The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  This entry can best be explained by reference to the practice carried on in Suffolk until just before the last war. It has already been mentioned in a previous chapter3 but Arthur Chaplin has described it in detail:

  ‘In the respite between haysel and harvest, about the second week in June, we cleaned out the stockyards and made hills or hales4 as we called them in the fields that were due to be mucked. Some of these hills had as many as 200 loads in them; and they were properly made. You chose your spot then you kicked up your load of muck—you took the toe-stick out of the front of the tumbril and it would tip up.

  ‘Then you spreed out the muck to form the bottom of your hill. Then as you tipped more loads the hill began to shape up, and you made a ramp at one end to get on top of it with your tumbril; and a ramp at the other end to get down. You’d have two, or even three, horses in your tumbril to take it up the ramp as the hill got higher. The hill went down as tight as a road with the tumbrils and the horses going over it; but after it was up about six feet high we squared-up the farther end—the ramp we used to take the tumbril back down. By now the top of the hill was wide enough to turn the tumbril after the trace-horse had been unloosed, so you could get back down the first ramp. When we had flattened the top, we squared up the first ramp to finish the hill off. With the hill of muck down tight like this it wouldn’t heat up too much and lose all its goodness—the ammonia and so on wouldn’t go off into the air.’

  The hill was then left until just before the winter ploughing, usually sometime in October: ‘When we loaded the muck to spreed it in the autumn, we backed the tumbril against the hill—setting the cart we used to call it; we took a kench,5 a section of the hill, and worked down to the bottom—from one end. Then you bottomed up or cleaned the surface and took out another kench. We carted the muck into the field and put it down in heaps at definite intervals—seven yards from heap to heap and nine yards from row to row. There were seven heaps to a load and ten loads to an acre, the usual amount for corn. We usually worked three fellers (fillers) to a hill; and the three of us were expected to fill sixty loads a day. Twenty loads was a man’s standard; and as soon as he had finished his standard he could stable his horses and go back home. We could get done quicker if only two of us were working: there wasn’t so much waiting about as with three—you didn’t have to wait to set your cart.

  ‘We usually took the job—did it on piece-work—at two shillings an acre. You could do an acre in a day comfortably. If you managed a bit over you might earn 2s. 3d. But you wouldn’t try to earn half-a-crown otherwise the farmer would say that he was setting the rate too high! The amount of muck for each field was fixed: ten loads an acre for corn, fifteen if the land was very poor, and up to twenty for beans. If we spreed fifteen loads we got three bob an acre.’

  Arthur Biddell refers to these hills in other parts of his diaries as compost-hills; and it was the old theory that muck so composted was better for the land than if it had been carted direct from the stockyards and spread on the fields. Tusser refers to it as compas and a verse from his August Husbandry shows that the making of muck-hills was a common practice in the sixteenth century:

  Or ever thou ride with thy servantes compound

  to carry thy muck-hilles on thy barley ground:

  One aker wel compost is worth akers three

  at harvest thy barne shall declare it to thee.

  But the most interesting fact to come out of this verse is from first line. ‘With thy servantes compound’ reveals that muck-carting or compassing was taken-work—taken as piece-work by men in a company—even in Tusser’s time. Arthur Biddell put out the making of innumerable hills to different companies of men down the years he was farming; and Arthur Chaplin has told us that piece-work was the rule for this work right up to recent times. This fact alone illustrates the continuity in these old farming practices, and it is one of the reasons for describing the process in some detail. For we can be fairly certain that in Arthur Chaplin’s description of making a hill and spreeding we are hearing about a process that was old in Biddell’s time and that, in its main outline, had come out of the remote fields and closes of the Middle Ages.

  A study of Arthur Biddell’s Work Books shows a surprising number of jobs done by companies of men who contracted with him to do these jobs on piece-work. Under the old farming system the contract of the year was the one made at harvest-time;6 and this has so overshadowed the other agreements that there seems to be an impression that this was the only taken-work of any size during the year. But Arthur Biddell’s wages-books illustrate that a large proportion of all work was contracted for; and here are some examples showing that this went on right throughout the farming year:

  The entry for a threshing job, done in January by the same two men and a third to help them, was given in the previous chapter.7

  ‘Feb 9th‚ 1821: Thrashing White Clover began Wednes.,

  Feb. 7th.

  23rd Memo.: began to Thrash on Wednes. Feb. 20th

  Laying down Frame8

  Finished Thrashing Saturday, Mar. 17th

  But most of the months of August and September would naturally be spent in the corn-harvest. Arthur Biddell made a full note each year of the harvest and the salient details of the harvest contract; but the actual contract itself was no doubt entered on a separate sheet which the company of men would witness. None of these full contracts seems to have survived; but details of a harvest contract made later in the century are given elsewhere.9

  A note given by an old farm-worker may help to illuminate the above details. It appears that when a farmer and his men discussed a job that he had decided to have done by a company there was a more-or-less set formula for the actual proposal. After details had been gone into, the farmer finally said: ‘Well, I’ll put the job out to you.’ The worker, acting either for himself or the company agreed upon, responded: ‘I’ll take it.’ It was natural that the men should discuss the agreements among themselves afterwards, comparing the rates and the conditions with those they had received and experienced on previous occasions. If after stating the rate he had contracted for a job a worker capped his account by saying: ‘I took it,’ sometimes his mates, critical of his bargain, chaffed him and retaliated: ‘You took it! You mean it took you!’

