The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  ‘If there were only six stetches in the field and eight ploughs working, the first baiter then put the second baiter and another to open up the furrows and lay the tops, so all the ploughs were employed. If there were six ploughs on the field and six stetches then it worked out easily: each man did one round (two furrows) on every stetch, making up the twelve furrows—or, to be more exact, eleven furrows and the brew or moul’ furrow. The brew was very important as it completed or shut up the work. We called ploughing the last furrow in a stetch taking up the brew. In twelve-furrow work, or any narrow-stetch work for that matter, it was important that all the brews lay in one direction. If they didn’t, the width of the stetches wouldn’t be exact; and the drill and so on wouldn’t fit the stetch; there was a waste of land or a waste of seed-corn. And if that happened you might as well hide your head in the hedge.

  ‘The first baiter had a responsible job when he had a field full of ploughs to look after. He was a kind of foreman; and he had continually to be looking at his watch and calculating whether they were forrard enough. And as they came towards the end of the day he had to do some quick thinking to find out whether he’d have to keep the men working right up to the last minute in order to get the stint, of three-quarter of an acre’s ploughing for each man, finished.

  ‘After they gave up twelve-furrow work—when the machines came in—they went in for flat-work, wide stetches, even on the heaviest land, of anything up to eighteen yards. Then each man ploughed his own stetch after the first baiter had laid the top. That system was better in a way. It kept you on your toes. As soon as you had a break in your ploughing you’d walk along the headlings to have a look at your neighbour’s work, to see where he had gone wrong, or if his ploughing was better than yours. It wouldn’t do just to have straight furrows: a good ploughman also had to have a good top to the stetch—the furrows lying all flat and even. If there was a bit of low in the land, he had to let his plough bite in a little deeper at this spot to bring his furrows up level. You had to have level furrows as the drill coulters3 had to enter the land at equal depth everywhere. Some say: ‘Oh, don’t worry about that! The harrows will level it off when they go over it.’ But the harrows would never level off. You can pick out a furrow after the harrow has gone over it. If a first baiter knew his job, as soon as a man had ploughed a stetch he’d drop his stick across the furrows. If the stick didn’t lie flat, but went all tittymatawta (like a seesaw), he then wanted to know the reason for it. It was work in the days I’m telling you about. Now, if you see a ploughed field today, it looks exactly as if a lot of pigs have been a-hoggin’ and a-rootin’ on it up.’

  A level top, apart from its looking well, was emphasised for a good economic reason: if the ploughland was level, the drill coulters would bite in at an uniform depth, and sow the seed in the same way; the ears of corn would then mature at approximately the same time and all the seeds of corn would be approximately the same size. This was a big point in a barley-grower’s favour when he took some of his corn to show to a maltster. For one of the first things the maltster looked for was just this: uniformity of seed in the samples that the farmer showed to him.

  But there is a long tradition of skilful ploughing in this county. Arthur Young wrote of it:4 ‘The ploughmen are remarkable for straight furrows; and also for drawing them by the eye to any object, usually a stick whitened by peeling, either for water cuts or for new laying out broad ridges, called here stitches; and a favourite amusement is ploughing such furrows as candidates for a hat, a pair of breeches given by ale-house keepers or subscribed amongst themselves as a prize for the straightest furrow. The skill of many of them in this work is remarkable’.

  Furrow-drawing and ploughing matches with horses remained popular until recent years, and even now have not gone out altogether. William Cobbold tells how the ploughmen at Battisford often had a small sweepstake amongst themselves during the day’s work in the field—an ounce of tobacco for the best furrow or the best laid stetch. Or sometimes one horseman said to another while they were ploughing: ‘See you across the field for a pint o’ beer’. If this challenge to plough the straighter furrow was accepted the head horseman was called in to judge the winner.

  The efficient horseman was a highly valued member of the old pre-machine, rural community; and his skill at the plough earned for him a notable place in the regard of his fellows. William Cobbold recalls one of them in this district: ‘Frank Botwright was my first horseman at Hill Farm. He was a very quiet horseman but a real good ’un. You could hear some horsemen three or four fields away; but you wouldn’t hear Frank even if you were in the next. He was ploughing the headlands of a field just by the farm one day and I had to go over to see him about something. Do you know his two horses went right round the headlands without him touching the cords (reins)’.

  Other ploughmen have been known to set the plough in the furrow, start the horses off and then release the plough handles, walking a few yards away from the plough till it neared the headland when they took hold of the plough again to turn it. One of the men who did this confessed: ‘It was a bit of a trick. Of course you had to have two good horses. But the real knack was in setting the two wheels of the plough—the land and the furrow wheel. Even so, you couldn’t go very far away from the plough; because if the coulter or the share struck a flint and started to dance, you had to be at hand quick to put it right.’

  The more formal ploughing—and furrow-drawing matches have been described elsewhere,5 but Arthur Chaplin has recalled his father at one of these in a story that is worth quoting: ‘My father tied with another man at an Old Newton furrow-drawing match: both had a quarter-inch deviation—it must have been about sixty years ago. Now he had one peculiarity when he was a-ploughin’: he had to have his pipe going before he could start. So this particular day at Old Newton, just before he started, he stopped to do the usual: get a good light on his owd pipe. One of the stewards saw him a-doin’ this and he say:

  ‘“Hurry up there! We’re waiting for you to start. You can’t smoke and draw a furrow at the same time.”

