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1
LOW FARMING TO HIGH
An examination of the place of harvesting in the changing circumstances of nineteenth-century commercial agriculture in southern England between 1840 and 1900 also offers an investigation into the economic and social conditions of the rural population involved; while the extent of change in the traditional practices and customs associated with the harvest can be shown.
The three counties chosen for particular reference were Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire, loosely described as mainly rural counties located south of Caird’s line. These three counties are taken as a broad context for discussion and examination rather than as counties with precise individual circumstances, and no attempt, therefore, has been made to restrict either evidence, discussion or illustration to these counties alone.
The focus on the rural population has been directed to the agricultural workers, definitively and incorrectly described in the nineteenth century as the peasantry or the peasants, indiscriminately as the rural poor but, most accurately, though with unfortunate undertones, as the rural proletariat.
Harvesting in the third quarter of the nineteenth century was on an unprecedented scale; the tools available in the middle of the nineteenth century and those used still later were those of subsistence farming; the rural population primarily engaged in agriculture in the middle of the century was still growing despite emigration and migration to urban areas; at the same time the impact of agricultural depression in the last quarter of the century was most severely felt in the corn-producing counties. The importance of harvesting in the social and economic life of those areas in southern England primarily engaged in arable cultivation between 1840 and 1900 is shown by the fact that a greater number of the rural population were involved in it than ever before or since that period – so evocatively described as ‘The Golden Age’ – between the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846) and the agricultural depression of the 1880s.
The full implication of this situation can best be made explicit by direct reference to specific agricultural circumstances of the particular region under study and to the reasons for changes in the practice of nineteenth-century, mainly commercial farming in a wage economy from those of the previous century’s mainly subsistence farming. Caird writes: ‘Before the discovery of artificial manures the rich clays were almost the only wheat growing lands in the United Kingdom.’1 If, in the period between 1800 and 1840, an increase in corn production in southern England was achieved through the reorganisation of arable farming and the adoption of new methods of cultivation, it did not occur without serious social and economic consequences for the rural populations of the purely agricultural counties.
Enclosures increased land usage, but they drastically curtailed access to land and the common rights of the rural poor; if new crop rotations increased efficiency, they led to a decline in work opportunity in the slack winter months, a situation implicit in the circumstances of larger scale arable farming. While increasing urbanisation provided a growing commercial market urban industrialisation accelerated the decline in rural home industries which had previously provided alternative family employment. In addition, wages were inevitably low in arable districts where the absence of large towns and chances of other occupations kept down the wage rate.2 ‘Low’ farming,3 however, with its reliance on the cultivation of more land through either the enclosing of waste and the breaking of marginal land, or the elimination of fallow in the rotations, neither produced cheap bread grain under the protective clauses of the Corn Laws, nor a buoyant agriculture which might have ameliorated conditions of employment.4 So ‘the detrimental changes in the condition of the labouring classes… which the lapse of years [had] wrought by gradually shutting them out from all personal and direct interest in the produce of the soil and throwing them for subsistence wholly and exclusively upon wages’ continued, while ‘the natural remedy’, the provision of allotments as yet in its infancy provided little alleviation, ‘for the difficulty of procuring land was opposing a continual obstacle’.5
The opinion prevalent amongst the labourers in 1849 was that ‘they could not be worse off anywhere than they were… Both the horse and the slave are fed even when… idle… when a poor wretch is prevented for even half a day by heavy rain, from working, his wages are stopped… his family [consigned] to want for the day.…’6 Somerville earlier in the decade was ‘shocked at the extreme depression [in Buckinghamshire] under which each family, each principle of independence, each feeling of humanity, struggled. Irregular employment, family discomfort, female prostitution, drunkenness, idle habits, gambling, absolute ignorance, and in many cases, starvation almost absolute.…’7
To reverse the growing rural stagnation and distress, it needed the persistent advocacy of high farming and the spur of the repeal of the Corn Laws gradually to have its principles of controlling hedges,8 clearing ditches, land drainage, and the use of organic and inorganic manures adopted. The interest in and concern for improvement in soil management at this period is reflected in the content of the papers read to the Farmers’ Club. Some of the subjects covered were manures (November 1844), surface and draining (January 1845), the advantages of breaking up inferior grasslands (February 1847), the best mode of draining strong clay soils (March 1848), high farming (June 1850), the use of guano (February 1852), the relative value of artificial manures (April 1856), and the management and application of farmyard and artifical manures (February 1857).9 Practical experiments too on the growth of wheat were becoming the vogue,10 an example being those carried out by Dr Voelcker on different top-dressings.11
Now, however, the magnitude of the subsequent expansion created a fresh problem;12 for the hand tools and techniques of harvesting, hitherto very little further developed than those of subsistence farming, were to prove inadequate even with an increasing labour force. Harvesting remained the dominant feature of concern until the turn of the century. In the middle years of the century summer working, especially the harvest with its massive need for hand labour,13 had become the main economic support of the rural family in wage-structured seasonal occupation while the social attitudes and customs surrounding the harvest were rooted in the past of a vanishing society. Any reorganisation was bound to have wide social and economic consequences. A study of harvesting cannot be neglected if there is to be a fuller understanding of Victorian rural life.