  The above treatment of taken-work implies that it was of very early origin and was common in Suffolk farms during the early nineteenth century: oral evidence also suggests that it was so right throughout the century up to recent times. If all this is true, it may appear that any generalisation about farm-wages during the last century in this part of Suffolk is bound to be very provisional; as the money a worker could earn would seem to depend on the generosity or carefulness of the individual farmer. Yet in spite of the frequency of contract work there is evidence to show that most farmers saw to it that their men got no more—and usually no less—than the average wage. This tendency is shown in an entry in the Biddell wages-books. It was made by William Biddell, another of Arthur’s sons, who became member of parliament for West Suffolk:

  ‘1847: Memorandum: The day wages of the men previous to Jan. 1847 were 1s. 6d. per day. They were then increased to 1s. 9d. per day, and so continued until Michaelmas 1847. The Horsemen’s (wages) were proportionally increased. The taken-work was also put out on a much higher scale than commonly, purposely so as the men could earn from 12 to 14s. per week. This was done because of the great rise that took place at this time in the price of Flour and provisions. The price of Flour having in April reached 4s. 1d. per Stone, though the previous Michaelmas it was little if any more than 2s. 0d. per Stone—before and after it fell rapidly so that now the price is only abt. 2s. 0d. per Stone as (?) it was last October.’

  March, 1848. Wm. B.’

  Before leaving this subject it is worthy of note that the method used by Arthur Biddell for paying his company of men for ditching or draining—by so much a rod (5½ yards), quoted on page 121—lasted until recent years, if not up to the present. William Cobbold
was a skilled drainer and this, he related, was the usual method of payment. He won many certificates for proficiency in pipe-draining at the beginning of this century, and has described the work as it was then carried on at Loose Hall, Hitcham:

  ‘Gangs of men—five usually, sometimes more—worked together on the draining. The drains, perforated earthenware pipes, were laid in the land nine yards apart and a yard deep. For laying pipes a yard deep—yard-work, as it was called—we were paid seven shillings a score rod—110 (20 x 5½) yards of pipes laid. A team averaged two score a week and had to work very hard to do that, as they had to dig out the drain, pipe it and fill it in. The ordinary pipes or eyes were two inches in diameter; the mains three inches. We laid the mains at the lowest level of the field and fitted the drains obliquely into them. At first we had to bore holes in the mains to admit the side-drains; but later the farmer hired a brick-kiln at Wattisham and had his own pipes made with holes already made in the mains. For fitting a neck‚ as this join was called, we got threepence extra. No cement was used at the join; little pieces of pipe were fitted into the join to keep it firm and the whole covered with a piece of clay. We dug the ditches with a draining-spade: this had a tapered blade, eighteen inches long for ordinary drains, twenty-two inches for the mains. We laid the pipes in the ditch with an L shaped tool—I used to make them myself: just a wooden handle and a piece of iron bent at right angles fitted into it. The art was to make sure that you dug the bottom of the ditch out level: you could then lay the pipes so accurately that they’d all appear to be one pipe without a single join.’

  Arthur Chaplin has recalled that at Stowupland they were paid five shillings a score-rod for pipe-laying; but the drains there were only thirty inches deep. He also recalled using a tool called a bass spade—with a tapering blade similar to the ordinary draining spade, but with two long pieces taken out of the centre to make the blade lighter and easier to work in clay.

  An entry in the Work Books related to the above demands a note owing to the unusual term contained in it:

  Jan. 22nd, 1829: Isaac Maltster

  39 Rods Delf digging in Luck’s Meadow (8d.) £1 6s. 0d.

  6 Do. at 3d. 1 6

  Delf—sometimes delfin—is a Dutch word probably introduced into English by Vermuyden and his seventeenth century compatriots who reclaimed so much land in East Anglia. It still survives in the Suffolk dialect and it denotes a deep sort of trench or ditch. The town Delf or Delft in Holland was so called from the delf (delve) or ditch—still the name for the chief canal in the town.10

  1 See here p. 110.

  2 See G. E. Fussell, The English Rural Labourer, Batchworth, p. 96.

  3 See here p. 46.

  4 A hale is also a clamp—e.g. a hale of turnips—in the dialect.

  5 Also canch: that part of a hay-stack or heap in cut.

  6 A.F.C.H., p. 85.

  7 See here p. 116.

  8 This probably refers to a rectangular frame used for sifting the clover-seed after the cobs had been threshed. A fine meshed sieve containing the seed was slid backwards and forwards in the frame until the seed fell through, leaving the husks etc. in the sieve.

  9 A.F.C.H.‚ pp. 85–6.

  10 Joseph Wright, The English Dialect Dictionary, London, 1898. A. O. D. Claxton, The Suffolk Dialect of the Twentieth Century, Adlard, Ipswich.

