The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  At this period there was a healthy spirit among farmers in Suffolk to experiment3 with various strains of corn. Almost at the same time as Arthur Biddell was carrying out the above experiments another farmer of similar turn of mind stumbled across an unusual strain of barley: out of this accident developed one of the most famous barleys of the nineteenth century. The story is quoted in the Report of the 1895 Commission already discussed:

  ‘About the year 1820 John Andrews, a labourer of Mr Edward Dove of Ulverston Hall, Debenham (Suffolk) had been threshing barley; and on his return home at night complained of his feet being uneasy; and on taking off his shoes he discovered in one of them part of a very fine ear of barley—it struck him as being particularly so—and he was careful to have it preserved. He afterwards planted the few grains from it in his garden; and the following year Dr & Mrs Charles Chevallier, coming to Andrews’s dwelling to inspect some repairs going on in the cottage (belonging to the doctor) saw three or four ears of the barley growing. He requested it might be kept for him when ripe. The doctor sowed a small ridge with the produce he thus obtained; and kept it by itself until he grew sufficient to plant an acre; and from this acre the produce was 11½ combs (about the year 1825 or 1826). This was again planted and from the increase thence arising he began to dispose of it; and from that time it has been gradually getting into repute. It is now well-known in most of the corn markets of the kingdom, and also in many parts of the Continent America etc. and is called Chevallier barley.’4

  Arthur Biddell’s observations on his corn crop during another year are worth transcribing for more than one reason:

  ‘On the Crop of Corn Grown in 1824 Memorandum

  Wheat never was so Stout on the Ground. There was generally 2 to three large loads Pr Acre. No Crop that I ever grew yeilded so little corn in proportion to the Straw, and it yeilded best where the land had been worst treated.

  From the New Lay after Tares, the Tares self-sown after Tares on about 6½ Acres, the land worked like Summer-land, and thinly mucked about 15 Loads Pr Acre. This yielded 53 C. 2 Bushels, or nearly 8 C. Pr Acre, contrary to every expectation. The other Part of the Field treated just the same but sown with Barley. The Crop was poor—about 7 or 8 Pr. Acre.

  ‘Alescroft: 5½ Acres is a very high State of Culture after White Clover, fed with Sheep, mucked with Town Muck. The Wheat very Stout, but only yeilded 40.3 or about 7 C. Pr Acre—expected 10.

  In Former Years I had always estimated my Wheat Crop very near its actual quantity. This year I was greatly deceived from its stout appearance.

  The Barley Crop averaged upwards of 12½ C. per Acre, there being 416 C. 3B. from 32½ Acres.’

  This memorandum had somehow got into Arthur Biddell’s Work (or Wages) Book for that year: it was his usual practice to write his notes in the field-books.

  Mention of town-muck in this note is a reminder of the old practice of farmers near big towns undertaking to collect night-soil for use on their land. It appears from a passage in The Autobiography of a Farm Labourer (see p. 44) that the farmer allowed the labourer seven shillings a load for the night-soil he collected from Ipswich. Presumably at that time, owing to the demand, householders and stable-keepers were able to sell their night-soil and stable-manure; and the seven shillings paid to the labourer were not all for his labours but were partly to re-imburse him for the money he had already paid out to obtain his load. It would be satisfactory to record that this practice of collecting town-muck or night-soil in Suffolk towns has already died out; but like many bad customs this shows a greater tenacity to survive than the good ones whose falling away are so often lamented. District or Urban Councils without a comprehensive drainage scheme still have a system of ‘collecting buckets’ in some towns; and as the disposal of the material tends to be costly, throwing a great burden on the rates, some of them gladly get rid of it to any farmer who is willing to use it on his land. Ashes5 were similarly collected for dressing fields; and the scale on which ashes and night-soil were used in Arthur Biddell’s time may be gathered from the Stock Taking of 1820. It is quoted in full since it gives some idea of the type of farming he practised:

