Agricultural Change
The evolution of farming and rural
life from the eighteenth century
Rural
lives
In their
houses the good, solid, hand-made furniture of their forefathers had given
place to the cheap and ugly products of the early machine age. A deal table,
the top ribbed and softened by much scrubbing; four or five windsor
chairs with the varnish blistered and flaking; a side table for the family
photographs and ornaments, and a few stools for fireside seats, together with
the beds upstairs, made up the collection spoken of by its owners as 'our few
sticks of furniture'. If the father had a special chair in which to rest after
his day's work was done, it would be but a rather larger replica of the hard windsors with wooden arms added.
As
ornaments for their mantelpieces and side tables the women liked gaudy glass
vases, pottery images of animals, shell-covered boxes and plush photograph
frames.
Those who
could find the necessary cash covered their walls with wall-paper in big,
sprawling, brightly coloured flower designs. Those who could not, used
whitewash or pasted up newspaper sheets.
Monday
was washing-day, and then the place fairly hummed with activity.
After
their meagre midday meal, the women allowed themselves a little leisure. In
summer, some of them would take out their sewing and do it in company with
others in the shade of one of the houses. Others would sew or read indoors, or
carry their babies out in the garden for an airing. A few who had no very young
children liked to have what they called 'a bit of a lay down' on the bed. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter VI, the
Besieged Generation)
Local rural
communities would have relied upon local businesses such as blacksmiths and
iron foundries, such as these, reconstructed at the Ryedale Folk Museum near
Farndale today.
There were
many foundries across the North Yorkshire Moors that specialised in the
production of parts for ranges. People could choose features and even
decoration, as they wished – for instance one or two ovens, separate or
combined hearths, a turf plate or coal basket and left or right handed.
Complicated flues to alter the draught could be operated to transfer heat from
the main hearth to the ovens to cook.
Supplying
water to a nineteenth century house could be a challenge. Few of the poorer
houses had indoor taps and people relied upon communal supplies such as rivers,
wells and springs. Two buckets might be carried with a yoke.
Small
houses, big families
The Rev J C
Atkinson, a local historian, describes visiting local cottages at Skelton in 1841. We then
went to two cottage dwellings in the main street. As entering from the street
or roadside, we had to bow our heads, even although some of the yard-thick
thatch had been cut away about and above the upper part of the door, in order
to obtain an entrance. We entered on a totally dark and unflagged passage. On
our left was an enclosure partitioned off from the passage by a boarded screen
between four and five feet high, and which no long time before had served the
purpose originally intended, namely that of a calves’ pen. Farther still on the
same side was another dark enclosure similarly constructed, which even yet
served the purpose of a henhouse. On the other side of the passage opposite
this was a door, which on being opened gave admission to the living room, the
only one in the dwelling. The floor was of clay and in holes, and around on two
sides were the cubicles, or sleeping boxes – even less desirable than the box
beds of Berwickshire as I knew them fifty years ago – for the entire family.
There was no loft above, much less any attempt at a ‘chamber’ ; only odds and
ends of old garments, bundles of fodder and things of that sort and in this den
the occupants of the house were living.
Of the
sleeping arrangements at a farm near Kilton Castle, he wrote What I found
was one long low room, partitioned off into four compartments nearly equal in
size. But the partitions were in their construction and character merely such
as those between the stalls in a stable, except that no gentleman who cared for
his horses would have tolerated them in his hunting or coaching stable. These
four partitioned spaces were no more closed in the rear than the stalls in an
ordinary stable, and the partitions were not seven feet, hardly six and a half
in height, while the general gangway for all the occupants was along the open
back. The poor woman said to me, as she showed me the first partition, allotted
to her husband and herself and their two youngest children, the next to their
children growing rapidly up to puberty, the third to the farm girls, and the
fourth to the man and farm lad, “How can I keep even
my children clean when I can only lodge them so?”
