The husbandman was bound to carry out the proper cultivation, raise an average crop and leave the field in good tilth.
Landowners frequently cultivated their land themselves but might employ a husbandman or let it.
Isaac, too, conjoined tillage with pastoral husbandry, and that with success, for " he sowed in the land Gerar, and reaped an hundred-fold " - a return which, it would appear, in some favoured regions, occasionally rewarded the labour of the husbandman.
The very laws which were made during successive reigns for protecting the tillers of the soil from spoil are the best proofs of the deplorable state of the husbandman."' In the r7th century those laws were made which paved the way for an improved system of agriculture in Scotland.
Remarkable as Hellriegel's discovery was, it merely furnished the explanation of a fact which had been empirically established by the husbandman long before, and had received most intelligent application when the old four-course (or Norfolk) rotation was devised.