Welsh Journals

The Early Cultivation of Clover in Gower by F. V. EMERY In RECENT YEARS, historians of the 'agricultural revolution' have shown that many improvements were adopted by English farmers in the period between about 1660 and 1730. That was a good deal earlier than most of us were taught at school, when we were told about the 'Norfolk system' and its sudden impact on farming from 1750 onwards. Some writers would take the basic improvements to a genesis as early as the Elizabethan period, but we are on safe ground nowadays if we expect to find evidence of innovations on the agricultural front quite soon after the close of the Civil Wars. Most of the research leading to this new appreciation has been done in various parts of England, but it is high time to show that Welsh agriculture, too, was more responsive to the introduction of new crops in the 17th and early 18th centuries than is generally assumed. One of the most important of these was the family of legumes or sown grasses that gave the farmer a much richer yield of feeding for his sheep, cattle, and other livestock. Among them, broad red clover, sainfoin, and peren- nial rye grass were of special interest to the improvers; because such gras- ses were of primary value to Welsh farmers then as now, we should expect to find evidence of clover cultivation in Wales at a suitably early date. This is indeed the case, sainfoin being grown near Wrexham by 1668, and a relatively large group of farmers in Breconshire and Mon- mouthshire had taken to clover by 1730. The aim of this paper is to make a few points about the share that Gower had in what was, after all, one of the most needful stages in the modernisation of Britain. There are two positive statements that would lead us to expect various proofs that clover was being grown in Gower by (at latest) the 1680s and 1690s. First we have the splendid pen-portrait of Gower writ- ten by the native Isaac Hamon in 1697. Quite early on in his remarks, Hamon states that there was 'much clover grass and seed' being sown by the Gower farmers. His remark about seed may be interpreted in two ways, that the farmers knew how to thresh the clover-seed themselves from their own crop (probably true), or that they grew seeds other than clover, i.e. other grasses like sainfoin. Hamon adds the further comment that clover cultivation was particularly well entrenched in the Bishopston district, and he should have known that from personal experience as someone who lived at Bishopston. His testimony generally is worth taking seriously, because he was for many years the steward of the estate in which most of the Bishopston farms lay. All the more puzzling, therefore, that when we look through the inventories of goods, stock and crop (compiled for probate purposes) of farmers living in Bishopston about 1700, we do not come across much evidence of clover. In fact, there are only two examples so far in the tally of 188 Gower inventories from eleven years sampled in the period 1700-15. One was from Bishopston. He was William Hopkin, yeoman, who died in September 1714. Judging from the