1: a method of introducing a sort of vineyard culture into
Speaker 1: the corn fields. He called this a specimen. It was
Speaker 1: something that he planned to expand on in a longer work.
Speaker 1: Tell nearly abandoned this plan after a plagiarized version of
Speaker 1: his essay showed up not long after. He claimed his
Speaker 1: was the first book on agriculture ever to be so pirated.
Speaker 1: But regardless, his friends encouraged him to continue on, and
Speaker 1: in seventeen thirty three he published the much longer The
Speaker 1: horse Hoeing Husbandry, or An Essay on the Principles of
Speaker 1: Tillage and Vegetation, designed to introduce a new method of
Speaker 1: culture whereby the produce of land will be increased and
Speaker 1: the usual expense lessened, together with accurate descriptions and cuts
Speaker 1: of the instruments employed in it. Uh, not everybody was
Speaker 1: happy about this. We will talk about it after a
Speaker 1: sponsor break. Jeffrey Tells book The Horse Hoeing Husbandry explained
Speaker 1: his process for planting and hoeing the fields and his
Speaker 1: reasoning behind it. It included diagrams of the equipment that
Speaker 1: a farmer would need for such an enterprise, with explanations
Speaker 1: of what the parts of those machines did and how
Speaker 1: they worked. There were different seed drills for different types
Speaker 1: of crops, plus horse drawn hose and other tools, all
Speaker 1: of his design. This on its own would have caused
Speaker 1: at least some controversy. The upfront cost for equipment would
Speaker 1: have been significant, especially since manufacturing methods had not progressed
Speaker 1: to the point that things like this could really be
Speaker 1: mass produced. You would need experienced craftspeople who could build
Speaker 1: the machines mostly from scratch. Plus a lot of farmers
Speaker 1: still found that six foot gap between rows to just
Speaker 1: be incredibly wasteful. Beyond all that, though, Tall also took
Speaker 1: the time in his book to criticize existing farming practices,
Speaker 1: which he framed as old husbandry or even bad husbandry.
Speaker 1: His own method was the new husbandry or the good husbandry,
Speaker 1: and at times he took aim directly at Virgil, criticizing
Speaker 1: Virgil's recommendations for how to do things like plow burn
Speaker 1: until the land gardner and nurseryman Stephen Switzer, was particularly
Speaker 1: outraged by all of this. It's possible that at least
Speaker 1: some of his outrage stemmed from the fact that part
Speaker 1: of his income came from selling seeds, so if everyone
Speaker 1: started using methods that required just a fraction of their
Speaker 1: normal seed purchases, that would damage his business. But he
Speaker 1: also seems to have been incensed on principle, seeing Virgil's
Speaker 1: work as the foundation of good husbandry that had quote
Speaker 1: stood the test of so many ages, and probably seeing
Speaker 1: Virgil himself as a man who should not have to
Speaker 1: face this kind of insolence. So Switzer established a private
Speaker 1: society of husbandmen and planters and opposition to tell although
Speaker 1: it's not clear how many members there were besides Switzer,
Speaker 1: if any. He accused Tull of plagiarizing John Worlidge as
Speaker 1: well as earlier agricultural writers. Switzer also pointed out specific
Speaker 1: flaws that he saw in Tull's ideas. For example, it
Speaker 1: was quote ridiculous to affirm that one and the same
Speaker 1: culture and one in the same kind of manure is
Speaker 1: common to all sorts of land. Switzer even accused Tull
Speaker 1: of being an atheist. Oh the very worst. Switzer published
Speaker 1: Practical Husbandman and Planter, or Observations on the Ancient and
Speaker 1: Modern Husbandry, Planting and Gardening over a series of installments.
Speaker 1: These volumes layout switzers i ideas of good husbandry, many
Speaker 1: of which were drawn from Virgil, and they directly criticized
Speaker 1: Toll's work as well as criticizing Toll as a person.
Speaker 1: Here is a sample quote. If men are known by
Speaker 1: their words as a tree is by its fruit, there
Speaker 1: never was a man who has distinguished himself more than
Speaker 1: the author of the horse hoeing husbandry has. The deepest
Speaker 1: rivers are generally allowed to be the most silent, and
Speaker 1: the greatest noise is ever found where there is the
Speaker 1: least depth of water. And it is the general but
Speaker 1: true observation that those who are weakest in understanding are
Speaker 1: the strongest in opinion. This author has, by uttering his
Speaker 1: precipitate and crude conceptions, discovered himself to be little better
Speaker 1: than the animal in the fable who, putting on the
Speaker 1: lion's skin, terrified all the beasts of the forest till
Speaker 1: by his voice, they knew who he was. Handsome, very
Speaker 1: clear opinions about Jethro Tall, So Jethro It's all. Responded
Speaker 1: to Switzer's many criticisms with a supplement to the Essay
Speaker 1: on horse Hoeing Husbandry in seventy six. This he tried
Speaker 1: to refute Switzer point by point. He called the society
Speaker 1: of husbandmen and planters the equivocal society, or just Equivocus
Speaker 1: disappeared in later editions of horse Hoeing Husbandry, as Jethro
Speaker 1: tells supplement answering the objections of Equivocus in defense of Virgil.
