The Pattern Under the Plough

by George Ewart Evans

7 Thomas Hennell, Change in the Farm, London, 1934, p. 89.

  8 Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols, p. 127.

  9 The Compleat Horseman, London, 1711, p. 104.

  10 Agricultural Ecology, London, 1956, p. 123.

  11 Eric Soane, The Seasons of America Past, New York, 1958, passim.

  12 Ibid quotation.

  13 September 1962.

  15

  Harvesting the Crop

  AFTER the crops were sown they were, as we have seen, sometimes ceremonially blessed at Rogationtide. But there was a continuous watching and waiting on the crop while it was growing: weeding – a slow and arduous job up to forty years ago when each thistle or dock was cut with a weed-hook or a spud – hedging, fencing, and ditching so that the crop was protected from stray animals and from the dangers of a water-logged soil. This need to watch and wait on the growing crop, and to take instant decisions, depending on the weather and the condition of the land and the young corn – whether to harrow or roll it and so on or, harder still, whether to do nothing to it at all – has given arable farming its distinctive character; and the difference between the corn and the grass farmer is still noticeable even today. A farmer who is a member of the committee of one of the national farming organizations illustrated this recently in a conversation with the writer: ‘If we are together discussing some plans for a future date, the grass farmers can usually say definitely: “We’ll be there. That date will suit us.” And this is months in advance. But I’ve noticed that the arable farmers are much more cautious. They can only say: “Well, it depends on how we’re fixed: what the weather’s like; and what is the state of the crops.”’

  The seasons, in fact, have always had a rather different significance for the pastoral farmer of the west of Britain and the corn farmer of, say, East Anglia. In the Atlantic climate of the west the seasons are not as well contrasted as they are in the near-continental type of East Anglia with its greater range of temperature and its comparatively low rainfall in summer. But the essential difference – although this stems largely from the differences in the climate – lies in the fact that the pastoral farmer specializes mainly in animals while the arable farmer specializes chiefly in crops. This is to state the obvious; but what perhaps is not as obvious is that spring and autumn are seasons that are not of such great significance to the pastoral farmer as to his arable counterpart. For the grass farmer the year was traditionally and essentially divided into two seasons: the time when he could turn out his animals to graze, and the time when he was compelled to keep them indoors.

  This gave the old Celtic division of the year: winter and summer. The animals were taken out on 1st May and returned to their winter shelter on 31st October – dates which still have their significance as May Day and All Hallows Eve but which were once the most important divisions of the year in the Celtic calendar. These also were the ancient divisions of the year in all parts of Britain before the coming of agriculture, and these festivals were still retained in those areas in which agriculture developed; and the corn festivals proper were later grafted on to them. Thus in East Anglia we still find remnants of the old, pastoral division of the year and the festivals and beliefs connected with it as a sub-soil to die corn-myths which came with arable farming from the Middle East and are essentially the myths of classical Greece and Rome. The two main pre-agricultural festivals were held on these important dates, May and Hallow E’en; and it is significant that they have always been associated with witches whose chief festivals they were. There is strong evidence that the witch cult dates from the period before the coming of agriculture to Britain; and this suggests that it is a survival of the primitive rites whose original purpose was to promote increase in animals.1 The two cross-quarter days, 2nd February and 1st August, were also witch festivals; and it is very likely that originally both these lesser festivals were also connected with animals. For the Christian Candlemas festival was essentially an adaptation of the old Roman festival of Lupercalia which was held in early February in honour of the god Pan, the god of shepherds, who was responsible for protecting sheep from the rapacity of the wolves. In this festival naked youths, representing the god, paraded round the streets slashing passers-by with whips made from the skin of a sacrificed goat; burning torches were also carried; and both these were undoubtedly apotropaic devices, symbols of the actual methods used by shepherds to keep away wild animals. The Lammas festival was also connected with animals – at least in East Anglia. For this was the date when animals – sheep especially – were allowed to graze on the land that had just been cropped for hay. This was a fixed custom and fell at a natural time at the end of the hay-harvest. It was called Lammas Shack in Norfolk to distinguish it from Michaelmas Shack which was the custom allowing the animals to feed on the stubble after the corn-harvest had been taken.2

