The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  One or two instances of the above-mentioned continuity have already been quoted: another is concealed in the term summer-land3 which occurs in Arthur Biddell’s 1824 crop memorandum.4 A summer-land is a fallow; and although the Norfolk four-course system, in the main, did away with the necessity of leaving land bare for a period in order that it could recover, this rotation of crops did not abolish the clean (dead or naked) fallow entirely. As Arthur Young noted at the transition time, at the end of the eighteenth century: ‘There is no question of the merit of fallowing, when compared with bad courses of crops. If the husbandry is not correct in this respect, the fallowist will certainly be a much better farmer than his neighbour; but there are courses which will clean the foulest land as well as any summer fallow by means of plants which admit all the tillage of a summer fallow. Cabbages planted before June or July; winter tares admit three months tillage if tillage be wanted; beans, well cultivated, will preserve land clean which has been cleaned by cabbage. And, in any case, two successive hoeing crops are effective in giving positive clean-ness. These observations are not theory, they are practice; and it is high time that mankind should be well persuaded that the right quantity of cattle and sheep cannot be kept on a farm if the fallows of the old system are not made to contribute to their support.’5

  As a vigorous advocate of the new farming, what Arthur Young is saying is that a farmer had better stick to the old method of having a long, clean fallow if he is not sufficiently conversant with the new system of rotating the crops; but he will not farm his land as he should do until he has learned to forgo the practice of occasionally having part of his land quite unproductive. But Arthur Biddell continued to use the old system, alongside the new, at least thirty years after this; and in 1849 the Raynbirds could observe: that in spite of the adoption of the four-course rotation on the heavy land of Suffolk:6 The recurrence, on the average, of a long fallow once in eight years is considered absolutely necessary by the best farmers for the cleaning and amelioration of stiff land by repeated ploughings and pulverizations; and there are a few who consider a clean fallow is necessary every four years.’

  A study of Arthur Biddell’s cropping schedule shows that during the early part of the century this was in fact his practice. He had a clean fallow every four years on some of his fields; and it was only later in the century he followed the new approved course of growing tares, beet or turnips on the land that required resting before a corn crop. On the eleven-acre field the New Lay‚ already mentioned in the memorandum, he had a summer-land or clean fallow every fourth year between 1823 and 1840: but after this he rested the land in the fourth year by growing Swedish turnips, turnips, beetroot, beet, Swedes, white turnips, etc.

  The Raynbirds described the method of preparing a long fallow or long summer-land over a hundred years ago. But William Cobbold of Battisford has recently described how he used this essentially medieval method of clean fallowing, until about twenty years ago, on the heavy land of this area:

  ‘We sowed rye and Italian grass on a field in the spring and left it to stand until the following spring. Then we fed the land with sheep—the lambs that had been born that year had their first feed off this. Then we treated the land with five earths.’

  The word earth as used here gives a clue to the antiquity of the practice. The Rectitudines Singularum Personarum (Services Due from Various Persons),7 a Latin translation of a Saxon manuscript, probably of the tenth century, records that one of the services of a villanus or gebur—an owner of about thirty acres of land—was to plough and sow a gafol-yrth, or three acres of land, for his lord. Yrth8 is the Saxon word for a ploughing and gafol-yrth was a tribute or ‘rent’ ploughing. The word earth has exactly the same meaning of a ploughing when it is used like this, as it often is, in Suffolk even today. Tusser uses the word also:

  ‘Such land as ye breake up for barlie to sowe‚

  two earthes at the least or ye sowe it bestowe.’

  And Cullum of Hawstead says:

  ‘To ear is to plough; so used in the English translation of the Bible and other contemporary writings. Earable, in this lease, is the same as arable: from the Latin.’

