What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew

by Daniel Pool

  In spring, barley was sown, and in May the sheep were driven out into the fields after being marked with a substance to identify them, like the “raddle” (red earth) purveyed by raddlemen like Diggory Venn of The Return of the Native. On farms where corn was grown the sheep munched their way through the meadows of grass down near the riverbeds during the day. At night they were penned up in the cornfields in portable pens called “hurdles”—moved to a different spot each night—so that they could fertilize the corn in an era before artificial fertilizer was widely available. During these weeks, the cattle were also brought out of the barns to graze.

  The wool that had kept the sheep warm during the winter was becoming hot (and salable) by the end of May, and so the sheep were washed clean of dirt and raddle by swimming them through a pond or stream, a process described in Far from the Madding Crowd, and then sheared of their wool a week later when it had dried. The sheep were also moved out of the hayfields so the grass could grow back long enough to be harvested to provide winter food for the animals. This took place while the cornfields were being tended and weeded to safeguard their crop.

  By June, “haymaking” occurred, that is, the hayfields were cut. Extra laborers were hired, and then the men and women began moving through the fields, reaping the hay with a scythe while gatherers followed behind them, collecting the hay into bushels. These were bound together either by the gatherers or by tiers coming behind them. The hay then had to be gotten quickly into stacks, or ricks, so it could be dried, since hay packed together that was moist was capable of generating enough heat to actually ignite. Even in the urbane world of Jane Austen, the necessity of such activity is conceded, when Miss Crawford complains in Mansfield Park that she can find no waggon or cart to transport her harp because it is “in the middle of a very late hay harvest.”

  “When you do think of it,” says Edmund Bertram not unkindly, “you must see the importance of getting in the grass.”

  Miss Crawford’s use of the term “harvest” to describe getting in the hay is, perhaps, one mark of her distance from the rural landscape that environs the orderly world of Mansfield Park. For the actual “harvest,” the climax of the farmer’s year, which took place in late July or August, referred to the gathering in of corn, not hay. The hay, after all, was merely to feed the animals; corn was the cash crop, and it was vital to get it in before the rains came and ruined it. Thomas Hardy tells us in Far from the Madding Crowd that Bathsheba Everdene’s harvest has produced eight ricks, worth £750, and half the produce of the farm for the entire year. The fact that her lover, Sergeant Troy, unthinkingly gets the laborers drunk before they can cover the corn from the rain vividly shows us how dangerously irresponsible he is.

  The actual harvesting was long, slow, tedious work, and generally involved use of a small sickle rather than the great sweeping scythe used in haymaking. A team of five men working well together might hope to harvest about two acres of fields a day. On the “average” 660-acre Dorset farm (not all arable, of course) this obviously could mean several weeks of back-breaking labor. And when that was done, the corn, like hay, had to be brought to the farm and put up in great ricks raised up off the ground by staddles to prevent damage by moisture and rats. The ricks would then be covered with cloths or actually thatched to keep the elements out.

  The farmer by custom then gave a “harvest home” that involved feasting the laborers in celebration of the successful conclusion of the harvest, and the agricultural year was at an end. In the days before the railroads began hauling freight, the end of the farm year was also the signal for the drovers to drive their extra cattle and sheep to the big markets and sell them off before winter set in. This was one of the world’s less exciting jobs, sheep in flocks tending to move at an average of about a mile an hour. Sheep, however, could at least feed as they went along; cows required a complete stop after they began chewing in order to digest their cud.

  THE MIDLANDS, WESSEX, AND YORKSHIRE

  There are three great rural landscapes in the nineteenth-century English novel: the Midlands, Hardy’s Wessex (really Dorset and other nearby counties in the southwest of England), and the Yorkshire moors of Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.

