In the time of King Alfred, the increase of population made it necessary to take more trouble about farming, so we find a description of what the good farmer ought to do. We might call this the very first Government leaflet, and it has led to the Agricultural Leaflets published by the Board of Agriculture for Great Britain and Ireland. "Sethe wille wyrcan wastbaere lond ateo hin of tham acre aefest sona fearn and thornas and figrsas swasame weods." He was to clear off fern, bracken, thorns, sloe, hawthorn, bramble, whin, and weeds. The names of the months give some idea of Anglo-Saxon methods of farming. May was _Thrimylce_, because the cows might then be milked thrice a day. August was _Weodmonath_ (weed-month), November _Blotmonath_, or blood-month, because the cattle were then killed to supply salt beef for winter time.[70] [70] Sir H. Maxwell, _Memories of the Months_, First Series. Very much later in history, after our English friends had laid waste and depopulated Scotland, so that woods sprang up again everywhere, and again long after that time when the gradual increase of population had again utterly destroyed those woods, a certain Dr. Johnson travelled from Carlisle to Edinburgh. This gentleman declared that he saw no tree between those places. This statement must not be taken too literally, for he had written a dictionary and considered himself not merely the _Times_ but an _Encyclopædia Britannica_ as well.[71] [71] This may of course have been an exaggeration, a sort of joke. But he had no right to make jokes on such a subject. The Earl of Dundonald (in 1795) thus describes the agriculture of 1745 (Prince Charlie's days): "The outfield land never receives any manure. After taking from it two or three crops of grain it is left in the state it was in at reaping the last crop, without sowing thereon grass-seeds for the protection of any sort of herbage. During the first two or three years a sufficiency of grass to maintain a couple of rabbits per acre is scarcely produced. In the course of some years it acquires a sward, and after having been depastured for some years more, it is again submitted to the same barbarous system of husbandry" (that is used as a fold and then ploughed up). In the same year (1745) in Meigle parish, the land was never allowed to lie fallow: neither pease, grass, turnips, nor potatoes were raised. No cattle were fattened. A little grain (oats or barley) was exported. In 1754 or thereabouts, there was only one cart in the parish of Keithhall. Everything was carried about on ponies' backs, as is the case nowadays in the most unsettled parts of Canada. The country in places was almost impassable. Bridges did not exist, and the roads were mere tracks. In Rannoch the tenants had no beds, but lay on the ground on couches of heather or fern. These houses were built of wattle and daub, and so low that people had to crawl in on hands and feet and could not stand upright.