Then
there was the sleeping problem. None of the cottages had more than two
bedrooms, and when children of both sexes were entering their teens it was
difficult to arrange matters, and the departure of even one small girl of
twelve made a little more room for those remaining. When the older boys of a
family began to grow up, the second bedroom became the boys' room. Boys, big
and little, were packed into it, and the girls still at home had to sleep in
the parents' room. They had their own standard of decency; a screen was placed
or a curtain was drawn to form a partition between the parents' and children's
beds; but it was, at best, a poor makeshift arrangement, irritating, cramped,
and inconvenient. If there happened to be one big boy, with several girls following
him in age, he would sleep downstairs on a bed made up every night and the
second bedroom would be the girls' room. When the girls came home from service
for their summer holiday, it was the custom for the father to sleep downstairs
that the girl might share her mother's bed. It is common now to hear people
say, when looking at some little old cottage, 'And they brought up ten children
there. Where on earth did they sleep?' And the answer is, or should be, that
they did not all sleep there at the same time. Obviously they could not. By the
time the youngest of such a family was born, the eldest would probably be
twenty and have been out in the world for years, as would those who came
immediately after in age. The overcrowding was bad enough; but not quite as bad
as people imagine. (Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter X, Daughters
of the Hamlet)
Agricultural
Labourers
The historical
family is rooted in the land and agriculture. Until the
industrial revolution, most of the British population was rural dominated
by small local communities.
As the
family moved its centre of gravity to the area of Cleveland when Nicholas Farndale’s
family moved there in perhaps about 1565, the focus remained rural for another
three centuries. There were groups of the family who moved to the larger urban
port town of Whitby where many turned to
the sea for work, and when the
industrial revolution came, others found work in the mines, whilst some
large groups of the family moved to urban centres such as Leeds and
Bradford, particularly to work in the textile industry. However the bulk of
the family continued to work in agricultural roles and mostly within a
comparatively small radius of not more than about ten miles around Guisborough. The bulk of the family
remained in a rural setting, working for others on the land, and sometimes
becoming tenant farmers themselves.
The lives of
many members of the family through time, was a life of work for others on the
fields. They included George Farndale of
Brotton, Jethro
Farndale of Ampleforth, Wilson Farndale,
Henry Farndale of
Great Ayton, William
Farndale of Brotton, William Farndale of
Whitby, William
Farndale of Seltringham, John Farndale of
Eskdaleside, Martin
Farndale of Kilton, William Farndale of
Great Ayton, Joseph
Farndale of Whitby, William Farndale of
Ampleforth, John
Farndale of Kilton, Richard Farndale of
Great Ayton, Matthew
Farndale of Coatham, John Farndale, John George Farndale
before he emigrated to Ontario, William Farndale of
Loftus, Thomas
Farndale of Ampleforth and George Farndale of
Loftus.
Very
early in the morning, before daybreak for the greater part of the year, the
hamlet men would throw on their clothes, breakfast on bread and lard, snatch
the dinner-baskets which had been packed for them overnight, and hurry off
across fields and over stiles to the farm. Getting the boys off was a more
difficult matter. Mothers would have to call and shake and sometimes pull boys
of eleven or twelve out of their warm beds on a winter morning. Then boots
which had been drying inside the fender all night and had become shrunk and
hard as boards in the process would have to be coaxed on over chilblains.
Sometimes a very small boy would cry over this and his mother to cheer him
would remind him that they were only boots, not breeches. 'Good thing you didn't
live when breeches wer' made o' leather,' she would
say, and tell him about the boy of a previous generation whose leather breeches
were so baked up in drying that it took him an hour to get into them.
'Patience! Have patience, my son', his mother had exhorted. 'Remember Job.'
'Job!' scoffed the boy. 'What did he know about patience? He didn't have to
wear no leather breeches. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter III, Men
Afield)
The elders
stooped, had gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the
effects of a life spent out of doors in all weathers and of the rheumatism
which tried most of them.
The men's
incomes were the same to a penny; their circumstances, pleasures, and their
daily field work were shared in common; but in themselves they differed; as
other men of their day differed, in country and town. Some were intelligent,
others slow at the uptake; some were kind and helpful, others selfish; some
vivacious, others taciturn. If a stranger had gone there looking for the
conventional Hodge, he would not have found him.
Their
favourite virtue was endurance. Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their
ideal. A man would say, 'He says, says he, that field o' oo-ats's
got to come in afore night, for there's a rain a-comin'.
But we didn't flinch, not we! Got the last loo-ad under cover by midnight. A'moost too fagged-out to walk home; but we didn't flinch.
We done it!' Or,'Ole bull he comes for me, wi's head down. But I didn't flinch. I ripped off a bit o'
loose rail an' went for he. 'Twas him as did th' flinchin'. He! he!' Or a
woman would say, 'I set up wi' my poor old mother six
nights runnin'; never had me clothes off. But I
didn't flinch, an' I pulled her through, for she didn't flinch neither.' Or a
young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement, 'I didn't
flinch, did I? Oh, I do hope I didn't flinch.'