  The Midlands were central England—Shropshire, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire, Staffordshire, and parts of Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Berkshire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, and Herefordshire. Much of it was rolling hills and good farmland, which was often planted with hedgerows, which blossomed so beautifully in the spring with the hawthorn’s white blossoms and the red flowers of the dog roses. The Midlands, in short, bore a tamed and domesticated aspect to an extent greater than many other regions of the country. Indeed, the long rows of fields with trimmed hedges helped turn the “shires,” as they were called, in the Midlands into the center of fox hunting during the 1800s as well.

  Wessex was described by Hardy as the “province bounded on the north by the Thames, on the south by the English Channel, on the east by a line running from Hayling Island to Windsor Forest, and on the west by the Cornish coast.” This is southwest England, once the scene of the ancient Saxon kingdom from which Hardy borrowed the name Wessex, and it was a relatively poor region of England for much of the 1800s. Unlike the middle or northern parts of England, Wessex had little industry, which kept farm wages low since there was no competition for the labor of farm workers from factories, as there was elsewhere.

  Village of Whit Hurch, Dorset.

  Then there was Yorkshire, specifically the brooding, desolate west riding in which the scene of Wuthering Heights is laid. Exposed to the icy northern gales of the Pennine mountains, the region was hilly and rocky—hard to farm and running wild to gorse and heath where it was not cultivated (oats were the corn crop). The steepness of the hills was probably one reason Wuthering Heights raised sheep, which did better than cattle in such an environment. The village, that tight social clustering of diverse humans characteristic of the Midlands landscape of Eliot, never took hold to the same degree in the north.

  In the north, the typical pattern of settlement was often the solitary farmstead—like Wuthering Heights—sheltering against the side of the hill miles from its neighbor. Rural isolation was reinforced by the tendency, longest lived in the north, for farm servants to actually live in the farmstead with the family—as do Joseph and Zillah at Wuthering Heights—rather than in their own cottages away from the farm where they worked, as Bathsheba Everdene’s laborers in Casterbridge did or as the farmers did in the Midlands.

  On the other hand, there was an abundance of coal in the region, which meant that the standard of living benefited twice over, first because of the relatively low cost of fuel for heat and cooking, and second because the growth of industry meant that nearby farmers were competing with factories for labor and consequently had to pay higher wages than farmers paid to their laborers elsewhere.

  Perhaps the most comfortable, familiar landscape of the three was that of the Midlands countryside described by Eliot. The prickly borders of shrubs and trees along the edges of the carefully cultivated fields, however, in reality often were emblematic of the unhappy and turbulent displacement of the area’s recent inhabitants. Until the enclosures began, men worked and farmed great unbounded areas in which arable land, pasture, and wastes were intermingled.

  The time came when individual farmers and large landowners wanted some of this land for themselves, and they won the legal right to remove the other users. They then planted hedges as boundary markers and to keep others off, a purpose admirably served by the hedgerows woven together of holly, hawthorn, and dog rose that blossomed so beautifully in the brilliant May sunshine. Before long, the hedgerows were a prominent feature of the Midlands landscape. They also served to keep cattle from wandering. They were planted out of hawthorn (also called Maythorn or whitethorn) because it grew fast and was virtually impenetrable. (Its “haws,” or red berries, provided food for the birds and set off the white b
lossoms it sent forth in spring, as did the “hips” of the dog rose or briar rose that often grew among the hedge trees.) Because of its prickliness holly was also used as a hedge tree, although it was not as hardy as hawthorn. Blackthorn had the merit of flourishing in harsh soil; its black berries—the sloe that were cousins to the domesticated greengages and damsons and plums—also provided jam and sloe gin, and the tree could be made into a walking stick or, in Ireland, a shillelagh.