  ‘The first earth‚’ as William Cobbold recorded, ‘was the first ploughing. For the second earth you turned back the furrows, ploughed them back until you were as you were before. For the third earth you crossed it: that means you ploughed it across or overwart (overthwart) as we called it: you ploughed at right angles to the first furrows you made. After the third earth you let the land lie for a while. It would be very rough, great old clods of soil and stuff, but the elements would get to work on it and help to pull it down. You then harrowed and rolled it and kept it moving. Most of the old spear-grass would come to the surface after the second ploughing: the harrowings would bring it out for you to burn. At the four’ earth you ploughed it back—turned it so you were as you were once again. Then you came to the five earth—the really skilled part of the whole job—when you stetched up the land for your crop of corn. Winter wheat usually, about November. The first-baiter was the one who did this. He measured the stetch with his nine-foot stetch-pole and he took a stick from the hedge, peeled off its bark so that it stood up white for a guide for his first furrow.

  ‘They don’t seem to take as much care today. There’re still ploughmen and ploughmen of course; but today most on ’em aim to keep in the field, and that’s about all. In the old days it was considered very important that you ploughed every square inch of your work: nowadays it seems to be cut and cover. But at that time they used to teach ’em to plough. It was a hard school, I can tell you: I’ve heard my father tell a story about a lad who was ploughing. The plough came out of the furrow so the lad kicked over the soil with his foot, saying: “Oh, that won’t be seen!” But the farmer who happened to be on the other side of the hedge heard him. He came into the field and said: “Take off your coat, boy.” Then he took his stick and gave the boy two or three cuts across his back: “Now do you put your coat on again: that won’t be seen either!”’

  Although this seems more like a cautionary tale than a true one, it appears that some farmers in the old days were not beyond correcting a learner with stronger means than either word or good example afforded. Nor were fads or foibles regarded:

  ‘Uncle Bill was living in and the farmer went into Stowmarket—this would be between eighty and ninety year ago—to the market; and as he came away he thought he’d take some sprats hoom. His wife cooked the sprats and gave some of them to the men to eat. The next time she see my grandmother she say to har:

  ‘“Your boy William, he fare not to eat the hids of the sprats or the boons. He shan’t hev any agen!”

  ‘“Well, he moight not stop for you to offer him any!”

  ‘Sure enough, Uncle Bill left after that. He went up to London and he settled down up thar comfortable. And in later years he used to say if it warn’t for sprats’ hids and boons he’d still be on the farm down in Silly9 Suffolk.’

  To revert to summer-land for an additional note: Against the field called New Lay, Arthur Biddell wrote in his cropping schedule for 1823: ‘Tares self-sown and made Bastard Summer-land.’ This is referred to in the memorandum made in the following year and already given.10 A bastard summer-land is so called to distinguish from a true summer-land or long fallow. The term is still used, as Robert Sherwood of Blaxhall has stated, although not in connection with a partially clean fallow as Arthur Biddell appears to have used it: ‘A bastard summer-land is one that is broken up before the usual time. As soon as the ley-crop is taken off in June the land is busted-up and a catch-and-grab crop of turnips is sown in July.’ Robert Savage of the same village also recalled: ‘They used to let the land lie falley in the heavy-land parts where it was too heavy to fold sheep. They’d leave a field falley every four year. They’d keep a-turning on it over the whole fore-part of the year to kill all the weeds and grasses; then they’d sow wheat in the autumn. This were under the four-course. But in this light land her
e they didn’t follow the four-course strict. You could get a catch-crop chance-times: if you put your seed in right quick in between, you could get an extra crop.’

  The cultivation of carrots, already referred to as a feature of the light-land districts, extends at least to the time of John Norden, the Tudor topographer, as Arthur Young pointed out. And the method of cultivating beans was until recently similar to that described by Young over 160 years ago; although in his time the beans were either sown broadcast or dibbled.11 ‘Beans have been dibbled in a row on every flag (furrow-slice), by others on every other flag. Dibbling is the best and most effective method of cultivating beans.’ Certainly, dibbling was more effective than the broadcast sowing; but by the middle of the nineteenth century ‘ploughing in’ beans was the general method of planting. A small wooden hopper or container mounted on a wheel about sixteen inches in diameter was fixed behind a plough: as the plough turned the furrow the beans dropped into it. The beans could be regulated by a screw device that varied the width of the aperture at the bottom of the hopper through which they fell into the furrow, thus varying the rate of sowing. Two ploughs usually worked at the sowing of beans—‘one drilling and one covering up’: one plough with the attached hopper opening the furrow and dropping in the seed, the other following behind opening another one, or sometimes two furrows, and at the same time covering up the seed. The interval between the rows of seed was eighteen inches (every other furrow of nine-inch width) or twenty-seven inches (every third furrow). No instance has been recalled of beans being sown in every furrow as they were in Young’s time.

