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Agriculture
Agriculture has always been the heart of the Farndale communities
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Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Context and local history are in purple.
This page has the following sections:
·
Introduction
·
The
Farndale farmers
·
Farndale
agricultural workers
·
Agriculture
in the Middle Ages
·
Serfdom
·
Tenancy
·
Sixteenth
Century
·
Seventeenth
Century
·
Eighteenth
Century
·
Farming
methods
·
Rural
Life around the North York Moors
·
Agricultural
Labourers
·
Agricultural
Change
·
The
path to modern farming
·
Links,
texts and books
Introduction
Whilst of course the family in the
twenty first century comprises a large range of folk, many now living in urban
areas, the historical family is rooted in the land and agriculture. Until the
industrial revolution, most of the British population was rural and horizons
were small.
Our family’s recorded history began with
the clearing of the land in Farndale by about 1230. There was pastureland
in Farndale by at least 1225.
Even by 1280 there were folk such as William
the Smith of Farndale who specialised in supportive trades. By 1338 people
such as Walter
de Farndale, later Vicar of Haltwhistle, Lazonby and
Chelmsford, and William
Farndale later Vicar of Doncaster, had become chaplains. By 1363, Johannis
de Farndale had moved to York and was working as a saddler in an urban
setting, and his family would stay there for generations, his grandson being a
butcher. There were large numbers of the family who joined the Armed Forces. There were several
policemen.
However the bulk of the family remained
in a rural setting, working for others on the land, and occasionally becoming
tenant farmers themselves.
Indeed even 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 four centuries. It is true that 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.
This web page tells the story of the
Farndales and agriculture.
The Farndale farmers
The Farndales who became tenant farmers
included John Farndale, “Old Farndale of Kilton” (FAR000143);
William Farndale, Farmer of Craggs (FAR000146);
William Farndale (FAR00152)
perhaps for a time; John Farndale (FAR00167); John
Farndale (FAR00177);
William Farndale (FAR00183);
Elias Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00184); John
Farndale, for a time before he turned to trade and agency and became a writer (FAR00217); Matthew
Farndale, who then emigrated to Australia where he became rooted to the land of
Victoria (FAR00225);
John Farndale (FAR00230);
Martin Farndale of Kilton (FAR00236); John
Farndale (FAR00240);
John Farndale of Whitby (FAR00244); George
Farndale of Kilton (FAR00252); Elias
Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00274);
Charles Farndale of Kilton Hall Farm (FAR00341);
George Farndale of Brotton (FAR00350C);
Martin Farndale of Tidkinhow (FAR00364);
Matthew Farndale of Craggs (FAR00383);
William Farndale of Gillingwood Hall, Richmond (FAR00531); John
William Farndale of Danby (FAR00537);
John Farndale at Tidkinhow (FAR00553); Martin
Farndale, cattle farmer of Alberta (FAR00571);
George Farndale, farmer at Three Hills, Alberta (FAR00588);
Catherine Farndale and the Kinseys in Alberta (FAR00601);
Herbert Farndale of Craggs (FAR00652);
Grace Farndale and Howard Holmes (FAR00659);
William Farndale of Thirsk (FAR00665);
Alfred Farndale of Wensleydale (FAR00683) and
Geoff Farndale of Wensleydale (FAR00922).
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
The Farndale Farm
Labourers
The
lives of many members of the family through time, was a life of work for others
on the fields. Many of the farmers listed above spent periods of time working
for others on the land before they acquired land to farm for themselves.
Examples of those who worked as ‘agricultural labourers’ included George
Farndale of Brotton (FAR00215); Jethro Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00218); Wilson Farndale (FAR00227); Henry Farndale of Great Ayton (FAR00229); William Farndale of Brotton (FAR00243); William Farndale of Whitby (FAR00257); William Farndale of Seltringham (FAR00258); John Farndale of Eskdaleside (FAR00262); Martin Farndale of Kilton (FAR00264); William Farndale of Great Ayton (FAR00283); Joseph Farndale of Whitby (FAR00285); William Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00286); John Farndale of Kilton (FAR00287); Richard Farndale of Great Ayton (FAR00288); Matthew Farndale of Coatham (FAR00297); John Farndale (FAR00305); John George Farndale before he
emigrated to Ontario (FAR00337); William Farndale of Loftus (FAR00378); Thomas Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00474) and George Farndale of Loftus (FAR00627).
