Climate Change — Back in the Day

We’re still trying to figure out the climate patterns after an unusually hard winter of 2019 that brought record snowfall to our part of the world, following by virtually no precipitation this past winter. Back in the day when the fortunes of harvest meant the difference between a local population’s prospect of plenty or privation for an entire year, an atmosphere of intense anticipation stirred across the countryside as summer beckoned. For the small tenant farmers of medieval times, several acres the harvest required the labor of all able-bodied family members from older children to adults. On the manorial estates of England and France, workers could number more than 200 so the harvest could be completed within the few prime weeks of summer between the kernel’s full ripeness and risk of damage from sprout or threat of rotting. Forces of nature that had brought forth bounty in the fields could also conspire to ruin crops in late summer with shattering hail, incessant rain, or felling winds, torching entire fields by lightning, or with a plague of all-consuming locusts. Fasts and feasts of the medieval church followed a sacred rhythm of agrarian wholeness represented by a liturgical calendar in recognition of parishioners’ reliance upon divine sustenance and protection from forces beyond mortal control.

Johann Hans, Celebration of the Harvest Festival in Ulm (1817), Lithograph, 9 ½ x 13 ¼ inches; Columbia Heritage Collection

Ulm’s grand medieval Ulmer Münster church and Münsterplatz are depicted in an early nineteenth century print that indicates the vulnerability and devotion of the populace in the wake of the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). The Northern Hemisphere’s subsequent “Year without a Summer” with recurrent rains and cooler temperatures led to the catastrophic crop failures and famine in central Europe. With the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and return of the climate to more normal conditions by 1817, city folk and farmers alike gave thanks and renewed harvest celebrations  throughout the land. In Frankfurt Pastor Gerhard Friederich led worshippers in a grand July Erntedankefest with prayers and hymns; Johann Hans’s Celebration of the Harvest Festival in Ulm depicts a similar event in that southern German city with verse about the calamity:

It was a sad year, a year of sorrow.

The poor spoke with tears every morning:

“Where do I find bread for my children today?”

The joy had been veiled, hidden.

Wherever one went, it was still and deathly.

“Oh open your heart, Mother Earth,” we begged,

“That we may be helped!”

And see, a beautiful day has come,

Joyous laughter has returned to all.

Folk Tunes and Corn Dollies in Merry Olde England

English folk tunes sung during harvest time and other field labors took various forms including ballads with charming melodies and lively tunes of ribald verse. The final cutting of grain after weeks of arduous work was commonly assigned to the youngest girl present. “O’ tis the merry time,” wrote cavalier poet Matthew Stevenson (c. 1654-1684), “wherein honest neighbours make good cheer and God is glorified in his blessings on the earth.” In some parts of Scotland the last sheaf was called the Cailleach (Old Wife), on the Isle of Skye the Boabbir Bhacagh (Crippled Goat), and the “Gander’s Neck” in western England. Cutting the last sheaf was considered unlucky in some folk traditions, perhaps a relic of pagan memory since the dwindling patch of standing grain was seen as a sanctuary for the field’s fertility spirit sometimes represented by a hare, bustard or crane, or other creature seeking refuge among the stalks. For this reason, workers might simply toss their sickles at the hallowed last stand in half-hearted effort to complete the harvest and begin celebrating.

Wheat Wreath, Columbia Heritage Collection

Solomki Straw Art Overlay, Columbia Heritage Collection

Harvesters typically adorned a young girl with a wreath of woven stalks and wildflowers and carried her in a jubilant procession led by a boy carrying the hallowed last sheaf. A “Kirn Baby” deftly woven of straw—the “Harvest Queen,” “Harvest Maiden,” or “Harvest Child,” depending on regional tradition, and honored sheaf typically served as table centerpieces for the annual Harvest-Home feast. Afterward the effigies of these “dollies,” which could also be made from barley, oats, and rye, were hung in the farmhouse or barn as a talisman to provide safe haven for the spirit of fertility until threshed for release with the seeding of spring crops. Scottish classicist and folklorist Sir James George Frazer (1854-1941) identified such mother-maiden traditions that continued into modern times as personifications of the ancient Demeter and Persephone myth without the elements that typically perpetuate such beliefs—a priestly class, designated holy places, or rites of propitiation. In parts of Scotland, Silesia, and Saxony, the maiden was chosen as the Wheat-Bride, Oat-Bride, or Rye-Bride according to the crop, and was joined by a respective Grain-Bridegroom to represent the productive powers of vegetation. The pair was honored at the local harvest celebration to which they came gaily dressed and tended by friends to imitate a festive marriage procession.