  ‘“Dew you be quiet. I know what I’m a-dewin’ on.”

  So he lit up his owd bit of clay pipe, put his hands to the plough and went after his horses. When he had drawn a furrow that everybody could see was one of the best—even before the stickers put the sticks on it—they say:

  ‘“See! It’s child’s play for him. He smokes at it as if he’s just a-diggin’ in his own garden!”

  They didn’t know that he couldn’t have drawn a proper furrow let alone a real good ’un if he hadn’t got his owd pipe a-drawin’ in his mouth! It just shows you: what you’re used to, you must do—even if it’s in a competition.’

  James Edward Ransome, writing in 1865,6 summarised the regard in which good ploughing was held: ‘I have done my best to explain the construction and mode of using the most useful and most general of all agricultural implements (the plough), and when we consider that good ploughing lies at the root of good farming and that good farming produces food for the world, we shall see that it is worthy of our attentive study. Nor ought the ploughman himself to be despised. He has not often had the advantages of education which make the scholar, but he has had an implement to study and work to perform which requires years of patient daily toil to master and become proficient at. I have found many a warm and honest heart beneath the rough hand of the ploughman. Nor has his work been despised by those in higher stations’.

  At eleven o’clock the teams stopped working. The horseman threw a couple of sacks over the backs of his horses and sat under the hedge to eat his elevenses. The break lasted twenty minutes; but it was not a complete break for the horseman for he was still in charge of the horses; and as they were not feeding they sometimes got restless, especially in the summer time when the flies worried them and sometimes caused a horse to get his foot over a trace. Even when he was resting the horseman had to be on the alert for incidents like this to see that nothing untoward happened to h
is team. After the break he resumed work and continued until 2.30 in the afternoon when it was the end of the day as far as the horses were concerned.

  But why this peculiar organisation of the horseman’s day which to a large extent cut across the hours of the other workers on the farm? The answer appears to be that such was the traditional day for the ploughman from time immemorial when his team was made up solely of oxen. Mediaeval records show that the oxen ploughed only in the morning and returned to their stalls shortly after mid-day. The old Welsh laws, dating from the middle of the tenth century, make it clear that the oxen were not to be used in the afternoon; and as Seebohm7 points out a cyvar (or co-ploughing, where different people contributed different members of the ox-team and the plough itself) ended at noon. Ffransis Payne,8 in a very valuable book that deals, in its early chapters, with the history of the plough in Britain, quotes three Welsh poets of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to show that the ox-team ploughed only until noon and spent the rest of the day in feeding and in resting.

  But, someone will say, what has Wales to do with England, and especially with Suffolk from which it is so far removed? Frederic Seebohm,9 has stated why the Welsh evidence is so relevant:

  ‘In these (Welsh) laws is much trustworthy evidence from which might be drawn a very graphic picture of the social and economic condition of the unconquered Welsh people, at a time parallel to the centuries of Saxon rule in England. And amongst other things fortunately there is an almost perfect picture of the method of ploughing. Nor is it too much to say that in this picture we have a key which completely fits the lock, and explains the riddle of the English open field system.

  ‘For the ancient Welsh laws describe a simple form of the open field system at an earlier stage than that in which we have yet seen it—at a time, in fact, when it was a living system at work, and everything about it had a present and obvious meaning, and its details were consistent and intelligible’.

  But why start early and finish in the middle of the day? Ffransis Payne suggests that ploughing was particularly burdensome to the oxen during the heat of the day, and that by finishing at noon they would escape the greater part of it. But an important reason for the long, unbroken stretch of work in the field was undoubtedly the amount of time and trouble that was necessary to yoke and unyoke a team of eight, or even four, oxen. A break during the middle of the day and a return to the stables—apart from the question of distance from the field where the work was being done—would have meant unyoking and yoking up a second time for another stint in the afternoon; and this would have lengthened the day without appreciably lengthening the working time. Therefore it was natural that the ploughing should be done in one extended visit to the field: it was convenient that this should fall in the forepart of the day while the afternoon was spent, by the oxen in resting, and by their driver and ploughman in feeding them and seeing to their wants.

  That the traditional shape of the old horseman’s day was a continuation of the much older discipline submitted to by the ox-driver and the ploughman is borne out by some of the terms that still survive in Suffolk. One old horseman put forward his opinion that the reason for the teams’ long stretch of work in the early part of the day was, in fact, to save taking off (the harness etc.) in the middle of the day; and—what is more interesting—he referred to the day’s visit to the field as a journey. Seebohm has pointed out10 how ancient this term is when it is connected with ploughing; for in mediaeval times the acre or strip, which was the average day’s ploughing for an ox-team, was sometimes called a jurnalis (or diurnalis) in monks’ Latin and journel in French—that is, the amount of ploughing that could be done in one day.