Agriculture in the Middle Ages
1086
By 1086, Farndale was an unknown place in thick
forested land. However there was a tiny settlement which comprised ten
villagers, one priest, two ploughlands, two lord’s plough teams, three men’s
plough teams, a mill and a church around the Chucrh
of St Gregory in Chirchebi, now at Kirkdale. It had been a community under
Orm’s suzerainty since at least 1055 and no doubt well before that.
Medieval
land units
The rod
is a historical unit of length equal to 5+1/2 yards. It may have originated
from the typical length of a mediaeval ox-goad. There are 4 rods in one chain.
The furlong
(meaning furrow length) was the distance a team of oxen could plough without
resting. This was standardised to be exactly 40 rods or 10 chains.
An acre
was the amount of land tillable by one man behind one team of eight oxen in one
day. Traditional acres were long and narrow due to the difficulty in turning
the plough and the value of river front access.
An oxgang
was the amount of land tillable by one ox in a ploughing season. This could
vary from village to village, but was typically around 15 acres.
A virgate
was the amount of land tillable by two oxen in a ploughing season.
A carucate
was the amount of land tillable by a team of eight oxen in a ploughing season.
This was equal to 8 oxgangs or 4 virgates.
After
his victory he visited York and Pickering. Henry I redistributed land from Robert
Curtose’s supporters, including Robert de Stuteville to his new men, including Nigel d’Albini, ancestor of the Mowbray family and Robert de Brus.
The
new barons resettled the landscape with freeholders, villeins and cottagers.
The bondsmen were settled as unfree men, sometimes referred to as serfs or
villeins. The Norman, Fleming and Breton landowners formed a new ruling class
of manor lords.
Freemen were sometimes created in return
for service. Roger de Mowbray settled freeholds near Thirsk on his
butler, usher, cook, baker and musicians (John
Rushton, The History of Ryedale, 2003, 49).
The Norman conquest broke the continuity
of ploughing for a period, but then there was a recovery and the old fields
were quickly restored.
At this time settlements of bondsmen and
villeins worked two or three adjoining fields, which were each sub divided into
a dozen or so furlongs. Each furlong was a section of the larger field usually
about 5 to 10 yards wide. The fields were cultivated collectively but each
strip was cropped by the tenant. Two oxgangs were quite commonly held by a
villein.
The villages may well have been laid
anew by the Normans. Often the lord’s manor house was at the end. Nearer to the
moors, large greens with ponds, provided a source for watering stock, as at Fadmoor.
(John Rushton, The History of Ryedale, 2003, 58-59).
With the recovery of agriculture, manors
started to invest in mills to grind grain – these were a major investment, but
were a means for a lord to gain an income from their lands.
Some land was not included within the
system, of oxgangs and new thwaites (clearings) appeared including Duvansthwaite at Farndale. Sometimes fringe land near the main
fields was cleared, often called ofnames.
Significant
land grants were given to the monasteries. Rievaulx soon had a great swathe of
properties, throughout Ryedale and stretching to Teesmouth
and Filey. At its peak it had 140 monks and 400 lay brothers. They tended to
site their granges away from villages. Monastic farms were a separate economic
force. The sheep grange was dominant in Yorkshire with many examples, including
at Farndale,
of donations of rights to pasture a fixed number of sheep.
Road systems
The
agricultural areas were sometimes connected by the King’s Highways,
which fell under legal protection and generally linked to the market towns.
There were a few long distance routes, often called great ways or magna
vias. A magna via through Huttons
Ambo led to York. Routes across the high moors were
sometimes called riggways. There were a small
number of bridges generally on lower ground, for instance at Kirkham. More
local routes often formed a start of routes in the immediate neighbourhood,
whose pattern changed between summer and winter. There were few signs or
markers, but occasionally crosses would mark a junction, such as Whinny cross
on Yearsley moor.
Tolls
may have been taken, though locally they were not often recorded and might have
not been worth it for the lack of traffic. Gatelaw
was a road tax levied in Pickering Forest.
Early rural industry was focused on corn
milling. Some castles and monasteries had more specialised industries and most
of them had bakehouses and breweries. There is some evidence of medieval
pottery, for instance pottergates of Pickering
and Gilling.
Corn mills inevitably belonged to the
manor. A water corn mill was a substantial investment, but provided a lord with
a steady source of income.
Occasionally windmills were found on low
flat lands.
Village fulling mills were sited on
streams, including at Farndale.
