Arizona republican., 1898-03-29
ENGLAND'S GRANARY.
Fields a Thousand Years Old-How
 These Lands Were Worked.

Some very competent writers, fright ened by the disproportion between the wheat grown in England and the quan- tity needed for our daily bread, have recently urged the establishment Of public granaries for use in time of war. The only wonder is that the figures which impress them have not made more impression on the public. But while hundreds of thousands of acres of good wheat land lie uncultivated in England, the proposal to buy and hoard foreign corn is rather too previous. Our best public grararies are the wheat 1 fields of old England, which have fallen into partial ruin and premature decay
 The wheat fields of England have two special claims to consideration, based on their merits, and apart from senti- ment, though we have lately begun to | apprehend that national sentiment ia great concerns may be as valuable as public spirit in small ones. But the fact remains that the wheat fields of Eng land are the oldest national industries in this country and the most productive in the world
 i A wheat field a thousand years old is quite common sight in this coun- try. Of course it has not grown a crop of corn every year in the ten centuries. but during that long sequence of ages in the fixed ard abiding order of this ancient country. that particular area Of land has been cultivated with the production of wheat as it's main object. and it has remained as part of the Eng lish granary from the days of Edward the Confessor until those of Victoria. Many of the wheat fields are far more ancient than this, but the record of Doomsday Book is a practical voucher for period of 1000 years. The GUS tom of the Saxon cultivators and the evidence of local names are proof of still greater antiquity of cultivation or some of the best corn land; and beyond the days of the SaXons lie the last two centuries of Roman occupation. when England was the great wheat-growirg country of the west, and supplied the population of Rome with daily bread
 Perhaps the most interesting feature of our ancestral corn lands is the small degree in which their appearance can have changed in course of ten or twelve centuries. Their area is much greater than in the old times, when villages were separated by wide woodlands ard only grouped and contiguous in nat urally open country. The early Saxon times were not days in which men cared to lay field to field. There was plenty of ground available, and of this the villagers cultivated and sowed with corn as much as they needed for their years supply.
 The flat. rich plain lies adjacent to a row of old Saxon settlements under the Downs, which are seen beyond the plain. The men in each village went out with their horses and plowed, sowed and harvested long narrow strip. starting from the village or town. This strip they called the Town Furlong" and to this day the 1,O0O-year-old wheat field is called "Tun Furlun." As they had TO turnips or beetroot. and re great quantity of hay. they could keen few cattle and had little manure. Cor sequently they had to leave their Town Furlong" fallow for three years to recover itself after the corn w..s reaped. They plowed ard sowed tie strip next to it in the foiio ;rg yea and after that cultivated a third. re- turning in the fourth year , the orig iral wheat field. "One-third wheat ard two-thirds weeds" was the rclo-Saxon notion of high farming.
 The next change in the appearance of this smiling F,ain was caused by pri- vate ownership. The common fields were broken up into an infinite num- Der of patches. marked by low banks or boundary stones. ard during several centuries each peasant reaned lis little patches for lis private store. In tie natural process by which these passHG into fewer hands the subdivision into minute portions still held good; and it was not until the great inclosures of the end of the last century, a process which was continued by obtaining special acts of parliament well into the last reign, that their holdings were joined together and the patchwork system banished from our most ancient and most fertile lands. These then became the broad acres, so justly famous, which have held their own in the competition to supply our daily bread after more re- cent additions to our wheat lands have relapsed to weeds and missiles.
 Their productiveness is astonishing. From 30 to 10 bushels of wheat an acre is the common yield of our English cornfields. This natural fertility is aided by special appliances which have grown up round the ancient fields from century to century.
 Every acre has its corresponding g share of fixed capital for it's profitable working. Special cottages for the homes of the cultivators, barns and buildings for crop and implements stables for the horses, yards for the cattle and folds for the sheep, which play their part in the chemistry of mod ern farming; good roads so made as to be accessible, if possible, from every field, and network of railways to brin 2 the wheat to the centers of great cities divided only by few hours journey y from the fields and from each other