Old World traditions honoring the grain’s vitality by weaving “Kirn Babies” (“Corn Dollies”) of artfully twisted shapes have endured since medieval times and has been revived for exhibition at rural county fairs and craft displays. Popular traditional designs include the Cambridge Umbrella, Norfolk Lantern, Durham Chandelier, Devon Cross, Worchester Fan, and Irish Countryman’s Favor. The related agrarian folk art of solomki still popular in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine involves the meticulous design of grain straw marquetry overlay on wooden boxes bowls, plates, and other objects.

Among the most magnificent and monumental examples of golden straw weaving and wickerwork are three sets of Orthodox Holy Gates appropriately located in a restored nineteenth century church which serves as the Belarus Museum of Folk Art in Raubichi near Minsk. Dating from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries, these exquisitely crafted panels served as centerpieces for Orthodox cathedral iconostases which formed the high wall of framed icons that divided the sanctuary from the nave where worshippers assembled. Skillfully drawn gold-colored thread fashioned from wheat stalks was also for exquisite decoration of white silk religious fabrics. Among these treasures’ earliest extant examples are The Good Shepherd and Jesus and the Samaritan altarpieces (c. 1650) that were deftly embroidered by nuns of the seventeenth century Order of Celestial Annunciades in Nozeroy, France, and preserved in the city’s Collegiate Church of St. Antoine.

Western European Folklore — Oat Goats and Rye Hounds

Scandinavian farmers customarily saved the last harvest cuttings for the ceremonial “Yule Sheaf” (Norwegian Julenek, Swedish Julkarve) of oats or other grain. The sheaf was suspended from a pole or barn roof during Christmas week as a blessing to the birds and goodwill offering for a favorable growing season in the coming year. This tradition continued among some families in eighteenth century America as described in verse by Ohio poet Phoebe Cary’s “The Christmas Sheaf”: 

“And bid the children fetch,” he said,
“The last ripe sheaf of wheat,
And set it on the roof o’erhead
That the birds may come and eat.

And this we do for His dear sake,
The Master kind and good,
Who of the loaves He blest and brake
Fed all the multitude.”

Adolph Tidermand (1814-1876), Traditions—The Christmas Sheaf (1846)

Oil on canvas, 14 ¼ x 16 ½ inches

National Gallery, Oslo

Upon completion of harvest in some parts of Germany during medieval times, farmers preserved the last remaining grain as “Wödin’s Share” (Vergodendeel, Vergodenstruss), an offering to the ancient pagan Allfather (Norse Odin, Slavic Volos). To solicit Wödin’s favor for the coming year, the cuttings were left for his thundering herd of horses sometimes glimpsed swirling aloft as heaps of roiling clouds. Four-wheeled “Wödin’s Wagon” was known in some German traditions as the four stars of Ursa Major with the three that descend from the corner forming the wain’s tongue. German folklorist-philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) found evidence of these traditions persisting well into the nineteenth century. After the ceremonial final reaping, some Saxon and Hessian farmers then struck the sides of their scythes three times with the strop, spilled a small amount of their beer, brandy, or milk on the ground, and waved their hats and beat their scythes three more times. Grimm further described a custom among some farmers to then parade home to the cry of “Wôld, Wôld, Wôld!/haven hüne weit schüt/jümm hei van haven süt….” British antiquarian John Symonds Udal (1848-1925) found vestiges of these beliefs in the celebratory end-of-harvest “crying of the neck whooping” of some Wessex descendants of Anglo-Saxon farmers in southern England. (“The neck,” in some places pronounced “knack,” was a small tied bundle of large heads gathered from the last cuttings.) Udal supposed their shouting “We hav’en” three times was “a survival of the old invocation to the great god Woden” that had remained through the centuries.

