SHEEP-SHEARING.
This was another service imposed upon the tenantry. Though hard and heavy work to wash and shear sheep, in the thirteenth century it was done by women, who are called "shepsters" in the Vision of Piers Plowman. The sheep were washed in the mill-pond. Shearers were usually entitled to the wambelocks, or loose locks of wool under the belly of the sheep; or at Weston, in Oxfordshire, a penny instead of the locks. The finest part of the fleece is the wool about the sheep's throat, called in Scotland the haslock, or hawselocks:
"A tartan plaid, spun of good hawslock woo',
Scarlet and green he sets, the borders blew."
The Gentle Shepherd.
Up in the North they call a sheep-shearing the clipping-time; and to come in clipping-time is to come as opportunely as at sheep-shearing, when there are always mirth and good cheer. In the middle of the seventeenth century, clippers always expected a joint of roasted mutton. In the Winter's Tale, the clown ponders:
"Let me see, what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? Three pounds of sugar, five pounds of currants, rice—what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on.... I must have saffron to colour the warden pies; mace; dates, none! That's out of my note. Nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger—but that I may beg; four pounds of prunes, and as many of raisins o' the sun."
The old customs of clipping-time were observed by Sir Moyle Finch, at Walton, near Wetherby, in the time of Charles I., and are thus described by Henry Best:
"Hee hath usually fower severall keepinges shorne altogether in the Hall-garth.... He hath had 49 clippers all at once, and their wage is, to each man 12d. a day, and when they have done, beere and bread and cheese; the traylers have 6d. a day. His tenants the graingers are tyed to come themselves, and winde the well; they have a fatte wether and a fatte lambe killed, and a dinner provided for their paines; there will be usually three score or fower score poore folkes gatheringe up the lockes; to oversee whom standeth the steward and two or three of his friends or servants, with each of them a rodde in his hande; there are two to carry away the well, and weigh the roll so soone as it is wounde up, and another that setteth it downe ever as it is weighed; there is 6d. allowed to a piper for playing to the clippers all the day; the shepheards have each of them his bell-weather's fleece,"—the "bellys" allowed to the shepherd by the old Saxon laws.
Sheep-shearing was thus celebrated in ancient times with feasting and rustic pastimes; at present, excepting a supper at the conclusion of the sheep-shearing, we have few remains of the older custom. Nevertheless, it is interesting to revert to these pictures of pastoral life and rusticity, more especially as we find them embellished by the charms of poetry, and enlivened by a simplicity of manners which, to whatever period it may belong, is always entertaining, if not productive of better fruit. The season of the shearing is thus laid down by Dyer:
"If verdant Elder spreads
Her silver flowers, if humble Daisies yield
To yellow rowfoot and luxuriant grass,
Gay Shearing Time approaches."