  In the farm where Arthur Chaplin spent most of his working life every other furrow was the rule: ‘But if the land was foul (full of weeds) we drilled every third furrow—though the beans were sown a bit thicker then. One coomb an acre was the average rate of sowing bean-seed; though when I were a lad they couldn’t afford to sow at that rate: they put on only half as much—two bushels an acre.’ (This was the rate in Arthur Young’s time). ‘If you wanted to check up on whether you were sowing at the right rate, you stood with your two feet along the furrow with a space of a yard between them. You counted the beans you could see between your feet. If there were twenty-three or twenty-four you knew you weren’t far wrong and sowing would be coming out at about a coomb an acre. We used the beans to fatten bullocks and we also fed them to the horses. You weren’t a farmer in those days unless you could grow a good crop of beans.’

  William Cobbold always sowed beans in rows twenty-seven inches apart. He drilled using a single (Ransome’s Y.L.) plough and followed with a double (Bantall) plough: ‘As it was all stetch-work, we couldn’t finish with a double plough—not by the standards we had at that time o’ day—so we left a four-furrow baulk and shut up the stetch later with the single plough.’

  A further note12 quoted by Arthur Young, about the cultivation of beans, shows that the three-furrow interval was used specifically for cleaning the land: ‘They should be drilled at thirty inches distance and ploughed between; if any quickens13 are found or remain two or three ploughings in spring for barley will eradicate them.’ This method of ploughin’ ’tween beans was used in Suffolk until recently. The breast of the plough was first removed and the ploughing was done with the share only: a similar method was adopted in cattle-beet cultivation.

  But Arthur Biddell did not find that Young’s recommendation in regard to bean cultivation worked out in practice, as the following entry shows; and it was perhaps one of the reasons why he held so long to the old method of a dead fallow in order to clean his land. The entry is also from the 1824 memorandum in the Work Books: ‘Net House14 Peice: 10 A. Wheat After Potatoes and after Beans. The land after Beans was so foul of Speare Grass that I had it taken up by Forks before the Wheat Sowing at an expence of 15 or 20 shillings p. Acre. (The Potatoes Previous to the Wheat were an amazing Heavy Crop) mucked lightly for Potatoes and Wheat too—not for Beans but after them for Wheat—this yeild to 77 Co. or 7C. 3B. Pr Acre.’

  Before leaving the cultivation of beans two old processes connected with their harvesting are worth recording. The beans were stored in the barn and most of them were threshed by machine; but the beans the farmer kept for seed were ‘knocked out’ with the flail. The flail did not bruise the seed as the machine did, and there was thus a much higher percentage of germination. Rider Haggard wrote at the beginning of the century:15 ‘On a farm belonging to Mr Edgar (near Preston, Suffolk) I noted a man using a flail to thrash out beans in a barn—a very unusual sight now-a-days.’ After the beans had been threshed they were put through a cavings-sieve—a round sieve with a wicker-plaited bottom. It was called a cavings-sieve from its use with the corn: it separated the cavings or bits of straw from the grain. Arthur Chaplin recalled: ‘As you shook it the corn fell through and the cavings or straw-stuff stayed in. You then threw this onto a heap at the side.—It were hard work using a cavings-sieve, shaking it full o’ corn or beans out there on front of you. So we invented a sifting-horse to make it easier. This was a T-shaped frame made of wood and about eighteen inches from the ground: we used to make them on the farm. You sat at one end—the bottom of the T—rested the sieve full of corn or beans on the long arm of the frame; and slid the sieve back’ard and forrard in front on you until the seed fell through. When you wanted to fill your sieve, you rested it on the cross-piece. With beans, naturally, you had a sieve with much wider mesh.’

  A farmer recalls: ‘My owd father was very particular about sifting the beans: he wouldn’t have any half-beans in the seed. They were no use: we sifted them out with the stalks and so on. It took us half a day to sift a coomb of beans on the owd sifting-horse; and you didn’t cop (throw) the beans into the bushel-measure you had ’long side you until they were done properly.’