  The landscapes of the far north and south were, of course, quite different. But in the place of gently rolling hills and carefully delimited fertile fields with sleepy villages, the landscapes of Wuthering Heights and the Hardy novels alike engendered a feeling of desolation and helplessness in the face of an indifferent but enduring nature. Wuthering Heights, we are told, is surrounded by acres and acres of boggy moor over which the unwary traveler goes at his peril, as Mr. Lockwood finds when he tries ill-advisedly to venture forth in the snow on one occasion; while The Return of the Native revolves obsessively around Egdon Heath, the vast, desolate, fictional expanse of heath and furze that Hardy imaginatively distilled out of a number of actual heaths.

  In fact, heath and moor are different names for a similar terrain, namely, a desolate, sandy-soiled place, where dead vegetation piles up and accumulates into peat. The difference between a heath and a moor is the greater amount of rainfall on the moor, which, unlike the heath, is characteristically boggy and marshy. Hardy remarks both on the similarity of and transition from the one to the other in a passage from The Return of the Native where “they wandered onward till they reached the nether end of the margin of the heath, where it became marshy, and merged in moorland.”

  The landscapes of the far north and south shared the same plants. The furze Clem Yeobright cuts to his wife’s horror when his eyes give out in The Return of the Native was a yellow-flowered shrub growing up to eight feet in height that could be used as fuel. In the middle of England it was called “gorse,” and in the north it was called “whin,” under which name it appears in Wuthering Heights. This was not the only shrubbery the two terrains had in common. In her ultimately fatal journey across Egdon Heath, Mrs. Yeobright comes across a “little boy gathering whortleberries in a hollow.” Sometimes they were called huckleberries, blackberries, or blueberries, but they turn up on the wild moors of Wuthering Heights as bilberries, a small plant growing no more than two feet in height, with delicious bluish-black berries. In a hungry moment, the exhausted heroine of Jane Eyre makes her way across a moor: “I saw ripe bilberries gleaming here and there, like jet beads in the heath; I gathered a handful, and ate them with my bread.”

  But it is the heath plant itself, the very shrub that gave its name to the characteristic landscape called a heath, that was perhaps the most typical plant of all. “Heath,” as it was called in the south of England—“ling” in the Midlands and “heather” in the north—was a shrub not more than a few feet high that produced light purple or sometimes white flowers. In the blaze of summer, according to Hardy in The Return of the Native, it conferred a transitory glory on the heath when “the July fire shone over Egdon and fired its crimson heather to scarlet. It was the one season of the year, and the one weather of the season, in which the heath was gorgeous.” It was what the sheep grazed on in the northern moors with their sparse vegetation, a source of fuel (and brooms), and it could even be used for thatching a house. It was also a stuffing for beds and a source of honey; Catherine Linton confides to Nelly Dean how Linton “said the pleasantest manner of spending a hot July day was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath in the middle of the moors, with the bees humming dreamingly about among the bloom.” The harebell (or heathbell)—Scotland’s famous bluebell—grew here, too. It was a small, purplish flower capable of producing a distinct whispering murmur when the autumn had come, “a worn whisper, dry and papery,” “the united products of infinitesimal vegetable causes . . . the mummied heath-bells of the past summer, originally tender and purple, now washed colourless by Michaelmas rains, and dried to dead skins by October suns.”

  The British yeoman.

  WHO’S WHO IN THE COUNTRY

  Rural England was governed by a strict hierarchy. At the very top were the landed aristocracy, the old, powerful families with hereditary titles and large estates. Typically, such families were of the peerage and had lived at their “seat,” or estate, for generations and owned thousands upon thousands of acres of land. The duke of Ancaster in 1888, for example, controlled more than 163,000 acres of British countryside. Altogether perhaps some one fifth of England was tied up in these great estates, which on the average consisted of 10,000 acres or more. As the earl of Derby noted in 1881, this kind of landownership yielded many rewards: political power, social influence, the pleasure of managing a great estate, rental income from tenant farmers, and the fun of shooting and hunting. The estates were typically rented out to farmers who rented homes on the land and worked it with rural laborers under the supervision of the lord’s land agent and bailiffs. Because of their exalted station, the estate owners typically spent only August through December on their estates, and their involvement in day-to-day county affairs was generally minimal. Typically, such a magnate might serve as lord lieutenant and select the local justices of the peace, but his attention would have been largely centered on London, Parliament, and national affairs.