  His list of stock shows that Arthur Biddell farmed a mixed farm with a bigger herd of cattle than was later usual in this part of Suffolk; and for a number of years after this his stock-lists were of roughly similar composition. But this may well have been a transition period between the old farming economy and the new bias which later made the area almost completely arable. For in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Suffolk cheese and butter had been famous; and though later they were not much heard of outside the county, some farmers evidently continued to make butter and cheese in very large amounts. But Arthur Biddell had a ready market in the nearby town of Ipswich; and this would be a natural inducement to his carrying on the old methods without changing over entirely to arable farming as most of the Suffolk farmers—including his sons—did later. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the classical period of the Norfolk system, the four-course became the orthodox practice; and this did not leave much room for dairy-farming. As Robert Sherwood commented: ‘Under the old farming of Herman Biddell’s and my father’s time they never kept cows to any extent. If a farmer started to keep a dairy-herd, his friends would shake their heads and say he was going down-hill. Cows were not part of the system. With cows, they said, you took more substance from the land than you put back.’

  The cheap cheese, listed in the stock at 2d. a pound, was undoubtedly the maligned Suffolk Bang, a skimmed milk cheese that got itself a bad reputation for hardness. A later entry in the Day Book for 1829 shows on what scale Arthur Biddell sold butter and cheese in the town:

  Feb. 14th

  Abbot for Butter sent before Michs.—

  18 Firkins £32 14s. 8d.

  Do for Cheese 4120 at 48s. 10 7 6

  before Michs.

  A note underneath this entry is typical of his hard, commonsense in recording even his mistakes in the hope that these will profit him later on:

  Memo:

  ‘Remember that the above is a Lesson not to trust any Grocer with Butter and Cheese to be kept for their use & to allow what they please for it. I lost by the above goods 5£ or 6£ in trusting to Abbot.’

  But Arthur Biddell appears to have learned another lesson before the above: catch-as-catch-can. An entry for January 5th, 1825 reads:

  ‘For the Leg6 Bullock sold to Mrs Newson £6 0s. 0d.

  Of Mrs Newson, change given by mistake to me in Paying, a five Pound note instead of a 1£—This she had evidently taken for a 1£ & she cheated me of 10s. in the Bull Leg above & I am not disposed to tell her of her mistake unless I find she had taken the note for five pounds 4 0 0

  Put to no Account

  The first entry relating to cows may require explanation: the farmer appears to have allowed £9 10s.—the price of one cow—for the amount of food that is left on The Ley or meadow, after it had been cut in September. It was probably a clover-ley; for often in this month, clover was cut and harvested for seed.

  Clarkson, the man Arthur Biddell records as having borrowed some oats, was Thomas Clarkson, the slavery abolitionist who lived at Playford Hall. Herman Biddell described him in a monograph he wrote later in the century: and Jane, Arthur’s wife, dedicated at least one of her poems to the cause of negro emancipation.

  The listing of the stock of flax and hemp gives a clue to an industry which was carried on in the cottages at this time. An entry in the work- or wages-book for the following year (1821) confirms this. It is against a workman called Jno. Garrod, Senr. But it should first be explained that Arthur Biddell had two columns in his wages-book: one debit and the other credit. The debit column records the amount he paid to his workers either in kind or in money; the credit column records the amount the worker earned either in wages or for piece-work. But here is the full entry:

  The very odd arithmetic, ‘say 1s. 6d. to make it even,’ is a very human touch, balancing the dead man’s acc
ount. Yet later in the year when another of his workmen died, owing him much more than the few pence he had crossed off in the above instance, Arthur Biddell felt that it required something more than a brief comment and a stroke of the pen. The debt of £1 19s. 7d.—he had probably let the man have a pig out of his stock—was a large one; and to console himself he took a leaf out of his wife’s book and had recourse to verses. Here again is the full entry:

  Wm. Wright (Smith)

  1820 Dr.

  To Balance from Page 107 in Old Book £1 19s. 7d.

  Memo

  Gristley Death with a Tyrant’s Sway

  Cancelled this Debt, but Nothing did Pay.

