Life as an Essex Agricultural Labourer 1840-1920 (Part 3)

Agricultural implements increasingly were available by 1840. Thomas Wright (1836) claimed that the Essex spring plough made by Clarke of Billericay was the best and Cook's scarifying harrow "is an excellent implement". He adds, "My thrashing machine was made by Ball, of Norwich, which answers completely in thrashing all sorts of grain"¹. The threshing machine, an early example of mechanisation in farming, was invented in the late eighteenth century but was not in common usage for a century afterwards.

The separation of wheat from the chaff by beating the comn on the barn floor (otherwise called the threshing floor) was known as flaifing. The flail was referred to as a stick and a half because it was made in two parts. It was held by a piece of wood called a hand-staff, made of ash or hazel. The other half, the swingel, was made of heavier wood, either blackthorn or holly. These were loosely bound together with a leather strap. The beating was with even pressure in order to separate but not break the grain.

Winnowing, the blowing away of the chaff, was achieved by simply opening the barn doors and regulating the air flow. Later a wind dresser was used. This created a lot of dust.

Reginald Beckett, on his "pedestrian perambulations" at the turn of the twentieth century observed, "Looking one day into a barn in one of the Roding parishes, I noticed a still stranger survival - the operation of threshing with a flail. These things serve to show that this part of Essex, geographically near London though it be, is centuries behind and apart from it"².

The assignment of the lease of the Jericho Priory Farm estate, Blackmore, in 1872 referred to the vendor's obligation to leave "all hay, corn, and straw in ricks, bins or on the threshing floors"³.

The introduction of machinery threatened the existence of the agricultural labourer. In 1816 and the Swing Riots of 1830, many men resorted to machine breaking. This happened at Finchingfield, Great Bardfield, Sible Hedingham and other piaces in Essex. In 1843 Michael Challis of Hatfield Broad Oak was transported for setting alight a farm at Harlow.

Changes in technology meant changes in the landscape too Increasingly the traditional harn disappeared. Today many surviving examples have been converied into houses.

Oxen were still used in preference to the horse on some farms in 1840. These animals are recorded in the Domesday Book. Wright says that the horse is an "extravagant expense ... who eat up a very considerable produce of the farm; this has driven me back to oxen, which F used about twenty years ago". Ashley Cooper (1982) wrote that a farm "at Burlingham in Norfolk used oxen until 1905". This ilustrases that farming practice spanned a considerable period of time, even when newer 'technofogy' was available.

In another example, Reginald Beckett (1901) records a conversation with a labourer in Doddinghurst. "In a fieid hard by the church two men were sowing oats by hand, with the rhythmic swing of the body, out of shallow wooden baskets. One of them passing near the hedge stopped for a moment's chat. It was an oid-fashioned way of shattering the seed, he said, but needed a lot of learning. I remarked that it was at all events a scriptural custom. 'Yes, they didn't have machinery in them days'".

In 1902. the 'Davey Land Digger' was demonstrated with "splendid results" in Wickford, its place of manufacture. It was a steam digger attached to a six horse-power traction engine. "Only one man is employed, and the land is dug to a depth of ten inches, over a width of twelve feet, at a rate of three-quarters of an acre an hour. The action of the digger leaves the land quite ready for drilling the seed"⁷.

Earlier Mr T C Darby of Pleshey had invented the 'Darby Digger', "which during the last year of two has done excellent work as a cultivator of the soil in many parts of the county. One at least of these curious-looking implements may usually be seen at work on Mr Darby's own farm, and its inventor is always pleased to show it to visitors. Mr Darby is now the owner of 5 of these machines, which are chiefly let out to his neighbouring farmers. It is claimed for the Digger, which took the Highest Prize Medal at the Royal Agricultural Society's Meeting at Carlisle in 1880, that it performs 'spade husbandry and steam power', and at one-seventh of the cost"".

A traction engine was first used in 1888 on Link Farm, West Hanningfield. The binder - a machine which cut and bound corn - arrived on the farm in 1898 but could not be used during the wet harvest of 1902: "This meant the revival of the old-time reaping harvests, and the old hands came back into their own again"". The petrol-driven tractor made its first appearance around 1900. The combine harvester was not generally available until during the Second World War although an early one was first used in Suffolk in 1936. Even so, change was slow: horses were used well into the 1950s and not all farmers used combine harvesters until the 1970s. Threshing machines remained in use well after 1945. The job was known as "barn work".

In many respects our ancestors would have recognised farming practice well into the third quarter of the twentieth century. But by then farming had changed significantly from the employment of a large number of labourers to a solitary occupation. A combine harvester can do the same job in thirty to forty minutes that would have otherwise taken a threshing team of ten in a day¹⁰.