Fussell, More Old English Farming Books, pp. 58–61. An edition was published in Philadelphia in the same year.
An important influential guide to land management through the use of new machinery.
“The book not only described the best common practice of the day, but pointed out the advantages of the Tullian system, especially when it was carried out with the aid of the implements designed by Mr. Randall…Donaldson, nearly a century later, estimated the work as valuable as it embraced widely the new system of pulverization, or the drill cultivation, and applied it in very tolerable perfection, and I, too, feel that it played an important part in spreading the drill husbandry gospel, whatever faults of style the author may have had” (Fussell).
Joseph Randall (ca. 1709-1789) was the Master of the Academy at Heath, near Wakefield, Yorkshire. He resigned the superintendence of the school after 1750 and retired to York, where he established a “respectable school” (Pearson) in 1756 which is advertised in this book in a detailed note after the preface and the list of contents. Randall offers tuition for only six pupils and promises tuition in languages, mathematics, writing and geography as well as, for an extra charge, dancing, music, drawing and fencing.
This book describes the Virgilian method for seed planting and proposes as an alternative a Semi-Virgilian system - a combination of the old method and the revolutionary one developed by Jethro Tul, carried out with the aid of the implements designed by Randall himself. The three engraved illustrations at the end of this book illustrate the function and uses of these new agricultural instruments: the “Spiky Roller”, the “Single and Double Skeleton Horse Houghs”, and the “Double Plough”.
Randall was “a man of highly respectable character, whose attainments in the mathematics and the science of calculation were considerable” (Pearson), although his style was “abstruse and not a little confused, and in its current of circulation not likely to fall into the hands of many farmers—a pity, because his method of cultivating cabbages was certainly worthy of attention” (Fussell).
This copy has been carefully read by an anonymous early annotator with a great interest in the description of Randall’s new processes of cultivation.
