Apparently no one qualified for the bounty on flax for, in 1661, provision was made for importing some flax seed from England. No price was fixed, in 1666, on "flax by reason of the uncertainty of the quality." In 1682, bounties were offered: "For every peck of flax seeds, four and twentie pounds of tobacco, and for every peck of hemp seed twenty pounds of tobacco." Bounties were also offered for hemp and flax woven into cloth. It was also ordered that every tithable person should produce one pound of dressed hemp and one pound of dressed flax or two pounds of either annually. From that time on considerable hemp and flax were raised in Virginia, but most of the crop was used at home. Linen cloth was highly prized. There was also a demand for cordage made of hemp fibers for ships. ENGLISH GRAIN As already noted, the initial attempts of the colonists to grow the grains with which they had been accustomed in England came to naught. They were familiar with wheat, rye, barley and oats. To make satisfactory yields, these grains had to be broadcasted on well prepared seed beds. Newly cleared forests left the soil full of stumps and roots. The wooden plows of those days were useless on these newly cleared lands. Preparation of the soil, for tobacco or maize, could be accomplished with a hand hoe or shovel. These plants required space in which to develop their full growth. A tobacco plant could be set or a hill of corn planted wherever a little loose dirt could be found. Some English grains were seeded in the cleared land near Hampton and Newport News but these old fields, abandoned by the Indians, were also near to exhaustion. An "indifferent crop" was reported. In 1627, Abraham Piersey had 200 acres each in wheat and barley. From these crops he was able to furnish food daily to sixty persons. How much of this seeding was on land that had been abandoned for tobacco, or was old Indian fields, is not stated. When DeVries visited Virginia in 1643, he found the planters putting down, in English grain, lands which had been exhausted by successive crops of tobacco. The General Assembly had ruled in 1639, that corn (probably wheat and maize) could be exported whenever the price fell below twelve shillings a bushel. Large exports of this valuable cereal were then being made to the near-by colonies of Maryland, Manhattan, Carolina and the West Indies.