The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  Two or three instances have already been given of the great respect accorded to the land, under the old system of farming, after it had been got ready for the crop. Nothing must travel on the stetch once it had been prepared; and after the crop was sown the seed-bed was considered almost sacred—to be disturbed by neither hoof nor wheel. The plain reason for this, especially on heavy land, was the danger of hard pan: as a vehicle or horse went over a prepared seed-bed the hoofs and the wheels put down the land and formed a hard pan17, a layer of hard mud that the seedling would scarcely penetrate. Therefore horse and wheel were so managed as to travel invariably in the furrows between the stetches or the ridges. In no process is this care better demonstrated than in the old farmers’ method of drilling. In drilling the twelve-furrow (nine feet) stetch, for instance, neither horse nor wheel touched the actual seed-bed. If a whole or nine-foot drill was used, six horses drew the implement. The horses were harnessed at length, three in each furrow; that is, each horse walked behind the other, three each side of the stetch. Six horses drawing a nine-foot drill for sowing wheat on heavy land was usual in the Raynbirds’ time. But four horses were the number with the smaller drills and for drilling spring corn, when the coulters were set to bite into the land not quite as deeply as they did when wheat was sown. But even at that time the half-stetch drill was being more generally used for twelve-furrow work than was the whole drill, probably because the draught was lighter and the drill could be used with two horses.

  The principal makers of the half-stetch drill in Suffolk were the pioneer firm of James Smyth and Son of Peasenhall. Their technical problem in the early years, apart from those problems connected with the actual design of the drill, was to make a drill robust enough to stand up to stetch-work. As one of their catalogues (c. 1878) stated: ‘No class of Drill requires more care in its construction than does that used for drilling on land ploughed in stetches. What with deep furrows and general heaviness of soil it is essentially necessary that the Drills should be not only well and strongly made but also of good seasoned material.’ The firm may be said to have succeeded in its object, for there is at least one Smyth drill—made about 1850—that is still in use after more than a century’s continual handling.

  The half-stetch drill, as the name implies, drilled only half the stetch at a time, thus reducing the draught considerably. Two horses were used to draw this drill—a filler and a trace-horse. On very heavy land three horses were sometimes needed. Whatever number was used the horses were harnessed at length and walked in one furrow. To enable them to do this the shafts of the drill were set on the quarter—that is, they fitted on one side of the drill frame; at the other end of the drill was a shackle and to this a chain was attached and coupled at the other end to the trace horse, thus ensuring that the drill moved forward in a straight line. The frame was fitted with a sliding or false axle that could be extended beyond the width of the drill. In twelve-furrow work this axle was extended to the full nine feet, allowing both wheels of the drill to run in the furrows.

  The half-stetch drill was a hind-swing steerage drill: two handles were fitted behind, and the man operating the drill used these for setting the coulters transversely, when completing the second half of the stetch, to ensure that all the rows of corn were sown at uniform intervals. Arthur Chaplin has supplied a note about the half-stetch drill: ‘The drill operator walked behind and by pressing on the two handles he kept the coulters in the land. We often hung pieces of old iron on these steerage handles to give them extra weight. We drilled fourteen rows in the twelve-furrow stetch when we were drilling barley and thirteen when we drilled wheat. As there were seven coulters to the drill, with wheat we had to block one of the coulters when we drilled one half of the stetch. Our rule was: Up six and down seven. We blocked a coulter when we went up one side of the stetch and there were only six working; on the way down the second half of the stetch we let the blocked coulter run. Some of us used to call the half-stetch drill “the owd block-drill”. We were paid a penny an acre extra for drilling, and you were expected to drill ten acres a day. You went on until you’d done your ten acres, too. Sometimes I’ve seen the horses shivering and their chains (traces) shaking with tiredness but they had to go on until the ten acres were finished. Our rate of sowing was two bushels18 of wheat to an acre and ten pecks of barley.

  ‘When the corn came up and if we found that we’d had a block in drill that we didn’t know about (showing by a bare patch in the growing corn) we’d lose the penny for that acre.’

