The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  James (Benhall) Wilding (born 1886) worked for the Pratt family for over half a century and was head horseman for the greater part of the time. He stated that beans caused a lot of feet-fever, especially in horses being prepared for shows, and he never used them for that reason. ‘We used a lot of carrots—the red kind. Carrots kept the horses in good condition. We reckoned they were good for the water.’ To bear out this use of carrots the Pratt stables have, as well as the usual chaff-house, a root-house alongside the stalls: here the roots—carrots and cattle-beet or mangel-wurzels—were stored before being ground up and fed to the horses.

  Arthur Young has a note on the growing of carrots in this area:3 ‘The culture of carrots in the Sandlings (of Suffolk) … is one of the most interesting objects to be met with in the agriculture of Britain. It appears from Norden’s Surveyors Dialogue that carrots were commonly cultivated in this district two hundred years ago, which is a remarkable fact, and shews how extremely local such practices long remain, and what ages are necessary to spread them. For many years (generally till about six or seven past) the principal object in the cultivation, was sending carrots to the London market by sea; but other parts of the kingdom having rivalled them in this supply they have of late years been cultivated for feeding horses; and thus they now ascertain, by the common husbandry of a large district, that it will answer well to raise carrots for the mere object of the teams…. In feeding they give about eighty bushels a week to six horses with plenty of chaff, but no corn, and thus fed, they eat little hay. Some farmers, as the carrots are not so good to Christmas as in the spring, give forty bushels and four of oats, a week, in the fore-part of the winter, but in the spring eighty bushels and no corn.’

  Carrots are still grown by farmers as a field-crop in this area but ehiefly now with the purpose of selling them to the town markets—especially Covent Garden. And Arthur Young’s note emphasizes the persistent quality of traditional fanning practices, founded no doubt as much on the inherited skill and knowledge of the best way to treat the crop as on the suitability of the soil for growing it. It is noteworthy also that down the years some of the best Suffolk horses have come from this area which is indeed the cradle of the Suffolk as we know him today.

  The baiters took immense pains in grooming their horses, out of pride in the beasts in their care, also out of a spirit of rivalry. One baiter did not care to fall behind another in the amount of shine or bloom that was on his horses’ coats; and it was one of the first baiter’s duties to see that the farm’s horses turned out to the plough looking at least as well as the horses belonging to the neighbouring farms.

  To make the coat shine each horseman had his own, usually secret, recipe. One used tansy leaves: ‘You dried them and then rubbed them atween your hands. You kept this powder in a little linen bag and you sprinkled a bit now and then in their bait.’ Another used sweet saffron leaves, baked to dry and fed in the same way: ‘Only you had to be some careful not to give the horse too much of the powder or else the sweat would bring it out and you could smell the herb on his coat.’ Another horseman used bryony root—a fairly common remedy in Suffolk: ‘Bryony is a big root like a passnip. You cut it up; let it dry, and feed it with the chaff.’ One horseman knew bryony as big-root: ‘We used to come across it while we were ditching. I used to borrow my wife’s nutmeg grater and then I’d grate up some of the root and feed it to ’em with the chaff.’ One horseman asserted that the best device to make the coat shine was to wet the chaff occasionally with a little urine.

  A chemist remembered that some old horsemen put their faith in black antimony for getting bloom; while a farmer stated that a device to bring up quickly the shine on a horse’s coat was to rub him down lightly with a rag that had been dipped in paraffin: this also had the advantage of keeping the flies off and thus helping him to stand his steadiest in the show-ring. One horseman recalled that a few leaves taken from a box hedge and dried and fed in a powder in the chaff helped to keep down excessive sweat which tended to spoil the look of a horse; and this same horseman prescribed gentian or felwort for inducing a horse that had lost his appetite to use the rack and the manger once more.

  Nicholas Culpeper confirms the property of this herb. He says: ‘The power of the dry roots (of gentian) help (sic) the biting of mad dogs and venomous beasts, opens obstructions of the liver, and restoreth an appetite of their meat to such as have lost it.’ He also commends bryony: ‘The root cleaneth the skin wonderfully’—presumably in men and in animals. But yet another horseman, while commending the old simples and remedies, stated baldly: ‘If you grow your corn and stover, you won’t want vet nor medicines for your horses’.

  William Cobbold has mentioned that: ‘Some of the old horsemen liked to nick a few mangels from the bullocks’ barn. (This was in the ‘bean country’) They ground up the mangels and mixed it with the stover. They reckoned the mangels toned the horses up. They acted as a medicine, especially when they were ripe, just after coming out of the clamp about April time. We also used to feed mangels to sheep at this time, but we had to be careful to rub off the young shoots or else they would cause the lambs to scour.’

  At many farms there was, for keeping up an unlimited supply of chaff, a horse-powered chaff-cutter or Old Roundabout, as it was known in this district. One such machine was made by Ransome, Sims and Jefferies, the Ipswich firm, and was catalogued in 1860 as ‘A New and Improved Horse Gear with Intermediate Motion for Driving a Small Chaff Engine’. The machine itself was housed in the barn or a specially built shed; and was geared to a capstan-like arrangement in the yard outside. To the single lever or shaft of this capstan a horse was fixed, by traces, and by a thin, quarter-inch steel rod—from the inside end of the shaft to the bridle—‘to stop it from going off’. The horse walked in a circle pulling the lever and working the machine. Behind the horse walked a man or a boy to keep him pulling steadily.

