I again thank you, my kind Friend—you have just to deliver a handsome Message to the Ladies you spoke to and say that the salary we have been giving to our assistant friends is not equal to what Miss A. will probably obtain elsewhere. I am, my Dear Friend, faithfully yours,
Arthur Biddell.’
It is interesting to compare Arthur Biddell’s attitude—implicit in this letter—to the scale and manner of housekeeping best suited to a farmer and his wife, with some observations on the farmers of Suffolk made at the other end of the century when agriculture was in the middle of another, like depression. Royal Commissions follow depressions like a pack of none too lively hounds stalking a destructive, smelly but elusive old dog-fox; and the following excerpts are taken from the report of the 1895 Royal Commission already referred to. A wave of Scottish farmers, attracted by the prospect of a better price for milk and by the low rents of farms that the natives themselves were loath to take on owing to the unpromising state of the times, had moved south into East Anglia five or six years before the Commission sat. One of the Scots who held a 300 acre farm in Suffolk reported to the Assistant Commissioner: ‘All the Scotch farmers, their wives and their daughters work hard. The Suffolk women do nothing. I cannot understand how the Suffolk farmers pay for servants.’ And the Assistant Commissioner confirmed: ‘They (the Scots) and their families work immensely hard and live hard. The Scotch women certainly undertake work which no Suffolk woman would dream of doing. The latter would think it socially beneath them, and farther that the work was too arduous and not suitable for them. Even in the North of England, where the wives and daughters of small farmers work very hard at cheese- and butter-making, feeding the calves and sometimes milking, I have never seen them mucking out sheds and pig-styes as I am informed that some of the Scotch farmers’ wives and daughters do in Suffolk.’
Many of the Scots had undoubtedly been accustomed to ‘family’ or subsistence farming; and while their activities in home and cowshed were evidence of an uncorrupted native industry, the comparison with the Suffolk wives of the time was perhaps a little harsh. For the Scottish wives when they first came into Suffolk were merely continuing to act in a way that had the sanction of the community they had just left; but the grandmothers of the Suffolk wives had long before this fallen victims to the fashion that Arthur Biddell at first attempted to resist. This was the fashion satirised by many writers in the early nineteenth century and given its well-known pithy expression in some verses written in 1843 and quoted by G. M. Trevelyan:5
OLD STYLE
Man, to the plough;
Wife, to the cow;
Girl, to the yarn;
Boy, to the barn,
And your rent will be netted.
NEW STYLE
Man, Tally Ho;
Miss, piano;
Wife, silk and satin;
Boy, Greek and Latin,
And you’ll all be Gazetted.
But even at the very beginning of Arthur Biddell’s career farming in Suffolk had long moved away from the subsistence level of an earlier period. The high prices the farmers obtained for their produce during the Napoleonic Wars (the average price of wheat for 1812 was 126s. 6d. a quarter) had set up many of the East Anglian farmers; and though prices went down sharply even before the end of the war the expenses of a visit to London, made by Arthur Biddell on January 12th, 1816, a few months after Napoleon’s defeat, show that he was not yet affected by this downward trend (wheat was 78s. 6d. in 1816). His purchases also show that his interests were far wider than the average working farmer, most of whose energies were absorbed in cultivating his land.
An old mail and stage-coach time-table (Cary’s New Itinerary, 1815) helps to illumine Arthur Biddell’s journey. The itinerary or route from Ipswich to London is not very different from that followed by the railway: Copdock, Bentley, Stratford St Mary, Colchester, Marks Tey, Witham, Chelmsford, Shenfield, Romford, Ilford, Stratford; and most of the inns that were the London termini for the East Anglian coaches were not far from the present railway terminus at Liverpool Street. Two or three of these inns were actually in Bishops-gate.
Without a doubt there were then many places along this route where Arthur Biddell felt much safer, with £100 or so in his pocket or under the seat, knowing the hired guard was sitting alongside the coachman. One wonders whether it was this fear of attack that prompted him to take none of his money in gold. Or were gold sovereigns not available at that time owing to a post-war inflation? He had a further reason for the extra guard if he travelled on the night Mail. This coach, The Royal Mail plying between London and Yarmouth, began its return journey from The Duke’s Head, Yarmouth at 2 p.m. (Dep. 2 aft.): it called at Ipswich, leaving The Bear and Crown6 (now ‘The Oriental Cafe’) at 9.30 p.m. and arriving at The Saracens Head, in Aldgate Street at 8 o’clock the next morning. The Post Coach, the fastest coach of the day, left The Golden Lion on Cornhill, Ipswich, in the morning (Dep. 7 and 8 morn.) and arrived at ½ past 5 aft. Yet another coach had its headquarters at The Bull Inn, Bishopsgate; and as Arthur Biddell put up at The Bull he may well have used the term Mail loosely and actually travelled on this coach. But The Bull Inn, Whitechapel was also the starting point for yet another East Anglian coach.
