Trist Families of Devon: Volume 6 The Farming Calendar: Trist Families of Devon, #6

By Peter Trist

If your ancestors were Devon farmers this volume is of great relevance because it explores the activities month by month that took place on most Devon farms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Peter Trist
• Release date: Nov 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9780648499169

Book preview

Description

If your ancestors were Devon farmers this volume is of great relevance because it explores the activities month by month that took place on most Devon farms.

TRIST FAMILIES OF DEVON

Volume 6

The Farming Calendar

TRIST FAMILIES OF DEVON

Volume 6

The Farming Calendar

By Peter J. Trist

Trist Families of Devon:

Volume 6

The Farming Calendar

By Peter J. Trist

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system without written permission of the author, except for the inclusions of brief acknowledged quotations in a review, thesis, article or published work.

The author and publisher have used their best efforts in collecting and preparing material for inclusion in Trist Families of Devon: Volume 6: The Farming Calendar, but do not warrant that the information herein is complete or accurate, and does not assume, and hereby disclaims any liability to any person for any loss or damage caused by errors or omissions in Trist Families of Devon: Volume 6: The Farming Calendar, whether such errors or omissions result from negligence, accident or any other cause.

Copyright 2023 by Peter J. Trist

Published by Australian e-Book Publishers

ISBN-13 978-0-6484991-6-9

CONTENTS OF OTHER VOLUMES IN ‘TRIST FAMILIES OF DEVON’

Vol. 1 Research Methods

Vol. 2 What’s In a Name? An Etymology

Origins of Trist Surname

Vol. 3 Medieval

Vol. 4 Forbears: their Farms & Sidelines

Vol. 5 Their Farmhouses

Vol. 7 Life in a Farming Community

Everyday life in a farming household (diet, clothing, bereavement & re-marriage, size of families, kinship networks, education, parish governance, litigation etc in a village community)

Vol. 8 Local Gentry & Country Parsons

Genealogy for a Trist politician & various churchmen (Charts 2 & 3)

Volume 9 Politics and Trade in Devon

Plus a genealogy of Trist families on Dartmoor & at South Brent

(Charts 4, 4A, 4B & 4C)

Vol. 10 Farewell to Devon:

Genealogical charts for Devon Trists in USA (Charts 8A & 9); Canada (Chart 8), Australia (Charts 6, 6A & 7); New Zealand (Chart 5)

Vol. 11 Selected Documents, Wills & Court Cases

Vol. 12 Trist Names Index

Including Unresearched Family Groups (UFGs)

GENEALOGICAL CHARTS AND NOTES

Genealogical Charts and Notes are located as follows:

Volume 1

Charts 1, 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D (Harberton, Cornworthy, Dittisham, Dartington)

Chart 2 (Harberton and Totnes)

Chart 9 (Philadelphia, USA)

Volume 8

Chart 2 (Harberton)

Chart 3 (Veryan, Cornwall)

Volume 9

Charts 4, 4A, 4B, 4C (South Brent)

Volume 10

(Chart 5 (N.Z.)

Charts 6, 6A (N.S.W. Australia)

Chart 7 (Victoria, Australia)

Chart 8 (Canada & USA)

Chart 8A (USA)

Chart 9 (Philadelphia, USA)

Volume 11

Selected Documents, Wills and Court Records

CONTENTS Vol. 6

Introduction to Vol. 6

Chapter 1 General Features of Devon Agriculture

Chapter 2 Speed the Plough: Daily Life & Work in Farming

Chapter 3 Farm management: Business & Legal Matters

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Bibliography

Endnotes

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS VOLUME 6

Figure 1 Farm worker laying a hedge using long-handled spade

Figure 2 Kiln Farm, Dittisham with a label showing the photograph of Middle Park

Figure 3 Kiln Farm, Dittisham. Same view without label

Figure 4 Fields at Kiln Farm, Dittisham showing three merged fields and others

Figure 5 Two farm workers laying and embanking a hedge

Figure 6 A well-laid hedge

Figure 7 A thatched wood rick outside a farmhouse

Figure 8 Mowing the Vicarage Fields at Seaton in 1909

Figure 9 Three men mowing hay using scythes

Figure 10  Hay making probably in June

Figure 11  Hay-rick making was a social event

Figure 12  Six Devon oxen pulling a wheeled ‘zull’ or plough

Figure 13  Author standing front of a bullock train at Timbertown at Wauchope, New South Wales, Australia in 2003