  Some of the old bean drills are still to be seen lying about in farm sheds and barns: here and there they are still in use. A farmer from the Southend district of Essex, seeing an old drill at the exhibition of old farm-tools at the Royal Show at Norwich (1957) said that he still used one on his farm, as also did one of his neighbours.

  The cultivation of cattle-beet or mangel-wurzels as practised generally until twenty or thirty years ago, and by an occasional farmer until the present time, is another old method it will be of interest to record. Mangels were first cultivated as a farm crop during the latter half of the eighteenth century—that period of enthusiasm for better farming that Arthur Young and Thomas Coke did so much to promote, and which farmers like Arthur Biddell carried on well into the next century. The method of cultivation does not appear to have changed much since Young’s time: certainly it is not very different from that described by the Raynbirds in 1849. William Cobbold’s description summarises the method as practised on most farms in this area:

  ‘If it was a dry season we ploughed up the land directly after harvest and let it stand like that for most of the winter. Then in the spring we ridged the land overwart16—worked it at right angles to the furrows. The first step in ridging was to mark out the land, with a measuring-pole and peeled sticks, into thirty-one inch strips. We then started at the side of the field and drew a furrow: we then came back down the same furrow and threw the land the other way. We then carried on turning furrows to meet one another, thus forming an arch or ridge. You’ll notice that when you are ridging up like this you are ploughing up and down the furrow and not round and round as you do when you’re stetching: in other words you are turning your furrows on to unploughed land. You are not cutting into all the land—that part in the centre of your work hasn’t been touched. But we come to that later. Next the ridges were tommed-up: we went through the furrows with a double-tom or tom-plough—a plough with two breasts—heaping up the ridges still further.

  ‘We then mucked the land. A tumbril full of muck gave six heaps, nine yards apart. When the tumbril was tipped it was not allowed to go right over: it was held by a lock-chain at an angle so the toes17 of the tumbril—the two pieces of wood sticking out at the bac
k—didn’t go right down on to the land and disturb the ridges.

  ‘We made the ridges exactly thirty-one inches apart for this reason: the tumbril wheels were set sixty-two inches apart so when the tumbril of muck went on to the land, the wheels travelled in the outside two of a group of three furrows while the horse walked in the centre one. In this way neither horse-hoof nor wheel disturbed the work. We next spread the muck.

  ‘Then the job was to split the ridges: we opened a furrow down the centre of each ridge, throwing back the soil and covering all the muck. When we split the ridges, as you can see, we were really coming back to the land we had not cut into when we first ridged up. Now the land was ready for a light roll, and after rolling, for the drill. The drill we used was a two-coulter Garrett drill specially kept for the purpose.

  ‘When the beet came up we put the scoop on ’em. The beet-scoop was fitted to the plough-beam; and we went down the rows pulling the ridges down with the scoop so the space between the rows would be level. Then came the time for chopping-out the beet with a six-inch hoe; and after this the women and children singled the plants out. The more soil you got away from the beet at this stage the better it liked it: and as it grew each beet would be soon standing up like a gate-post.

  ‘When the season was wet we couldn’t follow this method just as I’ve described it: we had to wait until the land was dry enough to go on, and then do the best we could. Some farmers used to split the ridges and then give them an extra earth in February; but this was a mistake on heavy land: the land would usually take harm at this time.’

  Charles Bugg of College Farm, Barking (Suffolk) has this year (1958) ridged beet by the old method, using a horse-plough and a two-coulter drill made by Murton Turner of Kenninghall in Norfolk. This is an old style horse-drawn drill that can be set for ridges varying in width up to thirty inches. There are two hoppers—one above each coulter—to hold the seed; and in front of each coulter is a large capstan-shaped roller, made to fit the top of the ridge. In the centre of each of these rollers is a metal sleeve which makes a miniature furrow along which the coulter deposits the seed right in the centre of the ridge. Behind each coulter is a small cylindrical roller which rolls out this small groove or furrow and thus covers the seed deposited in it.