  Mistakes in drilling figure in the folklore of the Middleton district of North East Suffolk. There is a superstition in that parish that if a worker misses part of his stetch in drilling and a tell-tale blank shows in the corn, there will soon be a death. Conversely, if—as sometimes happens—part of a stetch is inadvertently drilled twice, there will soon be a birth in the parish.

  On much of the land, however, stetch drills were not used. William Cobbold used a ‘six-and-a-half foot drill’ that was drawn across the furrows and not along them. He describes the preliminaries to the drilling: ‘As we ploughed the field a comb-harrow followed the plough. Next the comb-harrow went overwart the furrows. The two harrowings broke up the land, flattened it out to a certain extent; but it didn’t fill in the furrows altogether: you could see them quite easily as you drilled. We saw to it that the drill went plumb overwart each furrow: both wheels had to cross the furrow at exactly the same time. In this way we were sure that the counters bit into the land at an equal depth for the whole width of the drill.’

  Horse-hoeing was also touched on: ‘When the corn was about two inches high we hoed it with the horse-hoe. This hoe had nine whole hoes and two half-hoes—one half-hoe at each end. The reason for the half-hoe was this: You took your hoe up the ringes19 and as you came back to hoe the piece of land alongside, at one end of the hoe you’d be hoeing between the same two ringes of corn as you’d already done. If there was a full hoe like as not you’d be cutting into the corn and harming it. We called the row between the two runs of the horse-hoe the closen-ringe. You had a closen-ringe, too, when you were drilling overwart: the drill operator had to estimate the interval between the two runs of his drill so it would be the same as the set intervals on the drill itself. Often times the drilling would have been done so accurately and the closen-ringe was so much like the fixed intervals made by the drill that it was a puzzle to pick it out when we came to the horse-hoeing. A man using a horse-hoe had to mind his business and he wanted a good man with him a-leading his horse.’

  It is worth noting that the horse-hoes and rollers used in twelve-furrow work were also fitted with sliding-axles enabling both wheels to travel in the furrows. The twin-rolls on heavy land were often fitted with a smaller, metal-banded, wooden roll something like an elongated barrel. This was called a pup-roll or follower. This last name describes its function: it followed behind the twin-roll accounting for the little strip of land that was left between the two rollers.

  One thing, at least, stands out from the foregoing account of the old farmers’ method of cultivation: this is the necessity of being accurate to the inch; and this accuracy had to be combined with a degree of finish in working the land that would have done justice to the most exacting craftsman in any rural trade—like the carpenter, the wheelwright or the smith. But all these have had the social approbation and esteem that seems to have been denied—as it were, traditionally denied—to the farm-worker. Not so long ago the farm-worker—along with the coal-miner—was the pariah of British labour; and yet both were the very base and buttress of industry in this country. But the farm-worker was never accredited with skill: he was hardly accredited with sense; and it took two wars to induce society to give him even a modicum of the recognition he deserves, and a wage comparable to that of skilled workers in other national industries.

  A townsman going into the country today is impressed by the amount of machinery he sees in a field; and he admits to himself, however grudgingly, that farmin
g must require some skill if it is only the handling of all those intricate-looking machines. But it is probable that the old farm-worker had more real and more differentiated skills than the average worker who today tills the land with machines. Today differentiation is no longer in the worker but in the machine itself. The machine is not an extension of his own skill as the old tools and horse-machines were: he is merely the activator of the machine and to a great degree a ‘passive’ one at that.—So it appears to some of the old school who watch the present-day farm-worker ‘goo a-ripping and a-roaring’ across the field on a tractor. Perhaps the old school see the farm-worker today getting somewhere near the status he deserves; and they are rather bitter that they in their time were persistently denied it. Yet one of them spoke for the farm-workers, old and new, when he said: ‘They talk about a bricklayer and a carpenter and a plumber and so on being skilled men. Good luck to ’em. But the farm-worker is as skilled as any on ’em. It takes years to learn your trade on the farm—the same as anywhere else. To prove it you’ve only got to get some ’un fresh and put him to do the simplest job on the land—you’d have to close the gate on him right quick to keep him in the field.’