The farm
was large, extending far beyond the parish boundaries; being, in fact, several
farms, formerly in separate occupancy, but now thrown into one and ruled over
by the rich old man at the Tudor farmhouse. The meadows around the farmstead
sufficed for the carthorses' grazing and to support the store cattle and a
couple of milking cows which supplied the farmer's family and those of a few of
his immediate neighbours with butter and milk. A few fields were sown with
grass seed for hay, and sainfoin and rye were grown and cut green for cattle
food. The rest was arable land producing corn and root crops, chiefly wheat.
Around
the farmhouse were grouped the farm buildings; stables for the great stamping
shaggy-fetlocked carthorses; barns with doors so wide and high that a load of
hay could be driven through; sheds for the yellow-and-blue painted farm wagons,
granaries with outdoor staircases; and sheds for storing oilcake, artificial
manures, and agricultural implements. In the rickyard, tall, pointed,
elaborately thatched ricks stood on stone straddles; the dairy indoors, though
small, was a model one; there was a profusion of all that was necessary or
desirable for good farming.
The field
names gave the clue to the fields' history. Near the farmhouse, 'Moat Piece',
'Fishponds', 'Duffus [i.e. dovehouse] piece',
'Kennels', and 'Warren Piece' spoke of a time before the Tudor house took the
place of another and older establishment. One name was as good as another to most of the men; to
them it was just a name and meant nothing. What mattered to them about the
field in which they happened to be working was whether the road was good or bad
which led from the farm to it; or if it was comparatively sheltered or one of
those bleak open places which the wind hurtled through, driving the rain
through the clothes to the very pores; and was the soil easily workable or of
back-breaking heaviness or so bound together with that 'hemmed' twitch that a
ploughshare could scarcely get through it.
There
were usually three or four ploughs to a field, each of them drawn by a team of
three horses, with a boy at the head of the leader and the ploughman behind at
the shafts. All day, up and down they would go, ribbing the pale stubble with
stripes of dark furrows, which, as the day advanced, would get wider and nearer
together, until, at length, the whole field lay a rich velvety plum-colour.
The
labourers worked hard and well when they considered the occasion demanded it
and kept up a good steady pace at all times. Some were better workmen than
others, of course; but the majority took a pride in their craft and were fond
of explaining to an outsider that field work was not the fool's job that some
townsmen considered it. Things must be done just so and at the exact moment,
they said; there were ins and outs in good land work which took a man's
lifetime to learn. A few of less admirable build would boast: 'We gets ten bob
a week, a' we yarns every penny of it; but we doesn't yarn no more; we takes
hemmed good care o' that!' But at team work, at least, such 'slack-twisted 'uns' had to keep in step, and the pace, if slow, was steady.
The first
charge on the labourers' ten shillings was house rent. Most of the cottages
belonged to small tradesmen in the market town and the weekly rents ranged from
one shilling to half a crown. Some labourers in other villages worked on farms
or estates where they had their cottages rent free; but the hamlet people did
not envy them, for 'Stands to reason,' they said, 'they've allus
got to do just what they be told, or out they goes, neck and crop, bag and
baggage.' A shilling, or even two shillings a week, they felt, was not too much
to pay for the freedom to live and vote as they liked and to go to church or
chapel or neither as they preferred. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter I, Poor
People's Houses)
After the
mowing and reaping and binding came the carrying, the busiest time of all.
Every man and boy put his best foot forward then,
Harvest
home! Harvest home!
Merry,
merry, merry harvest home!
Our
bottles are empty, our barrels won't run,
And we
think it's a very dry harvest home.
the
farmer came out, followed by his daughters and maids with jugs and bottles and
mugs, and drinks were handed round amidst general congratulations.
