Bringing In the Sheaves

Farming and smallholding practices have altered over the past century or so. Some have been subtle, others less so — and many brought about by technology and legislation. In another of his monthly series, Jeremy Hobson continues to outline just a few of them.

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Bringing in the Sheaves’ is a popular American gospel hymn written in 1874 but, until the use of early, often horse-powered machinery, sheaves of corn would have been cut and bound by hand by our British farming and smallholding ancestors. The romance of hazy, sun-kissed days of harvesting in the fields where the workers were fortified by bread and cheese and flagons of cider is often portrayed in photos and paintings of the period but the reality was very different.

Harvests around the turn of the last century were both tiring and labour-intensive. Even though, by that stage, horse-drawn cutters and binders made farming life a little easier, opening up the edges of fields often required the use of men with scythes. Threshing machines might have been driven by steam engines or horsepower but both required a great deal of human interaction.