  Some evidence will be brought forward later to support the suggestion that the witch cult was a survival from the pre-agricultural period and was concerned chiefly with the fertility of animals, as were the rites of all those primitives who depended on their animals to keep them alive. But there is also day-to-day evidence of the regard with which some of these festivals were once held: this is the place they hold in traditional weather rhymes and sayings, the Candlemas rhymes, for instance, like the following:

  If Candlemas Day is bright and fair

  Half the winter’s to come – and more.

  and sayings such as: ‘If we get three frosts before 11th November (All Hallows Eve under the old Julian calendar) we’ll be sure to have a mild winter.’

  To sum up: the particular nature of arable farming in the past, arising out of its main task of the careful and protracted tending of the corn-crop and its ability to regiment a strong labour force at certain definite periods like the corn harvest, has made for a more rigid and hierarchical social structure. It has also helped to condition the folk-life of the region, making for a direct correlation between the old customs and beliefs and the demands of the actual growing and harvesting of corn. To give one example: knowing the ancient belief in the link between plant growth and the phases of the moon we would expect to find numerous aspects of the belief here in East Anglia. We found that this was so. We should also expect to find a rich complex of beliefs relating to the myths of corn growth and abundant examples of the customs connected with its harvesting.

  This again is true; and these beliefs and customs once enlivened and profusely decorated the villages of East Anglia; but it is not proposed to list them here as they have already been described elsewhere.3 Yet it should be added that many of these old customs have lasted up to recent years, and may still be observed where corn is still harvested and carted in the old manner and stored in the stack. Within the last year or two the old fertility practice of decorating the last load of corn with green boughs still went on. The green bough, moreover, was then placed in the stack of corn and remained there until it was threshed, perhaps six months later. ‘It got pressed down,’ one old farm-worker related, ‘like green leaves put inside a book.’

  Harvest customs have also shown a remarkable continuity with regard to their form; and there is no need to search for abstruse reasons for their survival for centuries almost unchanged. They mirror the structure of arable farming which in its reliance on animal power and cheap and easily available human labour remained up to sixty years ago essentially the same since the Romans farmed in Britain. Harvesting under the old economy was a quasi-military operation: disciplined labour had to be brought to bear quickly and efficiently at a time chosen by the weather. It was like an attack to beat an ancient enemy; and for hundreds of years it was organized on these lines. The corn harvest was gathered in by a regiment of workers marshalled under a Lord. As we know from the fourteenth-century Luttrell Psalter, the harvest Lord summoned up his workers in precise army fashion by blowing on his horn. The Lord of the Harvest used exactly the same method down to the early years of this century in south Cambridgeshire; and in Mendlesham, Suffolk, during the sa
me period, a substitute harvest horn – a hollow hemlock stalk – did service to summon up the women and children to bring their elevenses and fourses into the harvest field. The Mendlesham farmer4 who recalled this added: ‘The hemlock was a very tall plant with a grut thick owd stem which we used for a horn. It’s a very rare plant now round here. You hardly see any. It was done away with because it was poisonous to cattle. If a cow ate hemlock, she was finished.’

  Frazer has suggested that the harvest-supper had a sacramental character,5 and that the flesh eaten on this occasion was once regarded as an embodiment of the Corn Spirit that inhered in the green bough just mentioned or in the Maiden or Corn Dolly, a more sophisticated form of the same belief. Whatever the original significance of the meal, the harvest supper or largesse-spending was the most memorable occasion of the year in East Anglia; and the meat – usually beef – was rarely eaten at any other time of the year by the men; not because there was some sort of taboo on it but simply because their wages at that time rarely allowed the enjoyment of any meat other than pork or bacon which usually came from an animal they, or their neighbours, had reared themselves. Under the old pre-1914 economy, workers and small-holders in many Suffolk villages formed little ‘pig groups’ and made arrangements to supply one another with pork. Thus by killing their pigs at pre-arranged times each member of the group would be ensured of meat over an extended period. ‘A quarter of pork’ was usually the amount sold or exchanged; and the custom is illustrated by an entry in a small farmer’s6 account book for 1899: ¼ pork – 18s. 4d. This preponderance of pork in the Suffolk farm-worker’s diet has left its mark in the dialect where a chowpork (chew pork) was an old synonym for a clodhopper or swede-basher – that is, a real country dweller.