Not only did country sounds change when the sickle or the reaping hook or other hand tools gave way to the mechanical reaper and eventually to the reaper-binder; the enclosure movement in the earlier years of the century patterned the land with new confusion of hedge and ditch.14 In turn, as new methods of manuring and soil treatment developed, enabling the growth of wheat outside the traditional rich clay areas, more fallow and pasture gave way to corn production, and the fields took on a new colour in high summer. Previously barn and stackyard had accommodated the yields both of a peasant subsistence and an emergent commercial farming; now the growing magnitude of the harvests, as much due to the increase in the bulk of straw and in grain yields as to increased acreage,15 made it necessary to build serried ranks of hay and corn ricks in the open fields, altering the autumn and winter landscape – brief monuments to the labourers’ toil, substantial evidence of a farmer’s local standing. But these were to be the least of the changes.
NOTES
1J. Caird, ‘High Farming Vindicated and Further Illustrated 1850’, 2nd edn. (1850), Oxford Union Library Pamphlet Collection, vol. 26, p. 17.
2John Percival, ‘Wheat in Great Britain’ (1948), p. 60. Also figures for wheat area in England in 1870: seven eastern counties 621, 621 acres, three north-eastern counties 623, 528 acres, five south-eastern counties including Berkshire 425, 245 acres, seven east-midland counties 406,779. But see graph p. 12 for comparative wheat acreages 1866–80.
3For the arguments in defence of low farming see D. C. Moore, The Corn Laws and High Farming, ‘Econ. Hist. Rev.’, Ser. 2, vol. 18, no. 3 (Dec. 1965), p. 544: ‘high farming could never be a substitute for high price… could not be so widely adopted except by subverting the traditional structure of rural society’. S. Fairlie, The Nineteenth Century Corn Law Reconsidered, ‘Econ. Hist. Rev.’, Ser. 2, vol. 18, no. 3 (Dec. 1965). ‘A situation in which the Corn Laws protected the British farmer against continental post-war glut was giving way to one in which their retention threatened Britain with famine.’
Sources: Agricultural Returns
A Century of Agricultural Statistics 1886–1966 (HMSO 1968)
4Cf. ‘A Century of Agricultural Statistics 1866–1966 (HMSO, 1968), p. 81. Corn returns and prices: wheat 15s 10d per cwt (1820), 15s (1830), 15s 6d (1840), but 9s 5d (1850), 12s 5d (1860), 10s 11d (1870), 10s 4d (1880), 7s 5d (1890), 6s 3d (1900).
5PP 1843 (402) VII, Report from Select Committee on Labouring Poor (Allotment of Land), pp. 203–5.
6Supplement to the ‘Morning Chronicle’, 24 Dec. 1849, p. 6, col. 4. The rural districts: Bucks, Berks, Wilts and Oxon, Letter 3.
7A. Somerville, ‘The Whistler at the Plough’ (Manchester, 1852), p. 17. ‘We as have apples and income to afford flour may have pies and puddings both, but every family – nor the half nor the quarter – have not fruit of their own, and if they had, where be the flour to come from and the sugar.’
8J. B. Spearing, On the Agriculture of Berkshire, Prize Essay, JRASE, vol. 11, p. 3 (1860): ‘timber and corn cannot be grown together to advantage… hedgerows are a great bar to… improvement…’.
9Kevin Fitzgerald, ‘Ahead of Their Time, A Short History of the Farmers’ Club’ (1968), p. 202.
10J. B. Lowe...