German farmers also contended with a malevolent menagerie of imaginary creatures—die Feldgeister (field spirits), including the Kornkuh (Grain Cow), Gerstenwolf (Barley Wolf), Haferbock (Oat Goat), Roggenhund (Rye Hound), and Aprilochs (April Ox). Folklore in Slavic Eastern Europe prescribed sparing the last few stalks of uncut grain for the field’s wild goat-like spirit, or for Baba Yagá (“Grandmother Witch”), though Christian influence confronted tradition in the words of a Russian folksong:

Let’s go girls, let’s go girls,

Out to the grain, out to the grain.

In our grain, in our grain,

Sits a witch, sits a witch.

Get out, witch; get out, witch,

Get out of our grain.

Our grain, our grain,

Has been consecrated, has been consecrated!

Go away witch, go away witch.

To Sen’kovo, to Sen’kovo—

There the grain there the grain,

Has not been consecrated.

Lodewijk Toeput (c. 1550-c.1605), Summer Harvest (c. 1590)

Black ink and gray wash over graphite, 10 ⅝ x 16 ⅝ inches

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Harvest Folklore — Mysteries from the East

In Eastern Europe, cutting the last sheaf (Russian dozhinochnym, Ukrainian didukh) was often accompanied by an elder’s petitional prayer so widows and orphans, rich and poor, would all be blessed with a plentiful harvest. (The Russian word for harvest, urozhaí, and Ukrainian zhnýva, derive from a shared root meaning “to cut.”) Fieldworkers festooned the sheaf with flowers and ribbons and honored members of the landlord’s family carried it home with bread and salt in a joyous procession accompanied by the singing of ritual harvest songs. Workers also fashioned colorful wreaths to be worn by unmarried youth. The host ceremoniously placed the sheaf on a peg in the ritual corner of the house (krásni úgol/pokuttia) which held icons, censer, and candles. A festive harvest dinner followed and the sheaf, known in some traditions as the “Grandfather Sheaf,” remained in the sacred niche until Christmas Eve. At that time some grain from the sheaf was used to make traditional kutya cereal dessert while other kernels were ritually scattered outside for the fertility of the fields and blessing upon the household.

In Slavic folklore, decrepit Baba Yagá might be a maternal effigy fashioned from straw that was also identified in some traditions with the summertime Pleiades star cluster. The constellation’s bright appearance portended favorable harvests. Baba Yagá appears ambiguously in agrarian folklore as both guardian of crops and as ogress who could withhold humanity’s bounty from the earth. For this reason the “Old Woman” existed in the fearsome twilight between nature and culture, said to dwell in the unfenced borderlands separating field and forest. Parents warned their children not to wander through the countryside or trample crops lest they be taken by Baba Yagá, though such beings existed as much as pedagogical fictions to prevent wanderers from damaging the grain.

The Russian rural landscape might also be inhabited by frightful polevoi (“field spirits”)—the rural “demons” of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fictional fourth century Lesniks. These misshapen, clumsy beings tended to appear at midday and bore the color of an area’s soil with hair of wild grass. A polevyk’s appearance usually foreshadowed misfortune. These beings were similar to the more diabolical leshii (“forest spirits”) and vodianoi (“water spirits”). Slavic millers of grain appeased the latter by regular streamside offerings of bread and salt—origin of the Russian word for hospitality.

Plenty is Revealed, Beautiful Upon the Earth

Harvesting Heritage Grain Plots with Family “Volunteers”

We’ve had great fun here at the farm watching family members tend the heritage grain plot trials near the old farmhouse which allows us to determine which grains adapt well to our part of the country. Among the varieties we have grown are White and Red Lammas wheats that owe their enduring folk name to medieval Anglo-Saxon Lammastide (Anglo-Saxon hlaf-mas, “Loaf Mass”) of offerings traditionally held in early August when priests blessed the first ripe wheat. This annual commemoration’s antecedent included the sober rites of Celtic Luhgúhnadh, or the Celtic Sun god “Lugh’s Assembly,” which took place on August 1, when Scottish Gaelic Lùnastal (Welsh Gwl Awst—the Feast of August) was also observed.