The number of village blacksmiths
suggests the extraction of ironstone at some scale. Barned arrow rents suggest
than iron was readily available in Farndale.
1233
The Abbot granted that if the cattle of
Nicholas or of his heirs or of his men at Kikby, Fademor, Gillingmor or Farndale, hereafter enter upon the common of the said
wood and pasture of Houton, Spaunton and Farendale, they shall have free way in
and out without ward set; provided they do not tarry in the said pasture.’ 17th
year of the Reign of Henry III. (Yorkshire
Fines Vol LXVII) (FAR00007)
Peasant woman milking a cow, mid Thirteenth Century
1236
The Commons Act allowed manorial lords to
enclose common land for their own use.
1270
John
the shepherd of Farndale must have been a herdsman by about 1270.
By 1276 there was perhaps 545 acres of cultivated land
in Farndale.
By 1282 there was perhaps 768 acres in cultivation in
Farndale.
‘In a certain dale called Farndale there are
fourscore and ten natives, not tenants by bovate of land, but by, more and
less, whose rents are extended at £38 8s 8d. Each of whom pays at Martinmas two
strikes of nuts, four of the aforesaid tenants only being excepted from the
rent of nuts. Price of nuts as above. Sum of nuts, two and a half quarters and
one strike. Sum in money 43s 9d of whom four score and five shall be harrowing
at Lent according to the size of his holding, that is, for each acre of his own
land a 1/2d worth of harrowing. Those works are extended at 29s 4d. They ought
to be talliated and given pannage as above.
The sum of £1 10s 1d. There are there three tenants in waste places
called Arkeners and Swenekelis, holding ten acres of land, an paying
10s a year and giving nuts worth 18d. The harrowing is extended at 5d. They are
serfs as the aforesaid ones of Farndale. Sum 11s 11d.’
By this time there were some 800,000 oxen and
400,000 horses in England, which enhanced the power of labour some six or seven
times.
Wool was the most significant export, with some
12m fleeces exported each year.
As the population spread into less settled
regions, with poorer soils needing more labour, a collective open field system
spread. Each vill was divided into two or
three huge open fields. One field was left fallow. The fields were ploughed in
a ridge and farrow pattern, with the undulatios
still visible today, as at Kilton. Households would own strips of land in each
field, but the use of the fields was well controlled. This open field system
reached its peak in the fourteenth century.
Most
people lived in a village, worshipped in a parish and worked in a manor (Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 92).A lord might
possess many manors, or one. A manor operated as a large collective.
Senior
villagers held offices, such as constable or church warden.
About 2/3
of manorial tenants were not free in 1200, but were villeins or serfs. Villeins
usually paid part of their rent in labour. Strictly, they could not leave the
manor without permission. They could be sold.
The
common law gradually extended to all free men and even unfree men had certain
rights and could even pass on their land to their heirs.
At a
local level, the Lord was the pinnacle of local society and the political,
cultural and economic focal point. Norman feudalism only lasted for about a
century and it was replaced by a primitive system of land tenure. Over time
this was increasingly paid for by money rather than service. The lord provided
land, justice and protection. In return the lord expected obedience and
deference; support to profit from the land; and military assistance when
necessary.
By the
1300s landlords comprised about 20,000 individuals and 1,000 institutions (Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023,
94).
1301
By 1301, there was a sizeable agricultural community
in Farndale, with 39 names associated with the place and the identification of
farmed settlements which can still be identified today, including Wakelevedy’ (Wake Lady Green), ‘Westgille’
(West Gill), Monkegate (Monket
House) and ‘Elleshaye (Eller House).
1310
‘In 1310, 20 oxen the property of Nicholas the
parker, worth 8s, 6 oxen and 3 stirks of William in the horn worth £1 9s, a cow
and a stirk of Hugh Laverock 4s 8d and 6 oxen of William Stibbing
de Farndale…….’
1289
In
the second half of the thirteenth century there was a disastrous fall in global
temperatures, which led to a succession of storms, frosts and droughts. The
Great Strom of 1289 ruined harvests across the country.
1290
Real
wages fell by about 20% between 1290 and 1350. Wars in Asia Minor from the
1250s and wear with France disrupted trade.
1309
The
Thames froze in 1309 to 1310.
1315
In
1315 to 1316, two years of continual rain ruined harvests. A great famine
across Europe lasted for 7 years.
These
were years of perhaps the worst economic disaster that England has faced. Half
a million people died of hunger and disease.