Speaker 1: Among his points, quote Equivocus falsely accuses Tall of disrespect
Speaker 1: and not finding one useful truth in the Georgic. By
Speaker 1: quoting falsely, Equivocus does not prove his case. I feel
Speaker 1: like these two men would have loved Twitter, but that's
Speaker 1: I'm imagining, like one of the like a tumbler fight
Speaker 1: where going on forever. Switzer was not though the only
Speaker 1: person Tell was not getting along with Jethro's son, John
Speaker 1: was stravagant in his spending, and his relationship to his
Speaker 1: family seems to have become strained after Tell died on
Speaker 1: February seventeen forty one, at the age of sixty six.
Speaker 1: He left his property to his sister in law and
Speaker 1: his daughter's but he left John only a shilling. John
Speaker 1: ultimately died in the Debtors prison in seventeen sixty four.
Speaker 1: Jethro Tull was widely read and hotly debated from the
Speaker 1: seventeen thirties until the end of his life in seventeen
Speaker 1: forty one, but after his death most of his techniques
Speaker 1: sort of fell out of favor for a time, at
Speaker 1: least in Britain. His work was translated into French, although
Speaker 1: the French translations mostly focused on the techniques that were
Speaker 1: most demonstrably workable and not on the things that seemed
Speaker 1: a little more far fetched. The roots have mouths. Tell's
Speaker 1: legacy as a farmer is kind of a mixed bag.
Speaker 1: In the words of th. H. Marshall, writing in the
Speaker 1: Economic History Review in nine quote, he had apparently, first
Speaker 1: of allved his system of husbandry, then invented a scientific
Speaker 1: theory to explain it, and finally begun to study the
Speaker 1: literature of his subject. Overall, Marshall's analysis of Tull's agricultural reforms,
Speaker 1: it's not favorable. He wrote, quote, posterity is apt to
Speaker 1: be overkind to the inventor. It remembers only those of
Speaker 1: his ideas which have been incorporated in the life of
Speaker 1: the present, and forgets all those which time has rejected.
Speaker 1: It assumes that his mistakes and false notions were due
Speaker 1: to the ignorance of his age, rather than to his
Speaker 1: own incompetence, and convicts of pusillanimity those of his contemporaries
Speaker 1: who hesitated to follow his inspiration, shedding his errors as
Speaker 1: they traveled onwards. And so it is with Tull. But
Speaker 1: the picture is false. His mistakes were not those of
Speaker 1: his age. The experts of his could and did denounce
Speaker 1: them as mistakes. The bad elements in his system were
Speaker 1: not merely traditions from the past which he was not
Speaker 1: yet ready to throw aside. They were new. He was
Speaker 1: asking men to make a revolution in order to adopt
Speaker 1: what was unsound. It is not surprising that they hesitated.
Speaker 1: A lot of Toll's ideas were just wildly incorrect. But
Speaker 1: there were elements to his work that were useful and
Speaker 1: withstood the test of time, like developing ways to plant
Speaker 1: fields more uniformly and efficiently in wasting less seed. In
Speaker 1: seventeen sixty two, the London based Society for the Encouragement
Speaker 1: of Arts, Manufacturers and Commerce established a medal for people
Speaker 1: who improved on the seed drill and who tested methods
Speaker 1: of old and new husbandry to determine what worked best
Speaker 1: and what didn't. Tull was also part of what came
Speaker 1: to be known as the agricultural revolution in Britain, as
Speaker 1: people developed in proved ways to prepare the soil, plants, tenned,
Speaker 1: and harvest. This ran alongside the enclosure movement, in which
Speaker 1: previously common land was enclosed in fences and small farms
Speaker 1: were consolidated into large estates that were controlled by one
Speaker 1: wealthy landlord, often one who wanted very large fields of
Speaker 1: a single crop to be sold for the best possible price.
Speaker 1: Apart from changes in land use and animal husbandry, the
Speaker 1: agricultural revolution was also connected to the development of machines
Speaker 1: like improved plows, cultivators, threshers and tull seed drill. Through
Speaker 1: all these developments, between seventeen hundred and eighteen seventy, British
Speaker 1: farms became about four times more productive. This led to
Speaker 1: a drop in food prices and an increase in the
Speaker 1: varieties of food available. Improvements and food preservation played a
Speaker 1: part in all of this as well. All this contributed
Speaker 1: to an increasing in population. Just in the eighteenth century,
Speaker 1: the population of England and Wales almost doubled. We should
Speaker 1: note that this increase in food production did not eliminate
Speaker 1: poverty or famine. The Great Famine in Ireland, which we've
Speaker 1: covered in a two part episode of the podcast, took
Speaker 1: place during this same time, but the issue in this
Speaker 1: spamine was not a lack of food. There was plenty
Speaker 1: of food being grown for export, but a blight killed
Speaker 1: the potato crop that Irish farmers were living off of
Speaker 1: while growing other food to be sold, and the government's
Speaker 1: lay say fair approach to the crisis led to the
Speaker 1: food continuing to be exported even as the people who
Speaker 1: were growing it we're starving. Even as the agricultural revolution
Speaker 1: led to more and more food being grown in Britain's
Speaker 1: rural areas, more of its population moved into the cities
Speaker 1: because the time and labor saving devices and methods that
Speaker 1: were being developed meant that farmers could do more with
Speaker 1: fewer workers. As the agricultural revel lution intersected with the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution, former rural farm workers, many of whom had
Speaker 1: lost access to land they had been using after it
Speaker 1: was enclosed, started to find jobs in urban factories instead.
