THE HISTORY OF MYCOLOGY IN ESSEX. 287
affected wheat, predisposing it to blight (i.e., rust)*(2). The
parts referring to rust and smut are :—
"MILDEW.
The mildew is supposed, by many persons in Essex, to have
been more fatal of late years (for the last twenty or thirty for
instance) than formerly ; and to have affected the old chalked
lands which heretofore were exempt from it. Fallow wheat
more subject to it than that on a clover-lay ; dunged land more
than undunged, and of all preparations, cole-seed wheat the
least liable to its attacks.
In 1783 one man at Rochford had only three bushels an acre,
and not too good for fowls.
Mr. Sewell, on purchasing a farm, and sowing wheat in one
of the fields, found the crop mildewed in two directions ; and
asking a labourer if it was subject to that distemper—"Oh!"
replied the man, "it is in such and such a line." Just so. You will
find two barberry bushes, and they always mildew some of the wheat
whenever it is sown. Mr. Sewell grubbed up the bushes from
the hedge, and after that saw no more mildew.
In a very fine field of wheat of Mr. Honeywood's, after tares,
I remarked part pretty much mildewed to the line of a furrow,
and adjoining it the straw bright : the latter was dibbled, the
former broad-cast, and having been eaten by the worm, or died
in the winter, was too thin a plant.
Half a field of wheat at Felix-hall was cole-seed eaten by
sheep ; the other half clover manured, and mown for seed. The
straw of the crop was mildewed in the latter part, the other not
at all.
Mr. Saville, at Great Waltham, sowing half a field with red
wheat and half with white, land the same ; the latter was mil-
dewed, the former escaped.
At Audley-end, and the vicinity, on the gravel and chalk
bottoms, this distemper is so prevalent, and so mischievous,
that they avoid sowing wheat, and winter-fallow clover-lays for
barley, which answers better than wheat : on 400 acres of arable
land, Lord Braybrook has sometimes none.
Mr. Hardy, who has farmed forty years at Bradfield, is clear
that the vicinity of the sea is a great, if not an entire preservative
*2 Cf. Sir Joseph Banks's famous pamphlet, "A short account of the cause of the disease in.
corn, called by farmers the blight, the mildew and the rust." 1805.