The Horse in the Furrow

by George Ewart Evans

  ‘FIFTY POUNDS REWARD

  The Cramp put in the Mouth

  Whereas Mr William Smith of Helmingham has lately, at a public house in Ipswich, before some respectable persons, made use of many unguarded expressions, as well as very false ones, endeavouring to injure the character of Pells Kersey of Framsden, by telling the company he was a rogue, all which things Mr Smith will be found unable to prove; a reward of 50£ will be paid by Mr James Hayward of St Clement’s parish, Ipswich, to Mr. William Smith, or to any surgeon, or any other person whomsoever, that will procure any medicine, or give any other assistance to Mr Smith, so that the cramp may be removed so far from his mouth, or to give liberty to his tongue, so as to prove any one thing which he has said against the said Pells Kersey, or to prove one dishonest thing ever done by the said Pells Kersey, to any man from the day he was born to the present moment.—I was lately at a Nobleman’s who had the cramp set on one of his legs; to prevent it going into his thigh, a small cord was tied below the knee; but when the cramp is set in the mouth, the cord must be tied below the chin, to prevent the disorder getting to the heart, from whence this cramp first proceeded. An evil heart ought to be guarded against.

  PELLS KERSEY’

  Nov. 23, 1801

  *

  Herman Biddell’s researches took him all over the county of Suffolk and often into the adjoining ones; and the trouble he took to be exact in the registering of every horse included was endless and equalled the highest discipline of academic scholarship. He realised from the start that the stud book would be useless unless it was accurate to the last degree. For in addition to being a record it was also to be a guide to action. This, indeed, was its main purpose: a blue-print for the breed and a guarantee that known horses would breed as near to an agreed type as human judgment and knowledge between them could devise. Once the stud book was completed it would be comparatively easy, for there was little disagreement about the type they were aiming at: they were breeding a horse for agricultural purposes; they were not raising one as an agricultural product; he was primarily for use on the farm, not for sale off the farm as a dray horse to be used in general transport.

  He was also scrupulously accurate in recording any infusion of outside blood; and he did not attempt to conceal—as in the case of Catlin’s Duke 296, one of the most famous of the nineteenth century stallions—his belief that in the best of horses, as in the best of men, purity of breed is only relative. But what he did claim, and the subsequent history of the breed has borne him out, was that the old native stock was strong enough ultimately to absorb any stem that was grafted on to it. Blake’s tribe, for instance, the most vigorous of the importations, flourished widely at the beginning of the last century. Yet, although the new stock was for a time so numerous, they soon began to fall off, and animals descended directly from the old breed again became the prevailing line in the county. It was as though a freshet had suddenly poured into a slow, broad-flowing river, altering its appearance and making it sparkle in the sunlight, but without altering its main course one jot.

  In addition to the value arising out of the completion of its main purpose, Volume One can claim to be an important historical document if only for the glimpses it gives of farming in Suffolk during the middle of the last century. One of these concerns Thomas Crisp, a noted breeder of Suffolks:

  ‘The marvellous stories of his shipments for abroad are amply testified by the porters at the railway station. One day every horse box within call would be telegraphed for to Wickham (Market), for a consignment of Suffolk horses to one of the colonies; the next week a whole menagerie of animals would be sent off to Prussia; and then the pleasant rumour would go forth to the county breeders that Mr Crisp was buying up all the decent two-years-old colts in the county, as some German Baron wanted six of a certain hue. Again, a visitor at Butley would be startled by the sight of a row of wheat stacks at some off-hand occupation, the growth of a year long since forgotten by any miller in the county; and strange tales are told of incredible clips of wool which had seen every shade of variation from 10d. to 2s. 6d. a-pound. Curious grasses of rapid growth and an enormous yield would be raised from seed sent direct from some unknown region in the Wallachian Provinces. Another season, when flock-masters were starving under sunny skies and dewless nights, strange tales would go from market to market telling how the poorest, dryest and most wretched walks on the Tangham farm were knee deep in sheep feed, a luxurious herbage, the very name of which not one in ten had ever heard of as an agricultural product. It is said that it was no uncommon thing for Mr Crisp to have as many as three thousand sheep feeding away from home; flocks that had never seen Butley, nor been within ten miles of it—a branch in the trade none but those of the serenest of tempers and most untiring energy should ever attempt. His losses from ‘dropped’ sheep—death from natural causes and common casualties—amounted to one-a-day, 365 a year; we had this from his own lips. He must have farmed not less than four thousand acres, and what with reapers, haymakers, horse hoes, and well chosen over-lookers few occupations of a hundred acres could present a better face than did the whole of the land under his cultivation. Perhaps no figure in all Suffolk was so familiar to the agricultural community in the county as the late Mr Crisp; no one was better known or more respected, and his sudden death (in 1869) in the hunting field spread a gloom over the whole county, and carried grief into many a household besides those of his own family.’5