  The Spirit of Wright, having no Controul

  Over an Act which seemed so foul,

  Took its flight, from the Body Driven,

  To settle his Earthly Accounts in Heaven.

  (Died the Summer of 1821)

  But to return to flax and hemp: there was a large amount of hemp grown in Suffolk at this period, as Arthur Young notes. The great hemp-growing district extended from Eye to Beccles. Much flax was also grown in the county; and as Robert Reyce noted7 in the seventeenth century part of the process of working the raw material into cloth and cord was carried on in the home: ‘in other parts (of Suffolk) where the meaner sort doe practise spinning of thread linnen’.

  Tusser also advised:

  Good flax and good hemp, to have of her own

  in May a good huswife will see it be sown;

  And afterwards trim it, to serve at a need

  the fimble to spin and the karl for her seed.

  Fimble is the female hemp used—as Arthur Young recorded—for making shirts, sheets, table-linen and huckabacks. Karl is the coarse seed-hemp used for making ropes. The process of preparing flax for spinning involved breaking and scutching8 or pounding. After retting or soaking in water, hemp was broken up into serviceable lengths on a hand-driven hemp-breaking machine9 as one of the steps preliminary to heckling, combing with a hackle until it reached the fluffy condition ready for spinning. Traces of the industry are still left in the county: first of all, as often happens, in the name of an inn—there is at least one Scutchers’ Arms in the county;10 again, though cotton has long ago ousted linen, housewives in out of the way Suffolk villages still refer to their clothes-line as their linen-line, and the prop as the linen-prop. In recent years flax was grown occasionally for the linseed—for instance, at Broad Green Farm, Henley (Suffolk) which was at one time a horse-breeding farm: the linseed was used for feeding the horses.

  The Pigs and Hogs in the list require a note. Although hog is still heard in Suffolk as a generic name for all kinds of pigs, it appears to be used here in its specific sense of a castrated male swine. A brawn is a boar, and the word was used in the dialect until recent years. A cossett is a pig that has been brought up by hand—the pitman, the weakest pig in the litter. In spite of a long search no success was met in finding the significance of hewet. Walter Dunnett (born 1888) who was pig-man for sixty years at Hill Farm, many of these years during the Biddells’ occupation, had not heard of the term.

  The horses on the list are about the number one would expect for a farm of this size. The name Dodman was probably descriptive: dodman (more often hodman or hodmedod) is the dialect for a snail. But Dodman at £12 could not have been very slow as he was by no means the lowest in valuation. This place was reserved for Smiler who seems to have accepted it philosophically. Boney is, naturally, not descriptive, but merely an echo of the late troubles in which ‘Boney the Warrior’ figured largely.

  By 1828 Arthur Biddell’s stock of horses had increased considerably. They were:

  The increase appears mainly to be in riding and trap-horses—a definite indication that Arthur Biddell, unlike many farmers of the period, had not been forced to ‘put down his chaises and his nags’: on the contrary, he had acquired more.

  It has probably been noticed that there were no sheep on the 1820 list of stock. Nine years later, however, Arthur Biddell had moved nearer the ‘four course’ practice of sheep as an essential part of the corn husbandry of this part of East Anglia. He wrote:

  October 11th‚ 1829:

  Wool from last yr. 1085 Fleeces—supposed

  worth 6d. pr lb. 3 lbs. to a fleece £81 7s. 6d.

  about 480 fleeces this yr at 1s. 6d. £36 0 0

  Here, to end, are a few entries—from the same Day Book—relating to horses:

  August 29th, 1821

  For Shoeing Horse at Woodbridge 1 6

  October 20th, 1821

  Mr Mickelborough for 15 sets of whipple-trees £5 17 6

  March 5th, 1822

  Agreed with Mr Haggar to shoe the 9 cart horses at 7s. 6d. each for a year, to be left in good order; & to put them in good shoes. I agreed to pay him for 14 new Shoes although only 3 were off.’