the
harvest home dinner everybody prepared themselves for a tremendous feast. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter XV, Harvest
Home)
Tenant
farmers
The
Farndales who became tenant farmers included John Farndale, “Old
Farndale of Kilton”, William Farndale,
Farmer of Craggs, William Farndale
perhaps for a time, John
Farndale, John
Farndale, William
Farndale, Elias
Farndale of Ampleforth, John Farndale,
for a time before he turned to trade and agency and became a writer, Matthew
Farndale, who then emigrated to Australia where he became rooted to the
land of Victoria, John
Farndale, Martin
Farndale of Kilton, John Farndale, John Farndale of
Whitby, George
Farndale of Kilton, Elias Farndale of
Ampleforth, Charles
Farndale of Kilton Hall Farm, George Farndale of
Brotton, Martin
Farndale of Tidkinhow, Matthew Farndale of
Craggs, William
Farndale of Gillingwood Hall, Richmond, John William
Farndale of Danby, George Farndale
of Kilton, John
Farndale at Tidkinhow, Martin Farndale,
cattle farmer of Alberta, George Farndale,
farmer at Three Hills, Alberta, Catherine
Farndale and the Kinseys in Alberta, Herbert Farndale of
Craggs, Grace
Farndale and Howard Holmes, William Farndale of
Thirsk, Alfred
Farndale of Wensleydale and Geoff
Farndale of Wensleydale.
Martin
Farndale at Tidkinhow about 1920
John Farndale at Tidkinhow about 1937
Matthew Farndale and Mary Ann at Craggs Hall Farm, about 1900 George Farndale, of Kilton Hall
Farm, about 1925
…
Agricultural
change
Significant
changes were taking place quietly in agricultural practice. Commonly used local
varieties of wheat and oats were replaced or supplemented by imported seeds.
Enclosures
spread rapidly around Malton, for instance at Huttons Ambo and Appleton le
Street.
Local power
depended on deference, but by the early eighteenth century, deference had to be
earned. There was a growing confederacy between those working on the land who
increasingly saw the Squire’s property as fair booty and who colluded to help
each other against punishment.
In 1734
Jethro Tull (1674 to 1741), an agricultural pioneer from Berkshire, published essays
on improving farming including the use of the seed drill. He had perfected
a horse-drawn seed drill in 1701 that economically sowed the seeds in neat
rows. He later developed a horse-drawn hoe. Tull's methods were widely adopted
and began a new phase of revolution in agricultural techniques.
Jethro
Tull's seed drill
The
nineteenth century was a period of exponential growth in the production of
coal, pig iron and the consumption of raw cotton, dwarfing progress in France
and Germany. The growth in non agricultural
production meant a growing population had to be fed by imports. Since 1822
Britain’s balance of trade has remained permanently in deficit. It had to be
balanced by invisible earnings from banking, insurance and shipping, and
returns from foreign investments.
This brought
new kinds of wealth through commerce, manufacturing, food and drink, tobacco
and new wealthy families, like the Rothschilds and the Guinness’s. Someone of
the very richest, like the Duke of Westminster, continued to derive their
wealth from their land holdings, but they increasingly relied for the wealth
from mineral rights.
Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023 suggests that there were very
significant disparities of wealth. By 1914, 92% of wealth was owned by 10% of
the population.
In the 1860s
the population was around 20M. 4,000 people had incomes over £5,000 per year.
1.4M had around £100. A farm labourer might earn £20. Women workers earned
about half of men’s wages.
There was a
rise in wages from mid century, with a significant
rise in 1873. However in rural areas, wages lagged behind.
Living
standard improved with a fall in the birth rate. The sharpest increase in
spending was tobacco. The mechanically produced Wills Woodbines at 1d for five
were popular from the 1880s to the 1960s. The consumption of alcohol fell
sharply.
Rural society saw fundamental change during the Industrial revolution. The enclosure of the land between about 1720 and 1820 divided up the remaining common land. The agricultural system changed to large scale land ownership. Larger farms wee supported by fertiliser, artificial feed and machinery, tenant farming and wage labour.
By about 1850, about 7,000 people and
institutions owed 80% of land in the UK. 360 estates of over 10,000 acres held
25% of the land in England. About
200,000 tenants of relatively large farms employed over 1.5 million people. A
third of the population was involved directly or indirectly in agriculture.
The agricultural workforce peaked in
the 1850s.
The Corn Laws did not have an
immediate effect, but railways and steamships and later refrigeration, brought
imports of wheat and later livestock from North America, Russia, Canada, and
then Argentina, Australia and New Zealand. In 1880 frozen Australian beef sold
at Smithfield at 5 ½ d a pound. Meat consumption increased. New eating habits
emerged. The delights of fish and chips were born in Oldham in the 1860s.