  Two men inside the barn were occupied with feeding the machine. One man picked up the hay or straw and placed it at the end of the feed-box; the other pushed it gently forward to engage it with the knives of the cutter. The man who picked up the hay arranged it in yelms—that is, disposed it in more or less regular bundles or shuffs ready for feeding into the cutter. A man, who had walked behind the horse when he was a boy, recalled: ‘It wasn’t hard work; but it was tedious work both for the boy and the horse. You had to keep the horse going steady. If you didn’t watch out, he’d gradually slow down—he’d get bored with his job; but as soon as you urged him he’d go forward with a start like a thunder-bolt and the old machine started to revolve like fury. Then there was some swearing. A head poked out of the barn window and there was a shout: ‘Keep thet hoss steady, can’t you?’ You see, as the cogs quickened up, the machine took the yelms too quickly: the feeder couldn’t keep pace and there was a danger of him getting his fingers in the knives. If the old horse started a-loitering, on the other hand, the yelms didn’t travel fast enough and the chaff-cutting wouldn’t go forrard.’

  As soon as he had completed the baiting the horseman slipped home for a snap and he returned to the stable about 6 o’clock. If he lived some distance away from the farm it was necessary for him to bring sufficient bait to last him the whole of the working day. If he lived near he returned from breakfast with a packet of bread and cheese his wife had prepared for his mid-morning break. As soon as he was back he began to harness the horses for the day’s work: a-collaring up it was known as in this district. Then at 6.30 he turned out. The farmer was usually in the yard about that time to allot the jobs to each team; and if he had any doubts about a particular horseman’s grooming of his charges he had only to take out a white handkerchief, and surreptitiously hold it against the flank of one of the horses as they passed, either to justify his doubts or to dispel them.

  As already stated there was a quasi-ritual atmosphere about turning out. The head horseman or first baiter went first; then came the first baiter’s mate; then the second baiter who was followed by his ma
te. If a horseman, either through perversity or absent-mindedness, took his team out of the stable before his turn in the ordered procession, there was a true disturbance. A head horseman has been known to throw a brush at a man rash enough to lead his horses out of the stable before his proper turn. Another method of arresting the undisciplined was to rattle a stick suddenly against the side of the stall, thus temporarily frightening the two horses, and causing them to throw back their heads. As soon as he had got them under control again the erring groom was rated with a peremptory: ‘Don’t you know where your place is?’

  The same precedence was carefully observed at the end of the day when the teams had completed their work in the field. If a second horseman, for instance, happened to finish ploughing somewhere near the gate, it would not do for him to proceed out. He had to ‘hold to one side’, draw his horses away from the gate until the first horseman and his mate had passed through. Only then could he move his team into the procession that both horses and men had looked forward to, at least during the latter hours of their long task in the field. The horses walked in pairs, as they had ploughed, on the right-hand side of the road; and if a horseman rode, he sat side-ways on the land horse, the horse on the outside, nearer to the on-coming traffic.

  1 Fixed under the Corn Production Act, 1917. The figure was 25s. 0d. per week.

  2 G.V.A.C.S., p. 80.

  3 G.V.A.C.S., p. 125.

  2

  In the Field

  In many ways the part of a horseman’s job calling for most of his skill was that concerned with working the land, and using a standard of craftsmanship set immeasurably high both by the tradition of his craft and by the immediate needs of cultivation; and a horseman served a long and disciplined apprenticeship before he could attain to the standard demanded. Briefly, this meant the ability to ‘take his work and leave it’: to start and finish the ploughing; that is, to open and shut up a furrow and leave every stetch, or parcel of furrows, straight and level and without a wrinkle to mar the whole length of it.

  In Suffolk it was customary until recent years to plough a field in stetches or lands of varying widths. Each stetch was limited on its two sides by water-cuts or deep furrows that made easy the escape of surface water from the soil; and in fact the main purpose of ploughing in stetches was—and still is, where stetches continue to be used—to ensure effective draining of the land. The lighter the soil the fewer water-furrows were needed and, therefore, the wider were the stetches. In the strong-loam belt of Suffolk—the heavy-land districts—however, very narrow stetches of two yards and upwards were necessary effectively to take off the surface water. As the ploughshare most commonly used in this county was one that turned a nine-inch furrow, the two-yard stetches were characterised as eight-furrow work; the two-and-a-half yard stetches as ten-furrow work; and the three-yard as twelve-furrow. But the narrow stetches were used only where the heaviness of the land made them inescapably necessary; for their disadvantages were many. First of all, the more water-furrows in a field the more land is wasted; secondly a field that is ploughed in narrow stetches that are ridged up slightly to assist the drainage is not the best seed-bed for a crop of corn, as the ridges are bound, to some degree, to cause an unequal ripening of the seed. Again, as it was impossible for wheeled implements to cross the frequent deep water-cuts of a field ploughed in this way, all cultivation had to be done along the stetch itself; and this meant that implements—drills, hoes, harrows, etc.—had to be adapted to fit the width of stetch used.