In ancient Celtic folklore, Lugh established the festival to honor his foster mother, Talantiu, the “Great One of the Earth,” for dying from exhaustion after clearing forest for land to cultivate. By the early Middle Ages the festival came to include tribal assemblies attended by the High King, sporting contests, trade fairs, and other special events. The modern English word “earth” attests to these early peoples’ sacred regard for the land since the term is derived from Hertha, the Celtic goddess of the soil. (The word “harvest” is from Old English hærfest—“autumn,” the time described by the tenth century Menologium as “…[W]ela byð geywed fægere on foldan, or when “Plenty is revealed,  beautiful upon the earth.”)

Harvest Home in Sandomir (Poland)

Jozef Lienkowicz, Les Costumes du Peuple Polonais (Leipzig, 1841)

Columbia Heritage Collection

Early religious groups adapted these gatherings and vocabulary to the changing conditions of early medieval life and the new faith. Linguists trace the word “bread” (Nordic brøt) to Proto-Indo-European bhreu of northern Europe, a word suggesting the bubbling of leavened bread, the boiling of broth, and the brewing of beer. This northern term implies a process, while Mediterranean Latin’s word for loaf, panis (and derivatives French pain, Italian pane) emphasizes the end product. Medieval harvest festivals were commonly held throughout Europe for several days in late summer or fall depending on local traditions and after the crops had been substantially gathered. Folks of all ages but young people in particular looked forward to these spirited events as a time to don traditional costume, socialize, and engage in amusements after months of toil in the fields. Known in German as Kerbfest or Kirmes (Dutch Kermesse), these joyous times typically featured special church and market fairs with strolling minstrels, fellowship and feasting with family and friends and plenty of drink, and evening dances. The revelry is colorfully and sometimes comically depicted in such paintings as Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574) by Lucas van Valckenborch (1535-1597), Village Feast (c. 1600) by Marten van Cleve (c. 1527-1581), Brueghel’s The Kermesse of St. George (1628), and David Teniers the Younger’s Peasant Kermis (c. 1665).

Lucas van Valckenborch, Kermis, Peasants Making Merry (1574)

Oil on panel, 14 ½ inches

Danish National Gallery, Copenhagen

The beautifully composed painting Harvest Festival Procession (1826) by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) presents a romanticized view of such an occasion in the German countryside with elements that combine classical and medieval motifs with the artist’s Christian worldview. A celebratory peasant throng bearing grain sheaves follow a raised eagle standard as if a Roman legion marching toward a towering statue of Ceres. Other harvesters continue to labor in a distant field beneath the ruins of a medieval castle. Schinkel’s symbolic works characteristically depict historical and topographical detail in reverence to great epochs through the ages meant to inspire contemporary social renewal.

The painting presents the view of a people who appreciate the sacred bounty of the land which is used to uplift individual spirit and elevate overall area culture.  In many Catholic parishes the church consecration day that commemorated the founding of the church or its patron saint came to added sacred elements to the festival’s old folk traditions—often condemned by clerics, but did not greatly displace them in many areas. Catholic services commemorated the transmission of supernatural power upon a place of worship and featured a lengthy liturgical Mass with Holy Communion of wine and white bread. Protestant Kirchwiehen also involved solemn ceremony but as a sacred dedication and without the metaphysical connotations.

Scythes, Sickles, and Mr. Tusser

A vivid memory from my Palouse Country boyhood is watching Dad cut tall grasses and weeds around our farmyard with an exceedingly old scythe. He was fond of saying, “There’s a right way and a wrong way” (to just about everything), and I remember him showing my brother and I how to properly hold the handles (“nibs”) and set a rhythm to the cutting. Early cradle scythes appeared in the thirteenth century and are depicted in paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569). These featured a small half-circle loop attached to the base of the handle that caught the entire mowed gavel that was dropped at the end of each stroke for gathering into piles. Some ten swaths by an experienced fieldworker typically provided enough stalks to fashion a sheaf about one foot in diameter, and a long day’s labor with a scythe kept keen could cover from one to two acres depending on field conditions. A customary fieldworker echelon of four reapers followed by a binder could then harvest about five to six acres per day. The improved cradle scythe featuring a long scythe blade connected to four to six long wooden ribs that could hold several swaths eventually appeared in nineteenth century America. Its more substantial cuttings were then dropped in the stubble to be bundled and placed into rows of shocks. Using the more modern method, a single cradler-bundler pair could cover about the same area as the medieval five-member team.