  *

  Arthur Biddell’s interest in the buying and selling of horses remained right to the end of his life. He was an enthusiastic breeder of Suffolks, chiefly of the Shadingfield strain; and four days before his death he bought a mare from his eldest son. This entry—one of the last he made—reads:

  ‘May 21st‚ 1860

  3 yr old Mare of Manfred £30 0s.

  There were only two more entries after this; and these were in a hand that was much less firm than when he had first started his diaries, over forty years before. Then followed an entry in another person’s handwriting, probably that of his son Manfred:

  A Biddell died May 25th, 1860.

  1 rare—not quite made; rare meat is underdone meat (Shorter Oxford Dict.)

  2 A.F.C.H., p. 119.

  3 Arthur Young’s A Course of Experimental Agriculture, London, 1770, probably had a lot to do with this.

  4 From the MS History of Debenham, 1845: now in Debenham Parish Chest: quoted in 1895 Report, p. 14.

  5 cf. Virgil’s Georgics‚ 1. 79:

  Sed tamen alternis facilis labor, arida tantum

  Ne saturare fimo pingui pudeat sola neve

  Effetos cinerem immundum iactare per agros.

  6 Possibly Seg. The Raynbirds wrote (A.O.S., p. 298): ‘Seg—any animal emasculated when fully grown; a bull-seg.’ This animal is also called a stag. When killed its meat was tough; hence the low price.

  7 The Breviary of Suffolk, 1618: With notes by Lord Francis Hervey, Murray (1902), p. 57.

  8 A scutch—a wooden implement for dressing flax or hemp.

  9 Allan Jobson, Household and Country Crafts, Elek, p. 198.

  10 In the village of Long Melford.

  9

  Arthur Biddell’s Work Books

  These wages-books have already been quoted. Apart from an occasional entry that seems to have strayed from the field-books, they contained the lists of jobs allocated to people employed on the farm, and the amount of wages due to them. The Work Books offer us a great deal of information about farming methods at this time; and a comparison of some of these with the practices recalled by the old Suffolk farmers and farm-workers of the present-day show that these methods continued into very recent times.

  Before discussing these, however, it would be useful to comment on the phrase To Surveyor’s Account in the Jno. Garrod entry already quoted.1 The Surveyor was Arthur Biddell’s co-officer in the parish of Playford; and his full title was Surveyor of the Highways. He was sometimes known as a Way-warden or Stone-warden and was appointed by the justices at their special Highway Sessions. Stone-warden is a good description of his main function which was to see that the bad places on the highway were duly filled in with stones. These stones were normally obtained from farmers in the parish: in Playford they were flints picked up from the fields. An early entry from the Day Books explains what happened:

  ‘April 15th, 1815: 7 horses and 2 men carting stone from Mr Cutting’s warren into loads beyond the Church. One horse miss ¼ day. 11 loads. The man that fetched the loads of stone is down to Parish day work.

  Say Recd. for the above work £1 4s. 0d.’
>
  We can assume that Arthur Biddell later claimed this amount from the Surveyor of the Highways. An entry from an early Work Book shows how he was connected with the parish in yet another way:

  This entry shows how the Overseer of the Poor, another parish officer, had arranged with Arthur Biddell to allow three men to thrash in the barn using a flail, in order that their full maintenance and that of their families would not fall to the expense of the parish. For by this time the threshing machine, invented during the latter half of the eighteenth century, was beginning to displace a great deal of farm-labour that had formerly been engaged during the slack winter months in hand-thrashing in the barn. This caused an amount of distress; and in some districts of England the farm-workers’ resentment had turned against the machines, and there had been outbreaks of machine-wrecking. Therefore, by compounding with the Overseer of the Poor to employ three men, who would otherwise be without work if all his corn were thrashed by machine, Arthur Biddell was keeping his workmen in good heart and at the same time helping to keep down the poor-rate—a real concern of his as one of the principal holders of land in the parish.2

  An entry for November 1st, 1821 has:

  ‘Filling and Spreading and unloading a Hill of

  35 Rods on the top of Thistley Feild £2 16s. 3d.’