  The practice of sending flocks of sheep out from a farm is mentioned in Arthur Biddell’s Day Books where he refers to it as keeping sheep; and there are occasional entries showing how he fed so many sheep at so much a head for a certain period. The custom is also reminiscent of the foldcourse system practised in Norfolk and some parts of Suffolk during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries:6 this system was associated with the sheep-corn husbandry of the light, sandy soils of East Anglia. Sheep were folded on arable land, and thus mucked the soil preparatory to corn crops. It is likely that a practice described by a present-day Trimley farmer is traditional to this light-soiled district of Suffolk: ‘After sheep we ploughed lightly with a Ransome’s three-furrow paring plough—a pair of horses could plough about two acres in a day—and then we sowed oats right into the sheep-muck. We had some of the heaviest crops one could hope to get when we did this.’

  A foldcourse was an area over which a manorial lord could feed his sheep at certain times of the year. It included, as well as his own demesne lands, the strips of certain of his tenants in the open-field, as well as part of the adjoining heathland. The sheep usually fed on the strips from which the corn or hay had been taken, and the tathing or fertilising properties of the flock were considered sufficient payment for the privilege. Most tenants, in fact, paid the lord for this benefit of tathe, though many tenants possessed a ‘cullet right’—the privilege of turning in a fixed number of their own sheep with the manorial flock. Feeding sheep on land from which a crop has been harvested is called shacking: the term is still used in Suffolk today. There were two kinds of shacking: Lammas shack, the feeding of sheep on meadow-land after the hay had been taken; and Michaelmas shack, stubble-feeding after the corn harvest. An old map7 of Bury St Edmunds, now in Moyses Hall in that town, shows that a foldcourse system was once in existence there; and some of the fields are characterised thus: ‘Several Sheep Shackage to Holderness alias East Gate Barn’s Flock; Several Sheep Shackage to Eldo Flock; and Inter-Common Sheep Shackage.’

  Herman Biddell’s description of one of these occasions when sheep were ‘on the move’ is quoted below both for its value as a farming picture and for its portrait of old Boon, the Butley shepherd, and his typically East Anglian reaction to a curious stranger: the story is put into the mouth of Kersey Cooper, the Duke of Grafton’s agent:8

  ‘“First I met a drove of colts—thirty, forty, fifty, I should think—more than I could count. Then came a hundred beasts—cows, lean bullocks, young things; foot sore, tired and hungry as they could be; followed by
the biggest flock of sheep I ever met in a road in my life. They were like the flocks of Abraham. At last came old Boon, leading a pony and cart with half-a-dozen skins and two lame sheep.

  ‘Boon was a tall man—six feet one, and stooped a good deal, or rather leaned forward and plunged along in a slop9 down to his shoes like a man with sore feet on flint stones, and always walked with his eyes on his boots.

  ‘“Well, my good man, and whose, in the name of goodness, are all these things you’ve got here?”

  ‘Boon pulled up, took his eyes off the ground and said very slowly:

  ‘“Well, they belong to my marstar.”

  ‘“But who is your master?”

