LIBRAL
The Library of Rural and Agricultural Literature
As usual we offer the usual mixture of the familiar, the unexpected and the rare. We leave you to decide which is which!
So what do we have for you? The new Board of Agriculture’s publication on its experiments in Bread issued when it was trying to be helpful and make a role for itself (1795), and an account by a Mr Greg of his farming practice in Hertfordshire, directed to Sir John Sinclair (1810). We have Thornton’s Plea for Peasant Proprietors (1848) which purports to be about Ireland but ranges much more widely than Ireland alone.
We have added another agricultural encyclopaedia, John Wilson of Edington Mains in Berwickshire’s British Farming: the mixed husbandry of Great Britain (1862). The making of agricultural encyclopaedias by Scots farmers is a phenomenon that is yet to be explained. On the North of Scotland, we have an older (and some would say, antiquarian) book, Alexander’s Illustrations of northern life in the eighteenth century (1877), but, for its age, it is a rich pudding.
We would claim that John Abbey, Intemperance, its bearing on agriculture (1883 edn) is both rare and unfamiliar: it is a tract against drinking in the harvest field, replete with letters of support from Berkshire landowners and farmers.
And then three very different works from the 1940s: a further volume of the Ministry’s journal, Agriculture (vol. 53, 1946-7), H. I. Moore’s Good Husbandry (1944), very much written from the vantage point of Yorkshire, and Addison’s party tract, How the Labour Party saved Agriculture, a justification of the party’s policy towards agriculture in its six years in power, 1945-51. We wait to see how (or if) the present Labour government will save agriculture.
General View of the month is Henderson on Sutherland.