Grain and Chaff from an English Manor

by Arthur Herbert Savory

When the stapler arrives for the weighing he brings his steelyards and sheets; the wool is trod into the sheets, sewn up, and each sheet weighed separately, an allowance being made for "tare" (the weight of the sheet), and for "draught" (1/2 a pound in each tod, or 28 pounds). This last is a survival of the old method of weighing wool, when only enough fleeces were weighed at a time on the farmer's small machine to come to a tod as nearly as possible. Buyers did not recognize anything but level pounds (no quarters or halves), and consequently they got on the average half a pound over the tod at each separate weighing, gratis.

Owing to the immense importations of Australian wool, the price of English, which at one time was half-a-crown a pound, fell to the miserable figure of sevenpence or thereabouts. When I was in Lincolnshire, the tenant of the farm where I was a pupil clipped 14 pounds each from 200 "hoggs" (yearling sheep), which at 2s. 6d. per pound produced 35s. per sheep, equal to £350, so the fall of three-quarters of the value was a serious loss.

A story is told of a cunning wool buyer in the dim past weighing up wool on an upper floor of some farm premises. As the fleeces passed the machine they were thrown down an opening to the floor beneath in readiness for packing. The pile of wool upstairs had been there some time, and was full of rats. As the fleeces were moved a rat would sometimes rush out trying to escape. No farm labourer can resist a rat hunt, so the buyer being left alone beside the still unmoved fleeces, whenever a rat appeared, and the men scattered in every direction in pursuit, he took the opportunity to kick a few fleeces unweighed down the opening. When the owner came to reckon the quantity the buyer should have had, and compared it with the weight, the fraud was discovered, and the deficiency had to be made good.

I heard of a Hampshire farmer whose wife was anxious for a drawing-room to be added to an inadequate farmhouse, and the tenant with some difficulty persuaded the landlord to make the alteration. When the work was complete the farmer expressed the great satisfaction of his wife and himself with the addition, and the landlord was anxious to see the new room. Every time he suggested a day, the farmer objected that it would be inconvenient to his wife, or that he himself would be away from home. Time went on, and the landlord, finding it impossible to arrange a day that was not objected to, made a surprise visit, when shooting over the farm. The farmer protested as to the inconvenience, but the owner insisted, and was conducted to the new drawing-room. The door was thrown open, and the room was seen to be stacked from floor to ceiling with wool, without a stick of furniture in the place!

The veterinary surgeon is a necessary, but not very welcome visitor, for, of course, his attendance means disease or accident to the stock. He is not often mistaken in his diagnosis, though his patient cannot detail his symptoms, or point to the position of the trouble. But the vet is a man to be dispensed with as long as possible when epidemics, like swine fever or foot and mouth disease, are raging in the neighbourhood, because he may be a Government Inspector at such times, and there is great danger to healthy stock if he has been officially employed shortly before on an inspection. We had very little disease at Aldington, being off the highroad, but we had one bad attack of foot and mouth disease which I always thought was brought by a veterinary surgeon. The complaint went all through my dairy cows and fattening bullocks, and soon reduced them to lean beasts, but it was surprising how quickly they picked up again in flesh and resumed their normal appearance. It was curious to notice that, with the cows standing side by side in the sheds, the disease would attack one and miss the next two perhaps, then attack two and miss one, and so on; doubtless it was a matter of predisposition on the part of those affected.

The veterinary lecturer at Cirencester College told me that during the cattle plague in the sixties he had a coat well worth £50 to any veterinary surgeon, so impregnated was it with the infection. This man was fond of scoring off the students, and had a habit at the commencement of each lecture of holding a short vivâ voce examination on the subject of the last. I remember when the tables were turned upon him by a ready-witted student. The lecturer, who was a superior veterinary surgeon, detailed a whole catalogue of exaggerated symptoms exhibited by an imaginary horse, and selecting his victim added, with a chuckle, "Now, Mr. K., perhaps you will kindly tell us what treatment you would adopt under these circumstances?" K. was not a very diligent student, and the lecturer expected a display of ignorance, but his anticipated triumph was cut short by the reply: "Well, if I had a horse as bad as all that I should send for the vet." The lecturer expostulated, but could get nothing further out of K., and was forced to recognize that the general laugh which followed was against himself.

At a post-mortem, however, he was more successful in his choice of a butt. A dead horse with organs exposed was the object before the class, and the lecturer was asking questions as to their identification. "Now, Mr. Jones, perhaps you will show us where his lungs are?" Jones made an unsuccessful search. "Well, can we see where his heart is?" and so on—all failures. Finally and scornfully, "Well, perhaps you can show the gentlemen where his tail is!"

The village thatcher, Obadiah B., was an ancient, but efficient workman when engaged upon cottages or farm buildings, for ricks require only a comparatively temporary treatment. He was paid by the "square" of 100 feet, and, although he was "no scholard," and never used a tape, he was quite capable of checking by some method I could never fathom my own measurements with it. The finishing touches to his work were adjusted with the skill of an artist and the accuracy of a mathematician; and a beautiful bordering of "buckles" in an elaborate pattern of angles and crosses—"Fantykes" (Van Dycks), his hard-working daughter Sally called them—completed the job. He "reckoned" that each thatching would last at least twenty years, and being well stricken in years, or "getting-up-along" as they say in Hampshire, he would add gloomily, "I shall never do it no more." He was a true prophet, for on every building he thatched for me the work outlived him, and even after the lapse of thirty years is not completely worn out.

Passing him and his son in the village street, outside his house, when he was packing fruit for market, I heard him, his voice raised for my benefit, thus admonishing his son who was casually using some of the newer hampers: "Allus wear out the old, fust." But I must not attribute to his son the unfilial retort which another youth made under similar circumstances, when told to fetch some more hampers from a shed some distance away: "No, father, you fetch them, allus wear out the old fust, you know."

Occasional visitors come with goods for sale in quest of orders, and some are very persistent and difficult to get rid of. A man professing to sell some artificial fertilizer called upon me with a small tin sample box, containing a mixture which emitted a most villainous odour. He sniffed with appreciation at the compound, probably consisting of some nitrogenous material such as wool treated with sulphuric or hydrochloric acid, and began his address. He had not gone far before I remembered a story of a similar person in Hampshire. This man had called upon the leading farmers, and offered them a bargain, explaining that some trucks of artificial manure that he had consigned to Walton Station had been sent by mistake to Alton. He sold many tons in this way without any guarantee as to the analysis, but the buyers found on using it that it was worthless. The seller tried his game on again the following year, without success. One farmer whom he followed from the farm-house to a turnip-field went so far as to show him his hunting-crop, and pointing to the field gate at the same time, intimated that if he did not with all speed place himself outside the latter, he would make unpleasant acquaintance with the former. So now when my caller mentioned a truck of the manure which had come by mistake to Evesham Station, though consigned to Evershot in Somerset, my suspicions were confirmed, and when I innocently remarked, "I think I remember that truck, didn't it go to Alton once in mistake for Walton?" his countenance fell, and he wished me "good-morning" in a hurry.