Rustic Speech and Folk-Lore

by Elizabeth Mary Wright

a thing of a trifle shall comfort him mutch.

Afternoone workes.

Husbandry in Rhyme

‘Good husbandlie lessons’ stored up in rhymes in the manner of Tusser may still be found in rural districts. For example: When the cuckoo comes to the bare thorn, Sell your cow and buy your corn (Sus.). When the slae tree is white as a sheet, Sow your barley, whether it be dry or weet (Nhb.). When elum leaves are as big as a farden, It’s time to plant kidney-beans in the garden. When the moon is at the full, Mushrooms you may freely pull; But when the moon is on the wane, Wait ere you think to pluck again (Ess.). Shear you sheep in May, and shear them all away (Wor.). If you marl land, you may buy land; If you marl moss, there is no loss; If you marl clay, you fling all away (Lin.).

There is an old farmer’s saying in Rutland: One boy is a boy, two boys is half a boy, and three boys is no boy at all. According to a Cumberland adage, the ‘good husband’—as Tusser would call him—says: Come, goway to yer wark wid me, lads; while ‘unthrift his brother’ says: Howay to yer wark, lads, and leaves them to go by themselves.

It is interesting to recognize familiar sayings under a figure taken from farming. For instance: to have other oats to thresh, or another rig to hoe, is equivalent to other fish to fry; to shear [reap] one’s own rig, is to paddle one’s own canoe; to plough the headlands before the butts, is to begin a thing at the wrong end. The headland is the strip of land left unploughed at the ends of a field on which the plough turns, hence: to turn on a mighty narrow adlant, means to have a narrow escape. Pay-rent is a good practical synonym for profitable, e.g. A proper pay-rent sort o’ pigs; A rare pay-rent piece o’ beans.

A way-ganging crop is the last crop belonging to a tenant before he leaves a farm, a phrase which is picturesquely applied to an old man nearing his end.

Decay of old Farming Customs

Numbers of the old agricultural terms so common a generation or two ago, have now become obsolete, since the implements to which they belonged have given place to newer machinery. Twenty or thirty years ago one was accustomed to hearing the thud of the flail resounding on the barn floor, but now the threshing-machine does the work, and we have to look in dictionaries if we want to understand what was meant by a dreshel, and what parts of it were the handstaff, soople, and capel, and what happened to the barley when submitted to the faltering-iron. Reaping-machines, again, have superseded the older methods of shearing with the sheckel, the badging-hook, or the fagging-hook. We seldom hear the sound of the mower whetting his scythe, nor do we see Phillis hasting out of her bower ‘With Thestylis to bind the sheaves’. These are sounds and sights to read of in poetry, like the whilome glories of our wayside hedgerows, now cloaked under a grey pall of dust thrown over them by the passing motor.

The decay of old customs belonging to farming is chiefly noticeable in connexion with the ingathering of the harvest, and the celebration of its completion. Many causes have combined of late years to make farming an anxious and unremunerative industry, so that there is no longer the real joy in harvest that there used to be; a fact which must be reckoned together with the changes which have been wrought by the introduction of machinery, and by the increase in means of locomotion which brings hireling harvesters from distant parts, and carries away the young people who used to grow up on the same farm where their fathers and grandfathers had always worked.