The way in which Essex people speak has changed over the years, none more so than in the last generation. This is true even in Yorkshire where the hardened localised accent has become more cosmopolitan, more homogeneous.
As someone who has always lived in this area and interested in history I am fascinated by the way people speak and in words which have now fallen out of common usage. Researching a history of life as an agricultural labourer I came across many terms which I found unrecognisable: weights and measures was one example, and local farming terms another. My father was extremely helpful.
The Essex Record Office has a large sound archive and has inadvertently collected many examples of local speech. A compact disc, ‘How to Speak Essex’, was published last year (2009).
The illustration shows thraves (or traves) of wheat standing in a field to dry after being cut. Wet corn could not be threshed (or thrashed). Thraves were six to eight sheaves arranged together. In Suffolk this was called a ‘shock’. In the Midlands it was called a ‘stook’. A sheaf was a bundle of corn tied together. Thraves were collected from the field and built into ‘stacks’ or ‘ricks’, hence the term ‘stack-yard’ or ‘rick-yard’ for the open space beside a barn in farmyards. Both stacks and ricks were words used in this part of Essex, but the former more commonly applied.
It took some while for me to find the word thrave recorded anywhere. Fortunately Canon Gepp’s Essex dialect dictionary of 1927 came to the rescue.
Miss G. M. Baker recalls agricultural life at the end of the nineteenth century in ‘Margaretting. The village with a beautiful name’ (Volume II) (1983). “Besides binding the sheaves, the women and children also stood them up, around six or eight, in stooks or traves. It was necessary for workers to perform this operation in pairs”
We read that the First World War marked the demise of dialect but even as early as 1887 a local writer, Miller Christy, suggests that the School Board was responsible for “rapidly sweeping away local peculiarities”.