The Kotzebue book, one of Arthur Biddell’s purchases, was written by the elder Kotzebue (August F. F. von), the German dramatist and novelist who had spent much of his life in the Russian civil service: he was assassinated three years later at Mannheim by a student. His son, Otto von Kotzebue, was a navigator who made an attempt to discover the North East Passage (1815–1818) He was also a writer; but the English translation of his adventures did not appear until 1821.
The Biddells must have got together a fair-sized collection of books some of which they lent to their friends: Arthur records the loans in his Day Books:
‘Nov. 1820: Lent Mrs Walford. Manfred—Vol. of Byron & Wolsoncrofts Rights of Women
Jane Blencowe:
Child Harold & Mrs Blencowe Don Juan
G. Ely has Condorcet’
It is amusing to note that the mother went off with Don Juan and not the daughter. Byron appears to have been the Biddells’ favourite poet: in fact, they called their first child, Manfred.
When Arthur Biddell took his trip to London he did not seem to have paid much regard to the impending ‘recession’ in agriculture; yet within the next two years he began to be a little anxious. Here is his analysis of his accounts for one year with a revealing note at the end:
Memorandum of Expences between Oct. 11, 1818 & Oct. 11, 1819 Collected and Arranged under the following Heads:
The phrase Lost by Farming has a familiar ring; but it was too stark a phrase to describe Arthur Biddell’s real position. It appears from the above that he and his family were getting a fair living from the land, but just at that time the whole capital he had sunk in the farms (the Bransons Land referred to was an off-hand holding) was not giving him the return it would have done if invested elsewhere. But he weathered the storm, though he had much lee-way to make up when in the late ’thirties agriculture began once more to be comparatively prosperous. He had to do without frills, and governesses for his children; yet in many ways he suffered very little compared with farmers in other parts of the country.7 As one writer has pointed out, the men farming the lighter soils of East Anglia, as Arthur Biddell was, were to a large extent insulated against the depression by their progressive and enthusiastic application of the Norfolk four-course system of cropping, and by the general high excellence of their farming.
We have a record of how excellent Arthur Biddell’s farming practices were, both from the testimony of his sons and the impartial evidence of his Day Books and Work Books—farm journals which he kept regularly and scrupulously from the early ’twenties right up to his death.
But before going on to look at the Day Books, the dates at the head of the previous accounts are worth a comment. As most farmers still do, Arthur Biddell made up his accounts from Michaelmas
to Michaelmas. But he was still using the date of the old Michaelmas8—October 11th and not September 29th, as it is today and was officially at the time of his entry. Although the Gregorian Calendar had been introduced into England over sixty years before this (1752) yet he still used the old Julian Calendar known to his forefathers. At this time, too, and later in the century—so family memories tell us—two Christmas festivals were celebrated in Suffolk: the modern one and the old Christmas, occurring twelve days later on January 6th. Such was the tenacious clinging to old usages—a tendency that still survives in Suffolk in spite of the revolutionary changes of the past few years.
1 Herman Biddell, ‘A History and Register of the County Breed of Cart Horses,’ The Suffolk Stud Book, 1880, Vol. I, p. 611.
2 Thomas Clarkson and Playford Hall (MS monograph by Herman Biddell. Deposited at Ipswich Borough Library).
3 J. Allen Ransome, The Implements of Agriculture, pp. 73 and 75.
4 The Biddell Papers, Ipswich Borough Archives.
5 English Social History, Longmans; 1944, p. 472.
6 Leonard P. Thompson, Old Inns of Suffolk, Harrison, Ipswich, 1946.
7 E.F.P.P., p. 348.
8 The old date, October 11th, is still used by many Suffolk farmers.
8
Arthur Biddell’s Day Books
A farmer’s Day Books were his diary of events on the farm—what he sowed, where he sowed, what money he received when he sold his crop, what payments he made when he bought his seed-corn, his oil-cake or had his wagons repaired and his horses shod, and so on. As already indicated by the previous excerpts Arthur Biddell included in his Day Books a detailed account of his personal expenditure; and, what is just as valuable, he included details of the various experiments he carried out in connection with his farming. These diaries were also called field-books because their chief purpose was to preserve a record of cropping: a very important function at a time when the East Anglian farmers kept to the old Norfolk four-course system with the zeal of a religious sect adhering scrupulously to the letter of its creed. For convenience, however, Arthur Biddell made his Schedule of Cropping a supplement to his field books; and it is contained in four large sheets: it listed all the arable fields in Hill Farm, Playford, and the off-hand farm, Bransons, from 1807 until his death, after which the list was kept by one of his sons until the year 1870.
The past tense is here used in discussing field-books because it appears that present-day farmers in the county rarely keep such detailed records of their cropping. It is only farmers of the old school—men brought up under the old system to regard field-books as implements of cultivation almost as important as the seed-drill—who still continue the old practice of detailed recording. One of these is a Blaxhall farmer, Robert Sherwood (born 1885) whose father farmed the next holding to the Biddells’ at Playford—S. A. Sherwood and Herman Biddell, Arthur’s son, were contemporaries and although they were close neighbours they often used to conduct arguments on farming matters through the columns of the local newspaper—Robert Sherwood has kept up the practice of scrupulous recording into an age whose temper it is to live from year to year and to regard the land as something that has a shorter memory than even the people who farm it. The new farmer—many of the old school maintain—no longer relies on his field-books but on his fertilisers; and he expects these faithfully to cover up his mistakes and bolster his short-comings. Cultivation is no longer by rule or by rote but by formula; and the modern fashion is to ignore the living quality of the land and to look upon it merely as a rather complicated chemical whose rhythms can be effectively controlled from the laboratory.
