It has been thought that there used to be one universal harvest song used throughout England, but the words and music are not preserved as such. Some curious songs are performed by the laborers, where harvest suppers are kept up. A very popular one has a chorus ending with:
And neither Kings, Lords, nor Dukes
Can do without the husbandman.
The majority are drinking songs, and there is reason to fear that the ale and cider that flowed at harvest-time, conduced in no small degree towards the unbounded revelry of these old celebrations.
At the same time the country people of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were for the most part very simple and ignorant, and their childish exuberance of spirits may have been but the natural expression of life in a perfectly unartificial state. They were men and women who could live for the hour while the sun shone, who could laugh and dance like children who have no fear, and, as George Eliot says, who "cared not for inquiring into the senses of things, being satisfied with the things themselves."
But the change was coming. The old women of Cornwall lamented loudly when their sickles were taken away, and the corn was "round-hewed" by the men with a kind of rounded saw.
"There was nothing about it in the Bible," they said; "it was all reaping there."
The round-hewing was but a step, to be speedily followed by the scythe, and then by the steam reaper. And it often happens that the steam engines do not leave the field until the corn is carried to a temporary rick in the corner and threshed on the spot.
Farewell to the Hoaky Cart, the crowns of flowers, the Kern Baby, and the Cro' Sheaf!