  But certainly one of Frazer’s suggestions7 regarding the extraction of money from any strangers who came near the harvest-field gives a deeper meaning to the custom in East Anglia of ‘Hollaing Largesse’. Originally, it is suggested, the stranger was considered an embodiment of the Corn Spirit. This was a dubious role for anyone to have thrust upon him, as we know from those counties where there was a competition in the harvest-field to see who cut the last sheaf of standing corn.8 The reapers stood with their backs towards it, and turning round threw their sickles without properly sighting it. The man whose sickle actually cut the corn was roughly handled because it was considered that the Corn Spirit had migrated from the last sheaf to his person. It is suggested that the rough handling was the vestige of what was once a fertility sacrifice. And though, as far as is known, there was no rough handling in the Largesse Crying as practised in Suffolk, there was indeed a threatening aspect to it; and it appeared that passing strangers would refuse to contribute to the Largesse fund only at their own peril. This is confirmed by an old farm-worker9 from the parish of Framsden: he recalled that whenever a stranger passed the harvest-field all the reapers downed tools and crowded to the hedge and shouted humorously but with half-serious undertones: ‘Largesse or revolution!’ This was extortion under threat, however playfully covered up; and the extraction of money for their harvest-supper from total strangers does suggest that they were acting under the licence of an ancient custom that had been harnessed to a more practical and understandable occasion.

  In Suffolk the largesse-spending usually took place in the long room of the village inn, or sometimes in the Lord’s cottage when tables were set outside for the meal. Afterwards there was singing and dancing – stepping it was often called in East Anglia. Occasionally the jollification took place on the knoll, a small piece of green which many villages seem to have had before the coming of the motor age.10 The name knoll is directly connected with a communal occasion such as this; and the village green was called a knoll either because it was situated – ideally – on an eminence, or because a small mound of earth was raised near its centre as a seat for the fiddler or accordion player who provided the music. Villages on the Welsh border possessed a similar knoll or green, known there as twmpath chwarae or playing hillock.11

  Selling the corn crop was the last activity in the farming year; and this did not altogether escape the application of that primitive form of reasoning that had been applied so liberally to the rest of it. In west Suffolk, it is said, certain farmers once maintained that the corn market could be gauged by the rise and fall of Barton Mere – a stretch of water not far from Bury St Edmunds. A direct sympathetic relation was assumed between the level of water in the mere and the level of corn prices in Bury market. The same principle underlay a method of divination, performed on New Year’s Day, of corn prices for the ensuing year. It was used by a seventeenth-century farmer from north Suffolk:12 ‘Take twelve principall graynes of wheat cut of the strength of the eare, and when the harth of your Chimney is most hot, sweep it cleane. Then make a stranger lay one of these Graynes on the hot hearth: then mark it well. And if it leape a little, the corne shall be exceeding cheape. If it lye still and move not, then the price of corn shall stand, and continue still for that moneth. And thus you shall use your twelve Graynes, the first day of every moneth one after another; and you shall know the rising and falling of Corne in every moneth all the yeere following.’

  1 M. A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, p. 12.

  2 K. J. Allison, Agric. Hist. Review, Vol. V, Part 1, 1957, p. 19.

  3 A.F.C.H., chapts. 11 and 12.

  4 Charles Brundish.

  5 G.B., Part V, Vol. 1, p. 303.

  6 Charles Garrard, Stowupland.

  7 G.B., ibid., pp. 227–9.

  8 F.L.H., p. 104.

  9 Samuel Friend, born 1888.

  10 e.g. Blaxhall and Little Glemham.