  But the introduction of the reaping machine, the self-binder and latterly the combine-harvester made the use of narrow stetches impossible, as the continual jolting over the deep furrows soon put the most robust machine out of action. Under the surface draining or thorough water-draining of the land had to be undertaken on a more planned and workmanlike scale than had been done formerly; for now the below-surface drains had to take off most of the water and conduct it to the ditches, and had not merely to assist the wasteful system of frequent water-furrows on the surface, as the old bush-drains had done when they were almost the sole method of under-draining. Therefore the narrow stetches gradually went out of use as more machinery was introduced, and they were replaced by flat-work—wide stetches with water-furrows at as great an interval as was compatible with efficient overall draining.

  But when the first baiter led his teams on to an unploughed field he did not have to trouble his head about the width of the stetches: that had been fixed by long usage and probably appeared to him then as unalterable an aspect of the landscape as the roads and the hedges. His first job was to start his teams to plough: he had already been on the field the day before to mark out the stetches. He had laid out their width, at each end of the field, with the help of a stetch-pole, a pole equal in length to the width of the stetch they were working—a nine-foot one in twelve-furrow work. This use of a pole to measure arable land is very ancient. Old Welsh laws, quoted by Seebohm,1 specify how the strips of plough-land were to be measured—in some provinces—with a rod equal in ‘length to the long-yoke used in ploughing with four oxen abreast’.

  At each end of the centre or top of the stetch he placed a hazel-stick, taken from the hedge and peeled so that the white pith acted as a sight for drawing his first furrow. He, or the second horseman, did this for the whole of the field until it was marked out in equally spaced stetches. He then drew the first furrow of the stetch himself. If the first furrow was straight, example and actual guidance helped to persuade the ploughman who followed after him to draw the other furrows in the stetch in like manner: if the first furrow was bent nothing could prevent the others from being less than perfect also. The responsibility for drawing the first furrow on a narrow stetch was one the head horseman could not afford to delegate, unless it was to a man equally skilled as himself; for a stetch that did not come out, at every point, exactly to the inch would render ineffective the use of implements that had been designed specially for it; again, a botched stetch was visible to all—to the casual passer-by and to the practised eye of his neighbour; and the ‘loss of face’ a head horseman suffered through allowing the standard of his own work to be below that of the next farm’s was enough to make him ensure that every field was laid out and ploughed with as much care as patience and long-practised skill made possible. But another important reason for the head horseman’s care was that he was directly responsible to the farmer for the way the field was cultivated; and if the farmer brought forward a complaint, the head man had to bear the full burden of it.

  After he had drawn the first furrow in the stetch he returned alongside, ploughing a second furrow against the first, thus completing the laying of the top or centre-furrows—in shape, exactly like the ridge of a roof. He then left the first stetch and did the same with the next. Robert Youngman (born 1889) a retired horseman of Stratford St Andrew, has described how he started work at Marlsford Hall. His account illustrates how jealously the standard of workmanship was kept up, even when coaching a beginner in his first bout of ploughing was involved: ‘I started on the farm when I was thirteen, but I was eighteen before they let me plough. The first time I put my hand on a plough-handle they placed me between the first horseman and the second. It was ten-furrow work at that time. The head horseman laid the top, and then I gathered a round (two furrows around the top) then the second horseman followed after me; and someone else followed after him and so on till the moul’ furrow (the mould furrow was the last in the stetch) had been ploughed.’ In other words, the beginner was made to plough directly after the head man, who gave him guidance and a high standard, and any mistakes he made were covered up by those coming after him. Consequently when they had finished the stetch, it would not, even at its worst, fall much below the usual standard, as the beginner’s errors were corrected or at least made less obtrusive by the skill of the older men coming after him.

  Perhaps the deep concern of the horsemen to keep their high standard of work even in the ordinary day-to-day ploughing ca
n best be understood when we look at it against the background of a practice that was once common in many parts of Suffolk. On Sunday mornings during the time of the spring and autumn ploughing, the horsemen often strolled around the parish to view one another’s work, estimating its quality with the eye for detail of an exacting sticker2 at a furrow-drawing match. And if a man had a bent furrow or a hog’s trough (a hollow between two furrow slices) in his work, the mistake would soon be recorded in every farm and public house in the parish.

  Arthur Chaplin has given an account of the responsibility of the first baiter in the field: ‘Supposing he had to plough a field of thirteen acres and he had eight plough-teams working. His first job was to calculate when they should finish, how long they should take to plough the whole field, each man ploughing at the rate of three quarters of an acre in one day. Next he had to calculate how many rounds each man had to plough. Then he had to remember that even after the rounds had been allocated and the stetches accounted for, he still had to include the acre or so of headland, the land on the outside of the field where the ploughs turned, which had to be ploughed the last of all.’ The procedure followed at Stowupland with the twelve-furrow work was similar to that already described for the ten-furrow: the head horseman, or first baiter, laid the top and the other horsemen followed him, each ploughing a round at least on a stetch.