  Next in rank came the gentry, the people who had less land than the landed aristocracy, perhaps on the average some one thousand to three thousand acres. It was the gentry who constituted the real local leadership in county matters and on whose affairs the great novels like Middlemarch or Pride and Prejudice generally turn. The gentry were not peers, but their upper ranks would have included knights and baronets. They owned their own land and often rented it out for farming like the great aristocrats above them. The lower tiers of the gentry included those with long ties in the region who would be designated “squire.” Either to him or another member of the gentry, perhaps the local clergyman, would fall the post of justice of the peace. Squire Ullathorne in Barchester Towers in the latter part of the century fits this mold; in an earlier era we find the rough-riding Squire Cass of Silas Marner, “the greatest man in Raveloe,” whom Eliot depicts in a manner that recalls Fielding’s Squire Western. Dorothea Brooke’s uncle and the senior Mr. Linton in Wuthering Heights were nontitled members of the gentry, although they were not squires, and both served as justices of the peace. It is the gentry from whom Jane Austen draws most of her characters—educated, comfortably well-off—they do not work themselves but oversee the work of others and spend their time plotting how to marry off their children, paying calls or seeking to elevate their social standing. Where the great aristocrats spent time in London and, perhaps, even abroad, men like Mr. Rochester and Sir Thomas Bertram or Sir Pitt Crawley would venture only occasionally to the capital on “law business,” or to have a daughter presented, but would otherwise concern themselves with local “county” matters—hunting, the militia, the petty sessions and quarter sessions, and so on.

  Below the gentry were the yeomen, or gentlemen farmers. Some of the gentry had not much more land than their farmer neighbors, but the farmer often would have to dirty his hands working the land himself. Nonetheless, many gentlemen farmers were prosperous enough to maintain a life-style like that of the gentry, which meant that the farmer was always trying to elbow his way into their society. In Barchester Towers Mrs. Lookaloft seeks to make her way into the company of the gentry at Squire Ullathorne’s big fete. “To seat the bishop on a arm-chair on the lawn and place Farmer Greenacre at the end of a long table in the paddock is easy enough; but where will you put Mrs. Lookaloft, whose husband, though a tenant on the estate, hunts in a red coat, whose daughters go to a fashionable seminary in Barchester, who calls her farmhouse Rosebank, and who has a pianoforte in her drawing-room?” This same tension is present in Wuthering Heights between the gentry of Thrushcross Grange and the farmers at Wuthering Heights, a house
with no park but only a mean, stunted garden. It is always referred to as a “farmhouse” and, even after she marries Edgar Linton, Cathy jokes: “Set two tables here, Ellen: one for your master and Miss Isabella, being gentry; the other for Heathcliff and myself, being of the lower orders.”

  Traditionally, the yeoman was the small landholder who was the mainstay of the countryside—sturdy, loyal to his king, independent, and ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with his mates, as the “yeomen archers” did at Agincourt, in defense of English freedoms. As the century wore on, however, yeomen became a dying breed. Owing to nineteenth-century economic realities, the yeomen either lost their land and descended to the status of rural laborers or became tenant farmers of the big estate holders. Indeed, by the end of the century, the term “yeoman” had passed from use, as virtually every farmer of wealth and position usually rented from a large landowner. In Far from the Madding Crowd both Bathsheba Everdene and Farmer Boldwood are such farmers (who, between them, rent some two thousand acres), and both live extremely well. In fact, as Hardy says of Boldwood, “his person was the nearest approach to aristocracy that this remoter quarter of the parish could boast of.” This was not uncommon. Though some farmers worked only what they owned, many others rented land from the aristocracy and gentry and then hired laborers who would do the actual farming work.