The Pattern Under the Plough
Aspects of the Folk-Life of East Anglia
GEORGE EWART EVANS
illustrated by
David Gentleman
To my Mother
To tellen al wold passen eny bible
That o wher is …
CHAUCER
How can a literature of notations have any value?
PROUST
Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge my debt to those groups – chiefly Men’s Fellowships, Women’s Institutes, W.E.A., and Cambridge University Board of Extra Mural Studies – who have discussed with me a great deal of the material of the present book and have occasionally given me new light on some of the topics. More than this, their enthusiasm for the subject has greatly helped me during the labour of collecting and checking. In addition to those mentioned in the text I wish to thank Norman Halkett who gave me so much information and enlightenment, and without whose help one chapter, at least, would not have been written; also H. Audrey Beecham, Christina Hole, Francis Cutting, Anthony Dent, Frederick H. Foster, and George Ordish. I am particularly grateful to Lionel Reynolds for his valuable suggestions and for his reading of the proofs; and I owe a debt to David Thomson for his encouragement. I also thank the editors of The Builder, and New Society, Matthew Evans and all those correspondents who have suggested source material. I wish to make grateful acknowledgment to Professor E. Estyn Evans and Dr R. H. Golde for permission to quote from their writings. Lastly, I am grateful to those – mainly country people of the older generation – who have answered my innumerable questions so readily and have identified themselves with a work to which they have contributed no small part.
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
PART ONE
The House and the Home
1 The House
2 Surface Detail
3 More Detail
4 The Protection of the House
5 Trees, Plants and Principles
6 The Hearth
7 Magic and Disease
8 Cures
9 The Bees and the Family
10 Perambulations
11 The Rough Band
PART TWO
The Farm
12 Magic on the Farm
13 Preparing the Ground
14 Sowing the Seed
15 Harvesting the Crop
16 Animals on the Farm
17 The Smith and the Old Beliefs
18 Hag-Stones and the Evil Eye
19 What was the Mare?
20 Horse-Bones
21 Jading and Drawing a Horse
22 The Milt and the Frog’s Bone
23 North-East Scotland and East Anglia
24 The Horseman’s Note-book
Conclusion
Selected Printed Sources
Index
About the Author
Copyright
Abbreviations
V.G. Virgil, The Georgics
G.B. Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough (Third Edition, 1932–35)
W.G. Robert Graves, The White Goddess (Faber and Faber, 1961)
I.F.W. E. Estyn Evans, Irish Folk Ways
F.L.H. E. M. Leather, The Folklore of Herefordshire
E.O.S. E. and M. A. Radford, Encyclopaedia of Superstitions (edited and revised by Christina Hole, 1961)
H.I.F. George Ewart Evans, The Horse in the Furrow
A.F.C.H. George Ewart Evans, Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay (Second Edition, 1962)
Introduction
IN TWO previous books I attempted to record aspects of the old rural community in a part of East Anglia. The present book is essentially a continuation of these two works with reference here to the whole region. It was suggested in the first two books that since the beginning of this century there has been a revolution in the countryside, due chiefly to the new farming methods and the development of the motor engine both as a means of power on the farm and as a link between the towns and the villages. But this revolution is not confined to a region or country or even to a continent: it is world-wide, and has occurred over precisely the same period–the first sixty or so years of this century. The First World War was the watershed in Britain. The old society, quickly changing even before 1914, emerged radically transformed after the Peace: the former rigid social caste system had been loosened; women had proved their ability to enter into industry, commerce, and the professions on equal footing to men; and the Corn Production Act of 1917 had at least recognized the need for defining a system of fair relations between the farmers and workers in the rural areas. It was not simply that a mode of life had greatly changed but a whole culture that had preserved its continuity from earliest times had now received its quietus, and was swept aside in less than a couple of generations.
A similar revolution has occurred in the rural areas of North America; and an American writer and sociologist, Andrew Lytle, has narrowed it to about the same period as in Britain and he has named the same precipitating cause:1 ‘The last active expression of this Society seemed to fall somewhere between 1880 and 1910. The mechanics of change are obvious to all. The most effective was the automobile since it uprooted the family by destroying its attachment to place.’ The same process has been observed in Africa where the revolution is going on at a tremendous pace.2 Villages or settlements that received their first sight of Europeans in 1905 have already been brought, for good or ill, into the orbit of western civilization; and already their old culture has been almost inundated. The same is happening in the East.