  ‘“My marstar, sar? Why, the gentleman that own all these couts and ship and things!”

  ‘“Well, where are you going with these ‘ship and things’?”

  ‘“I’m a-going arter some feed my marstar ha’ bowt for ’em.”

  ‘“And where are you going tonight—you can’t lie on the road, can you?”

  ‘“Oh dear, no sar—there’s too many on ’em to lay i’ the rud—I can’t lodge ’em i’ the rud.”

  ‘“Well, well shepherd, as long as they are not going to mine I don’t know that I’ve any business with it—good night.”

  ‘“Good night, sar—but I was just a-going to say pra-ay could you tell me where Mistar Karsay Cooper live some where in these parts? I was to go to him for a night’s lodging.”

  ‘The most abject apology followed, and profuse were the explanations that he “hadn’t the la-est idea who I was a-speaking tu, but you know, sar, my marstar al’ays tell me not to know nothing when anybody ax me about my business. He said he thowt you had a little middar close to the house that ‘ud du nicely’.” And in the “little middar” the mixed multitude lodged, and little was left but the soil when they passed on the next day for another stage.’

  Passages like the above help to make Volume One a classic of its kind. The book, too, is memorable for the language in it, the curious phrases to describe horses and their destination: ‘a good horse—all over a gentleman’, ‘a very catching-looking colt’, ‘he was sold to go into Westmoreland’, ‘Boxer 299 was sold in 1844 to go, as one of the Butley Abbey men informed me, into “the Sheres”, an indefinite region to which Southampton Briton 301 was consigned sometime before.’ ‘Of the true Suffolk breed and a good drawer,’ ‘an out-sized horse and a good mover but had little of the Suffolk character about him.’ Duke 68 was ‘a savage brute—not much used as a sire: sold by Mr Grout, kicked out the end of the box on the railway and was shipped for the Continent to diffuse the cranky temper of his maternal grandsire among the German mares.’ A particular horse was ‘own brother to Catlin’s Duke 296’ Own signifies that the horse had the same dam as well as the same sire. ‘Captain, alias Ripshawe 294: A heavy horse with bent hind legs and a bad temper. Was first at Ipswich (Show) in 1850. The cognomen of Ripshawe comes from the hasty temper and pugilistic disposition which a former governor of the county gaol at Ipswich, of that name, was wont to exhibit when put out of his way.’ ‘He was then in bad condition, lousy, but turned out a good horse; he had an in-and-out shim on his face.’

  At one point in his absorbing reminiscences of horses and horse-breeders, Herman Biddell digressed10 to tell the story of an Essex farmer who was an enthusiastic stock-breeder. He had in his possession a painting by Cuyp, the seventeenth century Dutch landscape artist; but he did not approve of the conformation of one of Cuyp’s cows—‘The brute was deformed—no ribs, no anything—he could not have a cow like that in his dining room’—therefore he got a painter down from Chelsea to paint a straight-backed Hereford over the offending animal.

  But the writer’s finest descriptive powers were naturally reserved for the horses themselves; and some of them, like Catlin’s Duke 296, Biddell’s Major 153 and Garrett’s Cupbearer 3rd 566, figure in the book almost as characters in their own right. To the grooms and leaders, as to the farmers and breeders, horses were their life; and they treated the show horses like monarchs, letting them want for nothing in comfort, food or attention. Like monarchs, too, they had to be treated with respect, as the following story shows: A groom at a well-known Suffolk stud in the Sands was mucking out the stall of one of the show horses; and he called out to him cheerfully: ‘Come over, Buttercup’ (or some such name as that). The farmer happened to be passing at the time. No true Suffolk had ever held up his head under the name of Buttercup. The reaction was immediate: ‘Look, I can’t have you calling my horses fancy names. Do you leave on Friday!’—a decision that was revoked when tempers had cooled off and outraged honour had been appeased.

