Life in a Medieval Village - Frances Gies [58]
Women reaping while man binds. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 172v.
persons who turned out for the Elton harvest boon of 1298, the reeve, Alexander atte Cross, listed the victuals consumed: eight rings (thirty-two bushels) of wheat, an almost equal quantity of other grains, a bull, a cow, a calf, eighteen doves, and seven cheeses. The second day’s work required only 250 hands, who however ate bread made from eleven rings, along with eight hundred herrings, seven pence worth of salt cod, and five cheeses. A partial third day’s boon was exacted from sixty villeins, who were fed on three cheeses and “the residue from the expenses of the [manor] house.”40 Of nineteen recorded harvest boons at Elton, this was the only one to last three days. Seven others lasted two days, eleven only one.
The food supplied at boon-works was an important article of the ancient compact between lord and tenants. Size and composition of the loaves of bread made from the grain were commonly stipulated in writing. At Holywell boons, two men were to share three loaves “such that the quantity of one loaf would suffice for a meal for two men,” and the bread was to be of wheat and rye, but mainly wheat.41’ At the Ramsey manor of Broughton in 1291 the tenants actually struck over what they deemed an insufficient quantity of bread supplied them, and only returned to work when appeal to the abbey cartulary proved them mistaken. Reapers liked to wash down their wheat bread with plenty of ale, typically a gallon a day per man, according to one calculation, and “some harvesters consumed twice as much.”42
Wheat was cut with a sickle, halfway or more up the stalk, and laid on the ground. Binders followed to tie the spears in sheaves and set them in shocks to dry. In demesne harvesting, one binder followed every four reapers, advancing in echelon at a rate of two acres a day.43 That similar teamwork was applied in village harvesting is a reasonable supposition. Oats and barley were mown with scythes, close to the ground.44 Harvesting of all three crops left much residue, making gleaning an important function. It was too important, according to Warren Ault, to support a famous assertion by Blackstone in the eighteenth century that “by the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean upon another’s ground after
Stacking the sheaves. British Library, Luttrell Psalter, Ms. Add. 42130, f. 173.
the harvest without being guilty of trespass.”45 In the medieval village, gleaning was strictly limited to the old, the infirm, and the very young, less out of charity than to conserve labor, all able-bodied adults of both sexes being needed for the heavier harvest work. Bylaws generally forbade gleaning by anyone offered a fair wage for harvesting, usually meaning “a penny a day and food” or twopence without food (Walter of Henley recommended paying twopence for a man, one penny for a woman).46 Bylaws welcomed strangers to the village as harvesters while barring them as gleaners.
After cutting, gathering, binding, and stacking their sheaves, the villagers carted them to their barns and sheds to be threshed with the ancient jointed flail and winnowed by tossing in the air from the winnowing cloth or basket, and if necessary supplying breeze with the winnowing fan.
Besides the grain crops, harvest included “pulling the peas,” the vegetable crops that matured in late September and whose harvest also required careful policing against theft.
Yields for the villagers could scarcely have exceeded those of the demesne, which enjoyed so many advantages. Three and a half to one was generally a very acceptable figure