  Some methods of cultivation are hinted at in the old gnomic sayings that have been the vehicles for traditional farming lore and practices ever since the time of Hesiod; and a kind of primitive animism in talking of the land is still usual in country districts, no doubt expressing a half-conscious belief that the land is more akin to a living animal than to unquickened matter like a stone or a piece of rock. Poor land is hungry land. Kind land will give good crops, and so will land that is fat; and in the very word yield is the figure of the soil clinging to its concealed riches and only releasing them after the farmer has struggled with it in the sweat of his brow.20

  One saying that contains a piece of old farming lore is quoted by W. A. Peek, a Blaxhall farmer: it refers to the breaking up of new ground:

  To plough rushes is copper;

  To plough heather is silver;

  But to plough bracken is gold.

  Another of his sayings is: Drunk or sober sow wheat in October. He also quotes a rhyme to show that in farming, as in most enterprises, the temper and morale of the business is set by the man at the top:

  Trim tram:

  Such as master,

  Such as man.

  And if a farmer is going to run his place on the philosophy, ‘It’s a poor owd farm thet can’t keep one lazy man on it‚’ his workers are likely to take their tempo from him: the whole business will then gradually slip down-hill and he will soon find himself in the mire.

  Another saying from the heavy land district seems at first sight to be the sort of advice an old crone gives to a young mother nursing her first baby; but it is in fact a piece of sound farming lore: Keep its top clean and its bottom dry. In other words: Keep your land free from weeds and see that it is well drained.

  A frequently quoted mnemonic saying among the old school of farmers was: A man’s wages is equal to the price of a sack (or comb) of corn. Raymond Keer, a Bealings farmer, has given the saying its full significance. The wages before the First World War were:

  The worker had the equivalent of a sack Per Week

  (a comb or 12 stones) of oats: 12s. 0d.

  The horseman had the equivalent of a sack

  (a comb or 14 stones) of barley: 14s. 0d.

  The head-horseman or foreman had the equivalent of a sack (a comb or 18 stones) of wheat: 18s. 0d.

  It is sometimes said of a farmer:

  He is getting on a bit queer in a place where the bottom is too near the top.

  A note from Arthur Young can again enlighten us on this:21 ‘By bottom is not meant an unstirred sterile subsoil, but the lower portion of that surface which has been stirred by the plough.’ The philosophy of the hard-fisted small farmer is contained in the following:

  I don’t spend threepence until I can see fourpence back.

  If I get a shilling I keep it: if I see a sovereign I go after it.

  Any man’s my friend if I can make a shilling out of him.

  Don’t you fry him for a fule, dew (if you do) yew’ll waste your fat.

  I’ve got a saying of my own: If I say to myself: ‘The man’s a fule’

  I know it’s I’m the fule for thinking so.

  This view-point is also expressed in the cautionary saying that is held up as an awful judgment on the captious: ‘The owd fule! He backed his hoss into the ditch hid fust.’

  The man who does not love a horse cannot love a woman.

  Multiply the number of the loads by three: This cryptic saying is a mnemonic used by an old farm foreman: ‘Supposing the farmer wanted all the corn from a field put into one stack, and he estimated it would come to fifteen loads. To find out the size of your stack your sum was: 15 × 3; and that would give you the area of your stack bottom—45 square yards. That meant your stack would be 9 yards by 5. If you had twenty loads to put in a stack, your sum would be 20 × 3, giving 60 square yards. Now you could have a stack with either of two measurements: 10 × 6 or 12 × 5. You chose which size stack you’d have according to the state of the corn. If the corn was a bit on the damp side when it was carted, you’d have a stack of five yards width. This was the minimum: it wouldn’t do to have a stack under this measurement as it wouldn’t be safe.’

  I could do everything on a farm bar make eggs: an old farm-worker boasting of his versatility.

  If you lay an egg, though it be a gowd ’un, don’t caackle.

