Cultivating, Sowing & Harvesting: A Farm Lad’s Year in East Yorkshire in the Days of Horse Power: 2020, 57 pages, £6.50 + p&p. published 2020 by the East Yorkshire Local History Society.
This booklet sets out to open up the more or less lost world of practical farm work in East Yorkshire when horses were the main source of power. It is based around extensive quotations from lads born between 1888 and 1923 who had been hired for a year at a time to perform this work. It therefore forms a unique record of a very different way of getting things done from the highly mechanised farms of today. It also throws light on their own highly unusual lives, lodging in the houses of the farmers who had hired them until they married or left agriculture.
As the title indicates, we move through the farming year, looking in detail at all aspects of their work from the ploughing that filled the largest section of their time, to taking waggons to railway stations and towns to collect goods and deliver produce. It shows that even then farming in Yorkshire was a serious practical business organised around making money, not a romantic survival from earlier times as many novels would have us believe. With many photographs and illustrations there is plenty of fascinating detail as we learn about using scrufflers and clod crushers, digging out yards filled with manure by hand, or growing mustard. It is aimed at those with a general interest, but should be very useful to those who are involved in farming today and want to know how things have changed.
For those who have already read Amongst Farm Horses this adds an element which had to be left out of that book due to lack of space, and so complements it well. Click the image for a link to the East Yorkshire Local History Society publications page to buy a copy.
A review in The Local Historian, April 2021, by Professor Edward Royle
This readable booklet illustrates the essential contribution that good local history can make to more general historical studies: an in-depth understanding of local circumstances. Thus we are reminded that the East Riding of Yorkshire was and remains one of the most agricultural counties in England but, it’s agricultural practices and rhythms were in many respects different from those of of more southerly counties. Far from hiring fairs and living-in labour fading away in the first part of the nineteenth century, continued in the East Riding into the twentieth. Competition for labour from industrial employers to the west kept wages relatively high. What to the southern outsider might have seemed like outdated farming practices were in fact based in sound commercial sense for a flexible, market-oriented economy.
An important part of this farming regime was played by the horselads – boys between school-leaving at the age of 14 (or younger) and marriage who lived in their employers’ farmhouses and worked the horses on the farms. In the early 1970s Dr Caunce conducted and taped interviews with a number of old men who had been horselads in their youth, creating a pioneering archive which recorded a world which has now almost faded from memory – the world before the little grey Ferguson tractor, the ‘work-horse’ of farming after 1945. This early research resulted in a book, first published in 1991 as Amongst Farm Horses, and republished in a revised edition in 2016. The current publication is both a supplement and compliment to this work, adding previously unpublished chapters from Dr Caunce’s original doctoral thesis.
It provides a clear explanation of the various farming practices involved in a mainly grain-producing part of the country, enhanced with contemporary photographs and advertisements for farm machinery, organised around the farming year with extensive quotations from transcriptions of interviews. Beginning on Old Martinmas Day (23 November) with the annual hiring fair, we are guided through the horselads’ seasons: ploughing, sowing, haymaking and harvesting corn and other crops – barley, oats, and mustard for Coleman’s factory in Hull, as well as root crops, the latter mainly to feed the animals that produced the manure that fed the fields that produced the crops. In all this, horses provided the essential motor power, tended by the lads who made up the waggoners’ teams. Only for threshing was the mobile steam engine or traction engine brought in with it’s specialist operators for a few days each year. There is nothing sentimental or nostalgic about this account, but one is left with an admiration for the various skills and sheer hard work that went into producing the food which helped feed, and thereby made possible, an increasingy industrialised and urbanised country. The East Yorkshire Local History Society has done historians everywhere a service in enabling Dr Caunce to bring this further research to our attention.
Stephen Caunce 