Just before reaching the roadside hamlet of Longford, fifteen miles from Hyde Park Corner, a lane leads on the right hand to Harmondsworth, a short mile distant across the wide flat cabbage and potato fields. “Harm’sworth,” as the rustics call it, is mentioned in Domesday Book, under the name of “Hermondesworde;” that is to say, Hermonde’s sworth or sward, the pasture-land of some forgotten Hermonde.
THE “GOTHIC BARN”
Few ever turn aside from the dusty high-road to visit this old-fashioned village, rich in old timber-framed houses, and possessing an ancient tithe-barn which, standing next the church, was once part of an obscure Priory established here. The “Gothic Barn” is built precisely on ecclesiastical lines, with nave and aisles, and is the largest of the tithe-barns now remaining in England, being 191 feet in length and 38 feet, in breadth. The walls are built of a rough kind of conglomerate found in the locality, and called “pudding-stone,” the flints and pebbles distributed through the rock resembling to a lively imagination the currants and raisins in plum-puddings. The interior of the barn is a vast mass of oak columns and open roofing.
THE “GOTHIC BARN,” HARMONDSWORTH.
A relic of old country life may be seen hanging in this barn, in the shape of a flail, now occasionally used for threshing out beans.
OLD FLAIL,
HARMONDSWORTH
Very few people will understand the meaning of the old English word “flail,” because it is almost fifty years since that old-world agricultural implement was in general use. Until steam was introduced as a labour-saving appliance in agricultural work, corn was invariably threshed out of the ear by wooden instruments like that pictured here, consisting of two unequal lengths of rounded wood of the size of an ordinary broomstick, connected by leathern loops.
The farm hands who used this primitive contrivance grasped hold of the longer stick, and, brandishing it about over their heads, brought the hinged end down repeatedly on the wheat spread out on the threshing floor; thus, with the expenditure of considerable time and muscular strength, separating the grains from the ears. As the “business end” of the flail is constructed so as to swing in every direction, it is obvious that the mastery of it was only acquired with practice, and at the cost of sundry whacks on the head brought on himself by the clumsy novice. Indeed, it is an instrument requiring particular dexterity in manipulation.