  Here are three old farming rhymes from north Suffolk:

  Dry March, wet May:

  Plenty of corn, plenty of hay.

  Wet March, dry May:

  Little corn, little hay.

  By St Valentine’s day:

  Half your beet, and half your hay.

  (By the 14th February you should have used half your winter stock of cattle-beet—mangel-wurzels—and half your hay.)

  February waan:

  Sow peas and baan.

  (When the February moon begins to wane sow your peas and beans.)

  And the last saying was both advice and a test of skill under the old farming:

  Farm in front of your rubbish.

  ‘A good farmer sowed his seed so he could take his crop of corn before the rubbish (the weeds) came on. You had to be a good farmer to do that—a good practical farmer. And you wouldn’t get the knowledge out of a book. There was no short cut: farming was an art and few men had it unless they’d come by it the hard way. Out of the gentlemen who came into farming at that time (before mechanisation etc.) only about one in twenty could make it go: the others had to have a skilled man to manage the farm for ’em. But the skill has gone out of farming now. Today, if a man takes over a farm and gets into a muddle, he has the fertilisers, the sprays and the weedkillers—the whole lot—to get him out of it.’

  1 Seaton Gordon, The Times, 10th May, 1958.

  2 Herman Biddell, Thomas Clarkson and Playford Hall, p. 53.

  3 summerling in the dialect.

  4 See here p. 105.

  5 G.V.A.C.S., p. 49.

  6 A.O.S., p.9.

  7 Quoted by Seebohm, E.V.C., p. 129.

  8 yrth: O.E. erian—to ear or plough: Lat.: arare; Welsh: aredig.

  9 From O.E. Saelig—happy, or perhaps holy, referring to the number of religious establishments once in the country.

  10 See here p. 105.

  11 G.V.A.C.S., p. 78.

  12 G.V.A.C.S., p. 33.

  13 Variously called, quitch, couch, twitch or spear grass; but a bane to farmers and gardeners under whatever name.

  14 Usually Nettus in Suffolk: the neat- or cow-house.

  15 Rural England (2 Vols.) 2, Longmans Green, 1902.

  16 Virgil’s in obliquum: see Georgics, 1. 97.

  17 A toe-stick held the body of the tumbril to the shafts. A lock-chain was also used on a wagon with a slade or shoe that was placed under one wheel as the wagon went down-hill.

  1
7 This dialect phrase was taken to the U.S.A. by early English settlers. It is still used by American farmers. See Deeraff and Haystead, The Business of Farming‚ University of Oklahoma Press, 1948.

  18 cf. E.V.C.‚ p. 157, A tenant who held land in villenage in the manor of Tidenham (Gloucester) during the reign of Edward 1.—1306—had to do certain precariae (bene- or boon-works—work done for the lord of the manor). One of these was sowing corn: ‘He made 1 precaria called “cherched” and he ploughed and harrowed a half-acre for corn, and sowed it with 1 bushel of corn from his own seed.’ Two bushels an acre was, therefore, a truly traditional rate of sowing.

  19 Rows of corn.

  20 cf. Virgil’s Georgics: infelix tellus; ager ille malus; and occultas vires terrae.

  21 G.V.A.C.S., p. 79.

  Part Three

  THE HORSE

  11

  Historical Sketch of the Suffolk Horse

  The heavy- or farm-horse in Suffolk is primarily the horse of the Suffolk breed that has evolved in the county of its name. Since earliest times provinces or areas of certain countries have been well known for their breeding of horses: Epirus and Mycenae in classical times, and Central Arabia and Libya even before this. It is likely that qualities of soil, grass and climate combined to make a given area suitable in the first place; and that later, tradition and acquired skill in the breeding, rearing and feeding of horses tended to perpetuate the initial advantage. For instance, the Bedouin tribes living in the Nejd district of Central Arabia—an area which is elevated and mountainous and possessed of water running off lime-stone and thus suitable for the formation of bone—were in the right place to breed horses; and down the centuries, when horses and their pedigrees were handed from father to son as their most precious possessions, the advantage was consciously exploited.