Cradle Scythe (c. 1890), Columbia Heritage Collection

In medieval times, a landowner typically appointed a bailiff to preside over the day-to-day operations of the manor’s agricultural enterprises. Reporting to the bailiff were the reeve (Old English gerefa), the workers’ representative in civil affairs, a hayward (heggeward) responsible for safeguarding fields of hay and grain from theft and roaming livestock, and harvest overseer (“lord”) who urged timely completion in Thomas Tusser’s sixteenth century poem, “The End of Harvest.”

COME home, lord, singing,

Come home, corn bringing.

'Tis merry in hall,

Where beards wag all.

Once had thy desire,

Pay workman his hire:

Let none be beguil'd,

Man, woman, nor child.

Thank God ye shall,

And adieu for all.

 Tusser’s classic was among the most popular printed works in Elizabethean England and reflects his own experience as a small farmer. Some proverbs on thrift and country life that appear in his verse may not have been original with him, but appear for the first time in such writings from the period and also testify to harvest labor and equipment from the time (“Threshe sede and go fanne”). Tusser also offers qualified support to the era’s controversial enclosure of open fields which was widely opposed by rural commoners who had long benefited from access to the commons (“champion farming”). But Tusser saw economic benefits for all from individualized stewardship of natural resources that would improve efficiency and diversify crop production (“More profit is quieter found / Where pastures in severall be; / Of one seely acre of ground / Than champion maketh of three”).

Gleaners and Mowers, Gavellers and Carters

Although few references to gleaning are found in early medieval farm records or literature, the practice was known to parishioners through sermons and readings from biblical texts like Ruth. Agrarian by-laws after the thirteenth century that regulated peasant manorial obligations provide scant evidence that gleaning in the traditional sense was widely practiced. Virtually all able-bodied villagers worked in harvest and received a share of the crop for meagre although sufficient sustenance, and hordes of migratory workers seasonally roamed throughout Europe to meet area labor shortages during the critical weeks of summer. Until the advent of mechanical reapers and threshers in the nineteenth century, the cutting and binding of sheaves could not be done without some loss of the stalks, and more grain fell by the wayside when the sheaves were set into shocks to facilitate drying and gathering onto wagons. Although barley and oats lacked the level of gluten that made wheat the preferred grain for baking, they still offered the poor important sources of nutrition as flatbreads, soups, and other foods. Oats tended to shatter more easily than wheat when ripened and barley stalks could be more brittle, so both crops may have been gleaned to some extent to supplement villagers’ diets.

Johann Schönsperger, Scything and Reaping (1490)

Johann Schönsperger, Teutscher Kalendar (Munich, 1922)

Since landlords sought to turn out their livestock to forage on harvested stubble fields cleared of shocks, gleaners generally had only a week or two to complete their labor. Landowners zealously guarded the harvest from sheaf-stealers, not an uncommon crime at the time, which led to by-laws specifying limits and qualifications for gleaning in the traditional sense. English royal manor instructions of 1282 permit only those incapable of earning any income to glean: “The young, the old, and those who are decrepit and unable to work….” William Blackstone’s Commentary later explains, “By the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean upon another’s ground after the harvest without being guilty of trespass.”

Well into the present era throughout much of Europe, great bands of contract laborers, including both men and women, were led by the overseer who organized teams of workers as if a military operation. Mowers were usually teens (“lads”) and men who wielded sickles, broadhooks, or long-handled scythes and carried whetstones to keep them razor-sharp throughout the day. (The Proto-Indo-European root of the terms “scythe” and “sickle” is sek, also cognate to schism and sex, means to divide, or cut.) The men were followed by gavellers, often wives of the mowers or younger women, who raked the stalks into rows (gavels) for tying into substantial sheaves, or which were left unbound in rows to be thrown with wooden forks by pitchers into horse-drawn wagons. These were driven by carters to large barns and piled and piled by stackers into enormous heaps to await wintertime threshing by flail or horse “treading.”