  The stable kings of the last seventy years have been equally as outstanding as those celebrated in Volume One; and names like Wedgewood 1749, Eclipse 2627, Sudbourne Beau-Brocade 4235, Bawdsey Harvester 3076, Sudbourne Peter 3955, Sudbourne Premier 4963, and Shotley Counterpart 4903, are worthy members of the old dynasty.

  1 The Suffolk Agricultural Association, A Century Review, 1831–1931, by Cordy S. Wolton.

  2 Playford Churchwardens’ Book: Parish Meeting Minutes, April 11th, 1904: ‘Mr. Herman Biddell announced that as the Vicar had decided to have two churchwardens, he should decline to act.’

  3 S.H.S.B., Vol. 1, p. 23.

  4 S.S.B., Vol. 1, p. 245.

  5 S.H.S.B., Vol. 1, p. 633.

  6 The Agricultural History Review, Vol. V, Part 1, 1957.

  7 A Survey of Bury St. Edmunds, 1791.

  8 S.H.S.B., Vol. 1, p. 643.

  9 Suffolk dialect for smock.

  10 S.H.S.B., Vol. 1, p. 625.

  13

  Herman Biddell and the Oral Tradition

  The oral tradition has been much discussed within the past few years; and the importance, especially at this time, of taking account of the lore that has been handed down from one generation to another is becoming more widely recognised. It is certain that no satisfactory history of any country region of the British Isles can be written solely from books, documents and physical evidence in the field; and if the historian ignores the oral tradition in his particular area of study, he is cutting himself off from a vital and valuable source of historical fact—and what is more important—of historical enlightenment and perspective. For there is enough evidence to show that in addition to the surface and popularly accepted culture of the countryside there has always been a much older, submerged culture that has been displaced, or to a large extent driven underground, by the newer one. In many ways it is antithetical and even antagonistic to this historically more recent culture; and it has an inherent toughness that has caused it to persist right up to the revolutionary changes of modern times.

  If we ask why this has been possible, two tentative answers come immediately to mind; and these may help to explain the apparent anachronism of a scale of values, that seem to have had their origin in pre-Christian times, existing alongside a familiarity with some of the latest developments in modern engineering. The first is the split between town and country. There has always been a certain tension between the dwellers in the town and the country dwellers; and it may be argued that in recent years the split has been deepened rather than repaired by the physical spreading of the town into the countryside. The newer culture has always been identified with the town; and in the past some of the ineptitude of town-born and town-operating administrators in their attempts to educate the countryman have only confirmed his instinct to cherish his own culture as closely as circumstances would allow. Again, it cannot be doubted that the more sharply defined class-stratification of most rural English communities has helped to differentiate the two cultures and to keep them more or less rigidly apart. For the rural ‘upper class’ is by definition committed to the newer culture and to its successive development: if it were not its influence would soon begin to wane. To the ordinary countryman, however, the man who is governed, this is an added reason why he should be resistant to the new culture; and if he could be brought to speak—or p
erhaps whisper—his own views on this situation, he would be likely to say: ‘This what you see is theirs: this what is not seen is ours.’

  Folklorists have for many years been aware of the existence of this older rural culture and can point to a large body of primitive customs and usages surviving to the present-day even in some of the ‘advanced’ areas of the British Isles. But the folklore aspect is not the only one: much of the oral tradition is, as one would expect, concerned with agriculture; and the handing down by word of mouth of the findings of a long experience of wrestling with nature and the soil is as old as speech itself. Moreover, many of the craft practices and their secrets were passed from father to son in this way; for apart from the question of literacy both policy and custom demanded that as little as possible should be written down.—This will partly explain why, up to the present century, literacy was never held in high regard in rural areas: it was not economically necessary.—The craft of bard in ancient Britain (the Hebridean story-teller is one of his descendants) is the most notable example: the bardic craft meant, above all, learning by heart an immense unwritten literature of traditional verse, and the bard’s reputation rested primarily upon his accuracy in reciting it. Among other ancient craft brotherhoods dating, it is believed, from Romano-British times,1 trade practices and secrets had no other means of preservation except an accurate learning of the craft-lore by the initiates.