  11 Trefor Owen, Welsh Folk Customs, p. 96.

  12 Katherine Doughty, The Betts of Wortham, London, 1912, p. 80.

  16

  Animals on the Farm

  IF OUR thesis is right there should be in this arable farming region not only an abundance of old customs and beliefs relating to the cultivation and harvesting of corn but also a corresponding lack of those concerned with animals. This is true if the writer can judge from his own experience of collecting these beliefs in East Anglia. Compared with the richness of the corn and ploughing customs those relating to animals are meagre. (An exception is the horse; and we should expect this to be so, for the horse was for centuries the chief means of power1 – apart from human power – on the arable farms of the region, and therefore the most important animal on most farms. He remained so even after the coming of steam power to the farm about the middle of last century; it was the motor tractor, within the last twenty years, that displaced him almost entirely.) We have only to compare the rich cattle lore of the traditional pastoral regions of Britain2 – roughly the Celtic countries – to realize that the way the land has been farmed was a powerful determinant of yet another element in the folk-life of the region.

  Nevertheless, there were a number of interesting East Anglian practices relating to cattle; they were similar to practices in other regions and they should be recorded if only because they illustrate the principles that underlie these practices everywhere. The first is the placing of a cow’s afterbirth on a thorn-bush. The same custom was practised with sows and mares. In clearing up after the birth the horseman or stockman took the placenta and threw it over a whitethorn, usually on a remote part of the farm where it remained until it had rotted away. The dynamic of this belief is pure contagious magic. While the placenta was on the thorn-bush there would be an unbreakable link between the animal and the bush; the thorn-bush was the quickset which as its name implies is always abundantly alive. This would ensure that the animal would still remain quick or fertile and would breed again next season; or alternatively, that the offspring of this particular birth would grow into a fine foal or calf, which was only a different application of the same principle.

  Suffolk horsemen of the old school invariably followed this practice; and many stockmen also. One stockman3 said: ‘We allus used to do it, take it away from the nethus
and throw it over a thorn hedge, somewhere out of sight. But then the milk inspectors started to come round. One on ’em saw us a-doing it, and they didn’t like it. So we left off.’ The custom was world-wide, and Frazer lists numerous examples. He also gives instances of the careful disposal of the human afterbirth and the navel-string in order that no harm should come to the mother through a dog or any other animal devouring it.4 This belief was also held in East Anglia; and the writer recalls a Cambridgeshire woman giving a warning about the disposal of the placenta: ‘You got to be very careful to bury it deep enough so that the dogs won’t get hold of it.’ A district nurse in Suffolk has noticed a reluctance, especially in country areas to burn the placenta. Burying is the accepted way of disposing of it, chiefly – she believes – because this has always been the practice, and probably not because many people believe in the continuing link between the mother and the severed part of her. But even in this apparently neutral practice the old principle of contagious magic persists in the suggestion that the best place to bury the placenta is under a grapevine.

  An analogous custom was once practised in Montgomeryshire:5 foul or foot-rot in cattle was cured by a similar form of magic. If a cow had foul and lay down to take the weight off her affected feet, she must be observed as she got up. Then the piece of turf on which she had placed the bad foot must be cut out of the ground and thrown into a thorn hedge. This would ensure that the disease would soon disappear.

  At one time the practice of burying a beast to stay the plague in a herd was widespread in Britain and it survived in East Anglia into this century. Undoubtedly the beast was once buried alive as a sacrifice or propitiation to the powers the farmer had inadvertently offended:6 ‘(They) caused ane hole to be made in Maw Greane; and the cow was put quick in the hole and all the rest of the cattle made thereafter to go over that place, and in that devilische manner by charming they were cured.’ In more recent years the beast was either first killed or buried after it had died from the disease. In both Suffolk and Norfolk it was buried in a gateway so that the other cattle would in their normal route pass over it. This was a fairly common practice on Suffolk farms within living memory; and if a cow slinked7 her calf, the carcase was buried in a gateway as a matter of course, as a precaution against contagious abortion.