Bringing home the medieval harvest
This full-page miniature showing people reaping corn, gleaning, harvesting is from folio 8v of the Fécamp Psalter representing the month of August in the calendar. Fécamp Psalter, c. 1180. Manuscript (76 F 13), 160 x 125 mm. Image courtesy of Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague. Public domain.
Bringing home the medieval harvest
September in Medieval Englande was either joyful or worrisome -and it all depended on the harvest. If the weather had been kind over the summer months then you would be celebrating a bountiful harvest. If it had been wet and cold – you would be worrying about the Winter months and already thinking of the coming hunger.
Most people lived on the land. In 1555, London was the largest City in the whole country and still had under 200,000 people – though residents railed about the influx of country people. Landowners had taken back the land to rear sheep for the rapidly growing wool trade. Thousands of people were thrown from their rented cottages and common land and forced to make a meagre living or beg on the streets of the cities. But even with this social change – the land countryside was home to the majority.
Harvest would have begun back in August, with men and women working the fields with scythes and blades to cut down the ripe crops. Wheat, barley and oats would be bound into sheaves - though this was largely women’s work. When dried in the late August sun, the sheaves were loaded on oxen cart and pulled to great barns for storage and processing. This often has a romantic depiction in movies. It was not. With few carts, sheaves were often piled very high and when they fell, people died or faced injury.
When in the barn, the grain processing began. First the threshing, in which the grain was thrashed from the stalk. But nothing was wasted. Stalks were set aside for animal bedding, flooring, basket making and even bedding. With the grain separated, the winnowing began. Using large sieves, the grain was rubbed to separate the outer husk. All of this would be by hand and long hours were spent bend to hard labour and many a sore back made.
The milling in the town mill would start in September and go through October. Mills were small and powered by water or oxen. The miller was a busy man for two months.
With the grain ready for milling, the gathering began – hundreds of people would be out with hand-made baskets, collecting apples, berries, other fruits and also nuts. These were carefully preserved by drying, salting, bottling or making into preserves. Sugar was too expensive and so the equivalent of jam would be made with honey unless in the house of a wealthy man.
September was also the start of the fermenting season. If you were in the West or South East, apples would be gathered and put into huge vats to make cider. Elsewhere, fruits were fermented into drinks. So, when you buy an expensive bottle of fruit wine today for a fancy cocktail, you are buying the basic fare of medieval country folk.
In late September the Harvest Home festivals took over every village. This was a time of celebration, rituals and prayers. Villages and churches were decorated with boughs and other decorations; villagers revelled, shouted, sang and drank their beer and cider. Rituals were delivered to chase away the grain devil and every village made a corn dolly – an elaborate weaving of the last harvested sheaf. Prayers were said and the dolly drenched in water as a charm for spring rain. The sheaf was then carefully stored for first planting the following spring. In the churches, prayers were offered up in thanks for the food gathered. If the harvest was bad – the prayers were for survival through the bitter winter months.
There were also the two religious feast days – Exultation of the Cross on September 9th and the feast of St Matthew on September 21st. Unsurprisingly, St Matthew is the patron saint of tax collectors. And, indeed, this was the season when the church and the landowners started the collection of tithes and taxes to fill their coffers. The people paid in kind (grain) and money only to return to their meagre housing to try to complete any mending before the winds and rain of late Autumn and to prepare for the slaughter season – of which more in a later blog.
It was hard work being a medieval farmer. There was no rest – but the chase to get the harvest gathered, managed and stored was one of the toughest seasons. Little wonder those harvest home festivals were central to their lives – and survive to the modern day.