‘The Norfolk four-course has gone by the board today,’ Robert Sherwood said; ‘It’s barley following barley and all manner of things that would make men like my father and Herman Biddell turn in their graves. Farming is not ruled by the same factors today. It’s get what you can.’ An old farm-worker also expressed himself on this, relying more on his instinct than on his ability to give a reasoned statement of the facts: ‘In time they won’t grow as much corn on the land as they’re doing today. Chemicals are not putting back into the land everything the crops are taking out. It’s not recovering like it should. The land will go back. It won’t happen in my time, maybe; but later it will happen.’
To Arthur Biddell, as to many of the farmers of his day, his own farm was his laboratory; and one of the first experiments he conducted was to discover accurately what advantages he could gain by salting his hay and clover. This old practice is still followed today by some farmers in Suffolk, Robert Sherwood among them: ‘If I cart hay that is a little on the rare1 side I get the men to sprinkle a pail or two of salt on the stack—every two loads. It keeps the stack cool and lessens the risk of its catching fire.’ A horseman has also described how they used to salt chaff on the farm where he worked: ‘The salt kept the chaff moist and sweet. After we’d cut the chaff we shot it into a deep bay in the barn and kept a-sowing a little salt on every layer. It kept the chaff fresh. A hundred-weight of salt was enough for a whole stack. But nowadays they don’t even make chaff, let alone salt it: they feed the hay long. Though there wouldn’t be so many stack-fires if they used salt today.’
Arthur Biddell, however, set out to find what exactly in terms of weight he gained by salting his hay or clover. His first experiment was entered under December 1821:
‘Memorandum 37
May 24th Measured of Salted Clover
Stover from the Middle of a stack 34¾ cubit feet which weighed 342 lbs or about 10 lbs a foot—this had been on two sides exposed to the Sun 3 weeks—suppose the next trusses below would have been heavier & those above considerably lighter. On the whole I think the stack wd. weigh 9 lbs to the foot allowing for shaving off.’
‘Some time previous to the above experiment I weighed from the bottom of a Hay Stack near two years old some Hay that weighed abt. 12 lbs to the foot. It had been salted.’
June 25, 1882: on Salted Hay
‘The Meralds (?) Meadow was mown on Saturday, 22nd June, was not strawed—had two showers of rain upon it. On Tuesday, June 25th, the Swathes were turned in the morning and the afternoon. The Hay was weighed off the Meadow containing 2A. 2R. OP. (except where the Hay Stacks stood which part was not measured). The Hay was coarse & from not being Strawn (or Shaked) was irregularly made. Half of it, weighing net 372 Stones or 46½ Cwt, was stacked nearest to the Garden without Salt. The other Half of the Hay was stacked near to the other but nearer to the Gate and Salted with 56 lbs of Common Salt which was added to the 372 Stones of Hay, making this Stack with the Hay weigh altogether 372 Stones with the Salt.’
‘Memo on Hay Salted June 25th, 1822
The Stacks before mentioned were both carried up together and weighed with Scales, about 2 Cwt at a time—and 3 weighings put upon one Stack & then 3 Weighings on the other.’
‘May 14th, 1823: Measured the two little Stacks. The Salted Hay nearest the Gate, circ. 39 ft, 6 ft high, contained 726 Feet Cube; weighed 35 cwt 61 lbs or 5 lb 7½ ozs to the foot.
The unsalted stack 38 ft in circ., 6½ ft high, 741 ft Cube weighed 35 cwt 6 bls or 5 28/100 lbs or 5 lb 4¾ ozs to a foot.
The above Hay was weighed in very warm, dry weather—full sun. The other Experiment some years back was made in Damp weather in the months of Sept. & the Hay had always been shaded & this may account for there having been more difference then than in the experiment above related’.
*
Although the above experiments do not seem to be conclusive, this experience did not stop his zeal for recording and trying out his theories. In the same year as he started the above he made a record of his sowing of wheat. He experimented on one field, dibbling2 part and drilling the rest.
‘Wheat Sowing, 1821:
Finished in Home Barn field Nov. 23rd. The 1st Dibbled Stetch nearest the Gate is of Wheat from Mr Fullers. The next (2nd) Dibbled Stetch of Wheat is from Scotch Wheat or North Country from Ely’s; the third Dibbled Stetch is of North Count
ry Wheat (such as a coomb is left). The 4th Dibbled Stetch is wheat of my own growth. All the rest of the feild is Drilled. The further side with Wheat from the North—such as on the 2nd Dibbled Stetch. About 2 Acres on this side is Drilled with such as 3rd Dibbled Stetch. The Headlands all round the feild is rather mixed.’
The Horse in the Furrow Page 9