These new trends led to a Great
Depression in agriculture during the late nineteenth century which
is usually dated from 1873 to 1896, but its impact continued to the Second
World War. Farmers shifted increasingly from cereals towards milk, meat, fruit
and vegetables.
A typical farmer employed 5 or 6
people in 1851, but 2 or 3 in 1901, assisted by mechanisation and new methods.
Rural England lost 4 million people between 1851 and 1911. The repeal of the
Corn Laws in 1846 was only reversed by Britain’s accession to the European
Common Agricultural Policy (“CAP”) in 1973 so that home grown temperate
produce, which was over 90% of consumption in 1830, fell to 40% by 1914, and
rose back to 90% during the period of the CAP.
Cheap food had economic benefits, but
was traumatic alongside the loss of the common land which had traditionally
helped the rural poor. By the nineteenth century, rural workers were dependent
on wages at a time of downward pressure on agricultural prices.
The revolt
of the field in 1872 to 1873, led by Joseph
Arch sought an elevation in the status of the agricultural labourer.
The landlords took some of the strain.
Rents fell by a third between 1870 and 1900. Landlords sought to protect the
political and social influence of their ownership of land and subsidised their
estates, but there was the start of a trend to sell off estates of land.
In Kilton,
there was some relaxation of rents. The local landowner, J T Wharton Esq,
allowed a 50% land rental for the half year because of the Agricultural
depression, which received the thanks of the fraternity of tenant farmers.
It was reported on 13 January 1885 that there was a presentation to J T Wharton
Esq of Skelton Castle. On Monday afternoon, the half yearly rent audit of the
Skelton Estate was held at the Wharton Arms Hotel. Mr E B Hamilton (steward)
presiding, and Mr Robert Stephenson, Vice Chairman. After a splendid dinner,
provided and served up by Mr and Mrs Morgan in first class style, the Chairman
submitted “the Queen and Royal Family”, which was loyally honoured. The
Chairman then proposed the health of Squire Wharton who returned thanks in an
appropriate manner. Mr
C Farndale referred to an event which had taken place among them, as the
farmers had received 50% reduction upon the rent of their arable land for the
past half year. This was stated to have been brought about by the Squire's
compensation for the depreciation of prices as compared to any previous years
since he had become possessed of the property. (Applause). Mr Thomas Petch, on
behalf of the tenants, then presented a beautifully illuminated address in a
gold frame, which read as follows – “To J T Wharton Esq, Skelton Castle. We the
undersigned tenants of your Skelton estate most respectfully beg your
acceptance of this address as a token of our respect and appreciation of the
manner in which you have met us at the present, as also on a former occasion,
under the great agricultural depression, by returning to us 50% of the rent of
the arable land as the half yearly rent audit held January 12th, 1885 and we
earnestly hope you will long be spared in health and strength amongst us.
Martin Farndale, Kilton Hall and Charles Farndale, Kilton Hall; Matthew Young, Claphow, William. Judson, Stank House, John Smith,
Moorsholm Grange, William. Raw, Red Hall, Henry Robinson, Ralph Linus, Cambank, Thomas Petch, Barns Farm, Henry, Atkinson, West
Throttle., Robert Stephenson, Trout Hall.
There was regret at the loss of a
nostalgically remembered rural past, which saw an evolution of new
organisations to protect its legacy. The Commons Preservation
Society was formed in 1865; the English
Dialect Society in 1873; the Society
for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings in 1877; the Folklore Society in 1878; the Lake
District Defence Society in 1883; the Society for the Protection
of Birds in 1889; the National
Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty in 1895; the Folk Song Society in
1898; and the English Folk Dance Society in 1911. The National Trust
Act 1907 allowed the Trust to declare land inalienable. However the trend
for change was unstoppable.
By 1870 John Farndale
was writing about the dramatic
impact of agricultural change on the rural landscape of Kilton.
Realising the profound effect of change on his homeland, he recorded the
events which occurred in his native place, Kilton and the neighbourhood, and
which took place when spinning wheels and woollen wheels were industriously
used by every housewife in the district, and long before there were such things
in the world as Lucifer match boxes and telegraphs, or locomotives built to
run, without horse or bridle, at the astonishing rate of sixty miles an hour.
Kilton had started to realise the impacts of the monstre farm and the Industrial Revolution. And
now dear Farndale, the best of friends must part, I bid you and your little
Kilton along and final farewell. Time was on to all our precious boon, Time is
passing away so soon, Time know more about his vast eternity, World without end
oceans without shore.
