that it can most easily
afford nourishment."

King Solomon gives the same advice, "The sluggard will not plough
by reason of the winter, therefore shall he begin harvest and have
nothing." _Proverbs_, XX, 4.]

[Footnote 83: The Romans understood the advantages of thorough
cultivation of the soil. As appears from the text, they habitually
broke up a sod in the spring, ploughed it again at midsummer, and once
more in September before seeding. Pliny prescribes that the first
ploughing should be nine inches deep, and says that the Etruscans some
times ploughed their stiff clay as many as nine times. The accepted
Roman reason for this was the eradication of weeds, but it also
accomplished in some measure the purpose of "dry farming"--the
conservation of the moisture content of the soil, as that had
been practised for countless generations in the sandy Valley of
Mesopotamia. Varro makes no exception to this rule, but Virgil was
here, as in other instances, induced to depart from Varro's wisdom,
with the result that he imposed upon Roman agriculture several
thoroughly bad practices. Thus, while he applies Varro ploughing rules
to rich land and bids the farmer "exercetque frequens tellurem atque
imperat arvis," he says (Geo. I, 62) that it will suffice to give
sandy land a single shallow ploughing in September immediately before
seeding, for fear, forsooth, that the summer suns will evaporate
whatever moisture there is in it! Again, Virgil recommends, what Varro
does not, cross-ploughing and burning the stubble and Virgil's advice
was generally followed.

In William Benson's edition (1725) of the _Georgics_ "with notes
critical and rustick," it is stated that "the husbandry of England
in general is Virgilian, which is shown by paring and burning the
surface: by raftering and cross-ploughing, and that in those parts of
England where the Romans principally inhabited all along the Southern
coast Latin words remain to this hour among shepherds and ploughmen in
their rustick affairs: and what will seem more strange at first sight
to affirm though in fact really true, there is more of Virgil's
husbandry put in practice in England at this instant than in Italy
itself." That this was the fact in the thirteenth century is clear
from the quotations we have made from Walter of Henley's _Dite de
Hosebondrie_. Cf. also Sir Anthony Fitzherbert and the account of the
manorial system of farming in England in Prothero's _English Farming
Pa