Speaker 1: One of the biggest points of overlap between the Agricultural
Speaker 1: Revolution and the Industrial Revolution was the cotton gin, patented
Speaker 1: by Eli Whitney in sevent and totally shifting the cotton industry.
Speaker 1: The cotton gin made harvested cotton much easier to clean,
Speaker 1: which made it more profitable to grow, which led growers
Speaker 1: to want to plant more of it, which created a
Speaker 1: demand for more and more enslaved workers in places like
Speaker 1: the American South, where cotton became a primary crop. Tells
Speaker 1: planting methods for efficiency purposes also fed into this process
Speaker 1: with cotton. As for Jethro Tull's most famous invention, the
Speaker 1: seed drill did not become a reliable or practical part
Speaker 1: of farming until the nineteenth century, when improved manufacturing processes
Speaker 1: led to a model that was practical, affordable, and generally reliable.
Speaker 1: Wheel write James Smith of Suffolk developed a model along
Speaker 1: with his sons, which became known as the Suffolk drill
Speaker 1: and was available for five pounds in eighteen fifty one.
Speaker 1: It could sow multiple rows at once with adjustable spacing
Speaker 1: between the rows, and it had a manure box to
Speaker 1: apply manure at the same time. The depth and rate
Speaker 1: of sewing were adjustable as well. These did not follow
Speaker 1: tolls template of two to three rows in ridges four
Speaker 1: to six ft apart. Many drilled ten to twelve rows
Speaker 1: of seeds at once. Yeah, they're pretty cool to watch,
Speaker 1: which I was very much enjoying watching on all of
Speaker 1: these BBC historic farm shows. I also enjoyed watching them
Speaker 1: throw there. I think they were they were planting I
Speaker 1: think field peas when they were sowing the seeds by
Speaker 1: manually broadcasting them then leading me to just go down
Speaker 1: this whole jeth throw toll rabbit hole. What you got
Speaker 1: in the way? A listener mail? I have listener mail
Speaker 1: about Gin from Kendall. Kendall said, Hi, Tracy and Holly.
Speaker 1: I came across your show a few weeks back and
Speaker 1: absolutely love it. The details you share, you're back and forth,
Speaker 1: and the way you always seem to shed light on
Speaker 1: important issues related to historical events. It's all wonderful. My
Speaker 1: first episode was actually the one about vacuum cleaners. I
Speaker 1: found this episode so fascinating, and I've been listening to
Speaker 1: new and past episodes every moment I'm not chasing my
Speaker 1: three year old around. Last week's episode about Gin finally
Speaker 1: gave me something interesting to write to you about. As
Speaker 1: you were talking about how you could not find any
Speaker 1: neighbor to try, you mentioned the small painted houses that
Speaker 1: Klem gives to business class passengers and that they're filled
Speaker 1: with your neighbor. I dropped the large clippers I was
Speaker 1: using to trim my trees outside when I heard this,
Speaker 1: because I have one of those small ceramic painted houses.
Speaker 1: My husband and I were flying back from Sweden to
Speaker 1: visit family in the US back in on a Kalem flight.
Speaker 1: Our son was four months old at the time, his
Speaker 1: first flight. Every attendant on the flight was so kind
Speaker 1: to us and all were like, hello, welcome, you're our
Speaker 1: baby flyer. Before we got off the plane, they gave
Speaker 1: us a card in one of the beautiful, tiny painted
Speaker 1: Delf houses and memory of our son's first airplane flight.
Speaker 1: When the attendant told us it was filled with Jen
Speaker 1: probably lacking the time to inevitably explain to us what
Speaker 1: your neighbor was when asked. Now that I know this
Speaker 1: Delt house is filled with this unusual spirit. I can't
Speaker 1: wait to pop it open and try it. The collectible
Speaker 1: sits on a glass shelf with some other meetingful mementos
Speaker 1: in our house. Now having moved back to the US,
Speaker 1: it reminds us of better times traveling with our little
Speaker 1: one and having happy interactions with others in public, two
Speaker 1: better times. Thanks for your wonderful show, Kendall. Thank you
Speaker 1: so much for this email, Kendle. We've gotten several emails
Speaker 1: from folks about those Blue Kalem houses and all of
Speaker 1: them have been really delightful, So thank you so much.
Speaker 1: If you would like to write to us about this
Speaker 1: or any other podcast, where a history podcast at i
Speaker 1: heart radio dot com. We're all over social media at
Speaker 1: miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
Speaker 1: in Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
Speaker 1: the I heart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of
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