The study, therefore, of a local community at this time has more than local relevance: it should inform and extend the consciousness of the people who live in the district or region, pointing to the richness, variety and depth of their heritage; it should record as far as possible the true lineaments of the old culture that has been so lately swept aside; and it should above all extend their awareness of similar changes and stresses occurring all over the world wherever the traditional and immemorial cultures confront the twentieth century; a century to which science has given those innumerable skills and techniques that make the control of large sectors of our physical environment a reality; and–perhaps most important of all–has given us a confidence that falls short only of the awareness that now for the first time we are called not merely to suffer our own history but to make it. But make it on what? This question immediately points to a sense in which the study of the old, traditional culture is not simply a praiseworthy academic exercise but an essential preliminary to the building of a new order. For in spite of the quick break-up of the old framework, now dismantled almost entirely in most areas of Britain, it did house something permanent: the values, the communal responses that were the flower of its long growth. And without an appreciation of these no attempt to make a new community here in Britain or elsewhere is likely to survive the present century.
But before going on to write further about the old rural community in East Anglia it would be as well to define it more precisely. The last generation of people who came to maturity under the old culture were those who were born about 1885, and not much later than 1895. It is true that people born after this date remember well the old pre-war society; but there is an important difference between these and the preceding generation: they lived their early years in this old society but they were too young to be formed by it. Their adolescence coincided with the Great War; and in many ways they were the first generation of the new age, the generation that escaped taking active part in the War but whose outlook it largely fashioned. The differen
ce between these two generations is nowhere more sharply defined than in their attitudes to the traditional lore which is the main subject of the present study. The older generation had the lore in abundance; it was part of their existence and they had rarely paused to consider it as something separate from themselves. To a large extent it was not a question of believing in it but of living it. The next generation held a much attenuated version of the old culture and its lore. During the last fifteen years I have talked to hundreds of people of both generations about the old society, and I have found this difference emphasized over and over again. But even more striking than the difference in the amount of lore they held was their attitude towards it: the older generation accepted the old lore as part of the air they breathed; the later generation had already grown away from it. They knew much of the lore but they were sceptical, evaluative, and sometimes plainly dismissive; tending to adopt a similar stance to the African who considered that his new bicycle and bowler hat–badges of a specious emancipation–gave him licence to scoff at his own native culture.
The area of study also needs defining. East Anglia is a term loosely used since few people, it appears, agree where its boundaries lie; and while local and county authorities on the fringe of Norfolk and Suffolk vie with one another in opting out of the concept of East Anglia as an administrative region, many in these two counties would exclude everybody else as not qualifying for the Folk of which they are the north and south divisions. But the region is demonstrably a natural unit which was once almost divided from the rest of England and more accessible to the Continent–by way of the North Sea–than to most parts of Britain. The northern and eastern boundaries are the sea; the western boundary was the Fens which were an impassable barrier on that side from the beginning of the historical period, and–except for islands of occupation such as Ely–a sparsely inhabited waste. In the south lies the west–east flowing river, the Stour, and its marshy estuary–the present boundary between Suffolk and Essex; but the historic barrier was further south than the Stour–the heavily forested clay belt which was the natural march between the kingdom of the East Saxons (southern Essex) and the kingdom of East Anglia to the north. And even if the kingdom of East Anglia is one of those historical fictions in which the dark, pre-Norman period seems to abound, there is still evidence that this natural division just outlined was at one time a tight, well defended political or administrative unit. For the only access to the region from the rest of England was along the downlands of drift-covered chalk lying in the south-west. It was along here that a comparatively easy route-way could be made; and it was here that the Icknield Way, travelling north-east from Royston into Norfolk, penetrated the region. Here, too, if East Anglia was to be a self-sufficient unit would we expect it to be defended. The ancient dykes running across these downlands undoubtedly served this purpose; and although no one knows exactly who constructed them we can be certain that it was for this reason they were built; to defend this gateway to the region and to exclude invaders from the south-west. Indeed, one need not be an archaeologist to observe that the defence ditches of both the Fleam Dyke and Devil’s Dyke near Newmarket are on the south-west side of the earthworks. This close definition of East Anglia as a unit is emphasized here because it is important as a basis for the claim that at one period of history the region was allowed to develop on its own and to acquire its own characteristic culture.
But it is likely, however, that two other natural factors have played even a greater part than this isolation in bringing about the distinctive culture of the region. These are the soil and the climate. The whole region has been more than once covered by the sea, and it was during this period that its chalk ‘bed-rock’ was formed. But it has also been submerged during the Ice Age by extensive ice-sheets. On melting, these left a rich mantle of drift material, notably boulder clay interspersed with fragments of chalk; and this chalk gave the clay an excellent texture and composition, ideally suited for the growing of corn. This naturally limed soil together with the comparatively dry summers and hard, winter frosts that helped to break up the heavier soils and give them a good spring tilth have made the region one of the natural corn-growing areas of Britain. The effect of these natural advantages on the history of the region would be a subject in itself: they have made it the cradle of most of the improvements in arable farming during the last two hundred years, and they have been indirectly responsible for the siting here of two of the region’s most profitable industries: farm fertilizers and the making of farm machinery. For it was here in East Anglia that firms like Packard, and Fison; Garrett (of Leiston) and Ransome, Sims and Jefferies received their first impetus.