1342
Water
levels rose in the lowlands and the banks at Rillington
were raised in 1342 by the monks of Byland Abbey.
1356
The
tidal rivers of the Humber rose 4 feet above average in 1356.
Villein
services were being replaced by money dues. Villeins were replaced by
husbandmen and paid rents.
1349
In
1349 came the Black Death. Indeed the plague attacked the population four times
in thirty years and became endemic for three centuries.
The
reduced population eased the demand on arable crops, but the market still
sought mutton and beef, wool and hides. In sizeable estates, fields could be
allocated for rearing and fattening. Agriculture became more complex.
Life as a Medieval Farmer
Many
of the folk living in a late medieval village would have had a one room house.
The size of the house, the way it was built, and the contents reveal the
simplicity of the home. The villagers provided most of what they needed for
themselves and their daily routine was governed by the seasons.
Reconstruction from the Ryedale Folk Museum
The
family lived at one end of the building and the animals, kept for milk, meat
and wool, at the other. The hearth, where the meals were cooked, was the centre
of the home. The smoke would escape through the thatch.
The
cottage was also used to store tools and those used for raking, hoeing,
scything and chopping varied little over centuries. Hay and grain, needed over
winter, were stored in the loft and salted meats hung from the roof beams.
The most precious possessions were
stored in wooden chests. All the furniture could be easily moved to allow the
room to be used for other purposes.
Serfdom
Further
research required.
Tenancy
By the late
Victorian period, Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter
I, Poor People's Houses : 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.
Sixteenth Century
Seventeenth Century
Eighteenth century
Enclosures spread rapidly around Malton,
for instance at Huttons
Ambo
and Appleton le Street.
(Robert Tombs, The English and their History, 2023,
253).
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.
Victorian period
This was a period of exponential growth
in the production of coal, pig iron and the consumption of raw cotton, dwarfing
the equivalent in France and Germany.
The growth in non
agricultural production meant the 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
(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 now because they benefitted from mineral rights.
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.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 477 to 492).
Farming methods
Further
research required.
Rural Life around the North York Moors
Further
research required.
…
There is a manufacturer of wood burning
stoves in Pickering which keeps up the tradition, and they have a Farndale Stove!
…
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.
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.
Agricultural Labourers
In
the late Victorian period …
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter III, Men Afield: 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.'
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.
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XV, Harvest Home:
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
Agricultural change
Rural society was in decline 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 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 1.5M 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, brough 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 – 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.
Farmers
shifted 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 4M people between 1851 and
1911. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 was only revered by Britain’s
accession to the European Common Agricultural Policy (“CAP”) in 1873 so
that home grown temperate produce 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.
There remained a sentiment of rural
England, but no political will to protect it:
·
The
Commons
Preservation Society
1865
·
The
English
Dialect Society
1873
·
The
Society
for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings 1877
·
The
Folklore Society 1878
·
The
Lake
District Defence Society
1883
·
The
Society
for the Protection of Birds
1889
·
The
National
Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty 1895
·
The
Folk
Song Society
1898
·
The
English Folk Dance Society 1911
·
The
National
Trust Act 1907
allowed the Trust to declare land inalienable.
In many cases, these new organisations
were largely driven by the provision of amenity for town dwellers.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 486 to 489).
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 has recorded the events which occurred in his
native place, Kilton and the neighbourhood, and which took place when spinning
wheels ad 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 (Guide
to Saltburn by the Sea and the Surrounding District, John Farndale, 1870).
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 sure."
In his depictions of rural life in
semi-fictional Wessex, Thomas
Hardy
has sometimes been charged with romanticising rural life and portraying the
pastoral instead of the real. His characters frequently inhabit agricultural
communities, which form the basis of their lives and livelihoods. In tension
with the pastoral, romanticised village is the recognition of agriculture as a
capitalist venture: Hardy’s writings capture the end of the old sense of land
as a natural relative and the shift to land as an exploitable resource.
A E Housman’s A
Shropshire Lad
1896:
X
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, but it was not as
richly pastoral as Hungarian, Czech, Finnish and Russian music. It was rooted
in a world culture and even Elgar drew on European folk traditions.
There was a stubborn emotional
attachment to the rural past, but the political will was firmly fixed on an
industrial future.
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter IV, At the ‘Wagon and Horses’:
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 III, Men Afield: 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.
The path to modern farming
Gale
Bank Farm, Wensley where Alfred and Geoff
farmed.
Gale
Bank Farm
early twentieth century
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