  George Izzard, a Kentish man who is in charge of the large farm of H.M. Prison Commissioners at Hollesley Bay, in Suffolk, also revealed the antiquity of the practice when he recently referred to it as one yoke. He has a large stable of Suffolk horses which he still uses for ploughing: he said, however: ‘We don’t have the old system of one yoke now: the horses now return to the stable at mid-day, and go back into the field for another stretch of ploughing in the afternoon.’ This procedure has also been adopted by most Suffolk farmers who still work horses: the old, traditional one journey, or one yoke fell out of use just before or during the last war. Though there are farms in the county where it was retained up to nine or ten years ago—or even later; and it is likely that in other parts of the country the old system is still kept, at least in vestigial form.

  It appears that in some parts of Essex the organisation of the ploughing bore even greater resemblance to the old mediaeval system. Charles Bugg (born 1883) a Barking (Suffolk) farmer, recalled: ‘The horseman didn’t plough in Essex. They went on different there—at least in parts of Essex. There was a baiter who did nothing but feed the horses; and when they were ploughing two men went with every plough-team—the ploughman and the driver. The ploughman had nothing to do with the horses.’

  This is exactly how the mediaeval team was organised: the ploughman at the handles, the team of oxen—yoked in pairs or four abreast—and the driver who walked alongside with his goad. This is clearly shown in an illustration in the Luttrell Psalter. It is also worth noting that in the Welsh organisation, referred to in the old laws already mentioned, the counterpart of the driver was termed y geilwad or the caller. He walked backwards in front of the oxen singing to them as they worked. Songs were specially composed to suit the rhythm of the oxen’s work; and some of these songs were still used for their ancient purpose in the county of Glamorgan until the latter half of the nineteenth century.

  If the day’s ploughing was originally conditioned, as seems likely, by the length of time it was possible to keep a team of oxen working in the field without taking from them more of their strength than they could recoup during a night’s rest, it follows that the amount of ploughing done—or at least aimed at—during a day was fairly constant. This amount was, in fact, the acre. The Roman acre (about two thirds of an English acre) was the amount of land that could be ploughed by a single yoke of oxen in a day; and the Latin word for an acre, iugerum, is almost identical with that for a yoke—iugum: an additional argument in favour of this theory of the acre’s origin. Seebohm also mentions that the extent of a cyvar,11 or co-aration in the early Welsh laws, was an erw or acre; and he quotes the name for a similar strip in the German open field: this was morgen—a clearer indication still that the day’s ploughing ended at noon.

  As already mentioned three-quarters of an acre was the usual ploughing task for a day in the heavy-land districts of Suffolk; but in the light-land districts an acre a day was the rule. It was so at Morston Hall, an 800 acre farm near Trimley: Newton Pratt and his present head horseman, Jack Lancaster, used six or seven plough-teams of two horses, drawing single-furrow ploughs, and two teams of three horses, harnessed abreast, for the double-furrow ploughs. Incidentally, at this light-land farm, the men who worked the double-furrow ploughs earned a shilling a week extra to compensate them for having to work the extra horse. If at first sight it appears that an acre is not much land for a man and a team of horses to plough in a day, one fact may help to correct the view-point: if they were turning a nine-inch furrow—mostly commonly used in this county—the horses and the ploughman would have walked eleven miles by the time they had completed their stint; and walking, both for the horseman and his charges, was by no means the most arduous part of the business.

  But ploughing was of necessity not continuous throughout the time they were in the field. The horses had a ‘breather’ every hour or so; and during that time the men were able to walk along the headland to have a chat and inspect one another’s work, or to observe the trivial but absorbing happenings of the countryside—the movement of the birds and small animals about the field. One interesting fact may be mentioned before leaving this: Charles Bugg has related how nervous plough-horses became, when they heard the baying of the hounds in a hunt. The horses frequently became distressed even before the horsemen could hear
the hounds; and it was difficult then to work them. The old farmer knew of a ploughman who worked a horse that was particularly affected by the sounds—or the scent—of a hunt. To soothe him the ploughman used to take off his coat, spread it on the ground and get the horse to lie on it until the hunt had gone out of the immediate neighbourhood. Confirmation of this comes from Essex12 where an old horseman was able—much to the amazement of his fellows—to divine from the behaviour of one of his horses that the hounds were meeting in the neighbourhood on a particular morning.

  As soon as the teams had returned to the stable and had been uncollared, the baiters gave the horses a handful or two of stover as a prelude to their main meal of the day; and then they went home to have their own dinner. They returned at 3.30 and for the rest of the afternoon until they finished at 5.30 they were busy baiting the horses and taking off the mud and dust of the day. Arthur Young has given an account of what happened to the horses; and although he was writing at the end of the eighteenth century the account describes accurately the practice that was generally retained in Suffolk until nine or ten years ago and which is still followed on the few farms where horses are worked in any number:13

  ‘In the east district, in winter, horses are never permitted to remain in the stable at night; but about eight o’clock are turned out into a yard, well littered with straw, and plenty of good sweet oat or barley straw to eat but never clover or hay. By this treatment, a horse is never swelled in his legs, or seldom has any ailment about him. Horses in this county are as good as any in England and are kept in fine condition. A horse turned out every night will hold his work several years longer than one confined in a stable.’