But more important, though less spectacular than the founding of great modern industries, is the effect of these natural factors on the folk-life of the region. Arable farming, the growing of corn, has given it its distinctive character, and part of the present study will be concerned in bringing out this fact. But here again, one more definition is needed. What is meant by the folk-life of a region? The concept of folk-life is a Scandinavian one.3 Folk here does not carry the derogatory sense it has acquired in Britain, especially in the universities. It is used in a purely referential sense, and means the people of a country or region irrespective of class or creed; and the study of folk-life implies not only a systematic examination of the material culture of a region, but the relating to it of the region’s beliefs, customs, language, myth, and social organization. It is, too–particularly at this time–an examination of how much of the old recently displaced culture is still alive and accessible within the present society. Folk-life implies a holistic approach whose main definition is not in method but in the field of study; and it is for this reason that it is a most fruitful approach to an area such as East Anglia. For what obtains here is a transient folk-life situation. It is no use the investigator–if he is working alone–standing on the dignity of one method or discipline whether it is sociology, history, social anthropology, archaeology or dialect study; nor can he afford to pay too much respect to the convention that each discipline has its local specialist who has the ipsissima verba on his subject. To a worker in the field the dangers of specialization are very much more apparent than its advantages. He has to get what he can and as quickly as he can.
But the proper study of the folk-life of even a small region implies a lifetime’s work. In the present book I have, therefore, selected for study what I consider to be the main foci of the life of the old community: the house and home, and the farm. I am well aware of the omissions. The town in East Anglia, as in other regions, has also been transformed by the revolution of the last sixty years; and its crafts and industries have experienced an equal degree of change as the country ones; so too has its social life. The rich and ancient connection of East Anglia with the sea has also been omitted. Ideally, both these aspects should have been given equal prominence with the others. Yet the selection of the house and the farm was not an arbitrary one. Experience here and elsewhere has shown that for many people the concept of history or even the past is an abstraction with little or no meaning for them. But the history of the development of their own work has absorbing interest: it speaks to their own condition, appeals to them in a segment of life where they can respond. Similarly the evolution of the kind of house they knew as their home, and an account of the home life of their ancestors is the sort of history with which they have no trouble in identifying. The work in East Anglia has been historically arable farming: it has been carried on in this region for well over two thousand years; and it is a tradition that is in the bones of the indigenous population. And work here has a wider significance than is perhaps realized. For one has only to scratch a townsman in East Anglia to find that he is a farmer or a farm-worker under his skin, almost as knowledgeable and interested in the fanning of the land as the cousins he has left in the country.
The folk-life approach, apart from its value in itself, is also able to supplement and illuminate information gained in the more
specialized disciplines. Professor Grahame Clarke has given an outstanding example of this.4 An object found in prehistoric sites was variously misinterpreted by archaeologists as a musical instrument, a machine for making peat-bricks, a model of a boat, and a device for catching pike. Its true function was established only when a Scandinavian, Holger Rasmussen, found similar objects still in use among people of the old culture in eastern and central Europe. The objects were tread-traps–wooden devices for entrapping the foot of wild animals. It is worth noting, too, that the leister or fish-spear which the same author illustrates5 in his book and identifies as of mesolithic origin–first made in bone, then in bronze, and later in iron–is almost identical in form with the fish-dart used until recently in the Cambridgeshire Fens; and probably still used although this form of fishing has now been made illegal. The leister, too, is very similar in design to the eel-pritch, glave, or pilger, which was in common use in East Anglia before the First World War.
As the designs of these material objects–and of many more like the corn-sickle–have lasted since prehistoric times it should not surprise us that some of the ideas and beliefs of this period should have survived also. For beliefs, ideas, and customs are at least as tenacious of their identity as the design of physical objects. This is another aspect of the old culture which I have attempted to bring out in the present book. Moreover, the collecting and recording of many beliefs and customs associated with the old rural community have also been useful in throwing light on various literary references as widely spaced as Virgil, Shakespeare, and Gibbon. This, too, should not surprise us since the culture of which the survivors of the old community are the last carriers, embraces a span of time from the recent past to a period well before the coming of the Romans to Britain; and its continuity up to the present century is so apparent now at this time because it is only now that it is in danger of being broken. But this danger will have its uses if it persuades us to look without delay at the old rural society to which change has given a highlight, and the imminence of its passing a new perspective.
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