  10

  Methods of Cultivation

  One of the most pervasive and intractable elements—almost as intractable as man himself—that the historian has to handle is time. Everything he studies is part of a development in time; and he is forced to isolate phases of this development before he can properly begin his study. ‘Time must have a stop‚’ is more than a mere catch-phrase protesting at the relentless onward movement of events, it is of necessity the first device in the historian’s technique. He must stop the movement and make arbitrary divisions in time in order to ask his questions. He must assume, for his purpose, that history is not a process and he must immobilise events before he can study them. The trouble begins when the historian’s ‘arrested’ and provisional picture of the past is taken for the reality itself, when it becomes something like a multi-coloured tapestry of events tapering back into time, and is cut into convenient lengths in order to study the design and interpret the posturings of the figures woven into it.

  The study of agricultural history, in many ways, is a good corrective to this tendency to ignore the provisional nature of these isolates in time, a tendency endowing them with a reality they never possessed. For in no part of history is its organic nature more emphasised than that which treats of the way the land has been cultivated: how social organisation, customs, beliefs and usages are closely bound up with the actual methods of cultivation. The old agricultural, village community has always been to a large degree resistant to the pressure of outside change. Changes of dynasties, changes of government, it is true, affected it, sometimes profoundly; and the change in the tenure of land—the replacement of the open-field by the individual enclosed holding—put a great strain on its framework. Yet it preserved its continuity from early times right up to the present century, because in essentials the methods of cultivation had remained the same. From earliest times up to the period studied here, the farmer has relied on draught animals to cultivate his land. Whatever changes have come about have been due in a large degree to the improvement in the efficiency with which he used these animals and harnessed them to a gradually improving machinery: these were the instruments that any change in methods of cultivation relied on; and therefore the amount of change was necessarily limited. But during the last fifty years a new type of machinery altogether has been evolved—the internal combustion engine, that has its own propulsive power and in addition an apparently hidden potential not only to make revolutionary changes in methods of cultivation but also to make the biggest break in continuity that the old rural, agricultural community has yet experienced in its long history.

  Viewed from this standpoint the date 1485 is of comparatively little significance: from a narrowly political standpoint it was the beginning of the end of the Middle Ages; but it can be stated with equal force that, as far as agriculture and the countryside are concerned, the true end of the Middle Ages is not the accession of the Tudors but the introduction of the internal combustion engine. There is obviously more evidence for this statement in some parts of Great Britain than in others. For the regions of countries, as well as countries themselves, appear to be affected by the law of unequal development; and even in a comparatively small area like the British Isles it is possible to find one district, in many aspects of its living, centuries behind another. Recently, for instance, it was stated:1 ‘There were no horses on Fair Isle (between the Orkneys and the Shetlands): it was not until 1951 that the last of the bullocks which drew the plough were superseded by small tractors.’ And while the exceptional nature of this instance would not perhaps strengthen the argument unduly, the evidence here in Suffolk is that the Middle Ages—albeit in vestigial form—has persisted right up to the last two generations who saw the introduction of the internal combustion engine to the farmlands. The agricultural historian or the folklorist working in a rural community in this part of England can put no retrospective limit to his inquiries: his backward view will extend, as far as farming is concerned, at least to the time when the three-field system was the typical background of cultivation; and an inquiry into the beliefs of the rural community and some of the customs that are as closely bound up with the land as the methods of cultivation themselves will take him back much farther still—to the days before Christianity became the dominant religion of these islands.

  But before proceeding to actual cultivation, mention must first be made of an aspect of the social organisation of some Suffolk villages that has brought out comments such as this: ‘Such-and-such a village is feudal;’ and this was said of at least one village until as recently as ten years ago. ‘What the lord-of-the-manor said, was absolute law; and if you dared to ques
tion it you were out—on your way, and in most cases not knowing where that way would take you.’ Although feudal in this sense was used loosely for undue dependence upon the whim of one powerful person, the temper of the governors in a number of Suffolk villages, and—it must be said—the attitude of the governed themselves, were little different from those which obtained under absolute serfdom. In the ‘closed village’, until quite recent years adscripti glebae (or adscripti casellis‚ which amounts to the same thing) was a true description of the status of most of the villagers: they were tied to the land and the cottages and were at the mercy of the squire; and if they criticised him in any way they did not stay in their cottages longer than it took to get the machinery of ejection working. That the lord or squire in most cases exercised a benevolent regard for their tenants did in no way alter the fact that this precarious status was indeed feudal. The attitude of some of the governing class about a hundred years ago can be illustrated by a story2 about the wife of the squire of the village of Playford. An old servant ‘who would have gone through fire and water to serve her mistress’ asked her for a holiday. She got the peremptory answer: ‘Holiday? Why you had two days last year!’ And this lady was the wife of Thomas Clarkson, the abolitionist, who devoted the greater part of his life to the emancipation of the negro slaves. The observation of a man of sixty-five about the social life of the Suffolk village at the first part of this century shows that this attitude died very hard indeed: ‘At that time o’ day you had no peak to your cap, like as not: it were all wore up a-touching on it to the gentry.’