In his depictions of rural life in
semi-fictional Wessex, Thomas
Hardy has sometimes been charged with romanticising rural life and
portraying a fictional pastoral landscape. Hardy’s writings capture the end of
an old sense of land as a natural relative and the shift to land as an
exploitable resource.
All around, from
every quarter, the stiff, clayey soil of the arable fields crept up; bare,
brown and windswept for eight months out of the twelve. Spring brought a flush
of green wheat and there were violets under the hedges and pussy-willows out
beside the brook at the bottom of the 'Hundred Acres'; but only for a few weeks
in later summer had the landscape real beauty. Then the ripened cornfields
rippled up to the doorsteps of the cottages and the hamlet became an island in
a sea of dark gold. To a child it seemed that it must always have been so; but
the ploughing and sowing and reaping were recent innovations. Old men could
remember when the Rise, covered with juniper bushes, stood in the midst of a
furzy heath—common land, which had come under the plough after the passing of
the Inclosure Acts. (Lark Rise,
Flora Thomson, Chapter I, Poor
People's Houses: Recalling the Past)
A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad
1896:
|
Into my heart
an air that kills From yon far
country blows: What are those
blue remembered hills, What spires,
what farms are those? |
That is the
land of lost content, I see it
shining plain, The happy
highways where I went And cannot come
again. |
There was a pastoral air to the music
of Edward Elgar, Frederick Delius, Ralph Vaughan Williams, drawn from folk
traditions of Hungarian, Czech, Finnish and Russian music.
There was a stubborn emotional
attachment to the rural past, but the political will was firmly fixed on an
industrial future.
All
times are times of transition; but the eighteen-eighties were so in
a special sense, for the world was at the beginning of a new era, the
era of machinery and scientific discovery. Values and conditions of life
were changing everywhere. Even to simple country people the change was
apparent. The railways had brought distant parts of the country
nearer; newspapers were coming into every home; machinery was superseding hand
labour, even on the farms to some extent; food bought at shops, much of it from
distant countries, was replacing the home-made and home-grown. Horizons were
widening; a stranger from a village five miles away was no longer looked upon
as 'a furriner'. But, side by side with these changes, the old country
civilization lingered. Traditions and customs which had lasted for
centuries did not die out in a moment. State-educated children still
played the old country rhyme games; women still went leazing,
although the field had been cut by the mechanical reaper; and men and boys
still sang the old country ballads and songs, as well as the latest music-hall
successes. So, when a few songs were called for at the 'Wagon and Horses', the
programme was apt to be a curious mixture of old and new. (Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter IV, At the
‘Wagon and Horses’)
Machinery was
just coming into use on the land.
Every autumn appeared a pair of large traction engines, which, posted
one on each side of a field, drew a plough across and across by means of a
cable. These toured the district under their own steam for hire on
the different farms, and the outfit included a small caravan, known as 'the
box', for the two drivers to live and sleep in. In the 'nineties, when they
had decided to emigrate and wanted to learn all that was possible about
farming, both Laura's brothers, in turn, did a spell with the steam plough, horrifying
the other hamlet people, who looked upon such nomads as social outcasts.
Their ideas had not then been extended to include mechanics as a class apart
and they were lumped as inferiors with sweeps and tinkers and others whose work
made their faces and clothes black. On the other hand, clerks and salesmen of
every grade, whose clean smartness might have been expected to ensure respect,
were looked down upon as 'counter-jumpers'. Their recognized world was made
up of landowners, farmers, publicans, and farm labourers, with the butcher, the
baker, the miller, and the grocer as subsidiaries.
Such machinery as
the farmer owned was horse-drawn
and was only in partial use. In some fields a horse-drawn drill would sow the
seed in rows, in others a human sower would walk up
and down with a basket suspended from his neck and fling the seed with both
hands broadcast. In harvest time the mechanical reaper was already a familiar
sight, but it only did a small part of the work; men were still mowing with
scythes and a few women were still reaping with sickles. A thrashing machine on
hire went from farm to farm and its use was more general; but men at home still
thrashed out their allotment crops and their wives' leazings
with a flail and winnowed the corn by pouring from sieve to sieve in the wind.
(Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter
III, Men
Afield)
The route to
modern farming
…
Gale Bank Farm early twentieth
century Gale
Bank Farm in about 1960