Figure 14  Bullock team hauling a log at Wauchope, NSW, Australia in 2003

Figure 15  A double ox yoke

Figure 16  Devon ‘one-way’ plough or zull. This one has two hinged mouldboards. Tilted appropriately it could plough to left or right, thus always casting the furrow uphill when contour ploughing

Figure 17  Ploughing ley ground with one of the many varieties of ‘one-way’ plough

Figure 18  Pack saddle with dung pots. These had hinged openings at the bottom and were a universal means of carriage for loose materials

Figure 19  Dittisham Mill Creek with Great Commons (field 244) and Middle Lions Hill (field 246) on the right-hand side at Kiln Farm, Dittisham

Figure 20  Sower Using ‘zillup’ (seedlip)

Figure 21  Aerial photo with labels of the fields (merged) of Great Gratton and Little Gratton mentioned in the text as being harvested

Figure 22  Aerial photo without labels of Great Gratton and Little Gratton

Figure 23  A group of harvesters: the teeth of the large arish rake can just be seen at the men’s feet.

Figure 24  Making an ‘arrish mow’: a small rick built of fifty to sixty sheaves in the corn field

Figure 25  A Vital Link: the Dittisham-Greenway Ferry known locally as the Horse Boat

Figure 26  Cider apples on the floor of a south Devon orchard

Figure 27  West Country metal screw cider-press, dating from the end of the eighteenth century

Figure 28  Trimming the edges of the straw cheese with a hayknife

Figure 29  Pressing cider apples in the Devonshire way about 1883

Figure 30  Traditional wooden cider barrels pictured on p. 31 of Cidermaking by Michael B. Quinion. Barrels of this size were once widely used

Introduction to Volume 6

One of my aims in compiling this history has been to construct, as far as possible, a plausible outline of the daily working life of my forbears. Nearly half of this family history focusses on farming in Devon. This emphasis recognises that farming was the default occupation of most Devon families.

There is, of course, very little direct autobiographical evidence from my own family or from most other farming families. Few people, then or now, think their daily working routine worthy of interest or mention and certainly not worth committing to paper.

Most information on daily working life in the past must therefore be picked up indirectly from material written for another purpose such as letters or farm journals. Few letter or diaries written by members of the yeoman class have survived, and these are fragmentary and scattered. Fortunately, gathering this widely dispersed evidence together has been the work of several historians specializing in the subject and I have made use of their work in compiling this section of the history.

Among these historians is a Devon farmer, Robin Stanes, who farmed at Slapton in the South Hams, during the 1950s when many traditional farming practices were being abandoned at a rapid rate. Some farming practices were disappearing so fast, that Robin realized that his own memories and experiences of a vanishing way of life were assuming genuine historical significance in the sense of an eyewitness or primary historical source. He decided to write a book which would be ‘an attempt to recall and reveal something of that life from personal memories, from talking and listening to farmers and farm workers’, and from extensive reading and some of his own scholarly research.1 Much of this way of life was ‘centuries and maybe millennia old’ and even as recently as the 1950s farmers in Devon were still

using horses, still making hay stacks and corn ricks and thatching them, still cutting and laying hedges and making up banks, still milking by hand, often sitting beside a great fireplace and cooking on an open fire, still raising cream and killing a pig regularly to cure and salt, still eating fat bacon and making and drawing cider, cutting the ashen faggot at Christmas, and drawing water from the well. All these practices were immemorial. Farmers still grew mangolds and swedes as they had been doing for a couple of centuries and getting in the threshing machine to thresh their ricks as they had been doing for eighty and ninety years. The combine was only just taking over. Everyone had a tractor but they were new; a few used the electric fence; silage was still suspect; old farm buildings still served a useful farming purpose; poultry were kept in twenties and thirties and scratched about in the farmyard, instead of by thousands in a battery; pigs by the dozen instead of by hundreds. A dairy herd was large if it was thirty strong, instead of today’s one hundred and fifty. All that has changed almost entirely.2

I am very glad that Robin Stanes, as a historian with real farming experience in Devon, decided to write his book. The Old Farm is full of insights and understandings which made it indispensable in trying to reconstruct the farming life of my forbears. It is also a scholarly work for Stanes has used a wealth of original and contemporary records in his account. Robin was kind enough to offer to read a draft of this chapter. As a result, he has saved me from making many blunders and greatly increased my understanding of past and present farming practices.

I used one major primary source, namely William Marshall’s treatise The Rural Economy of the West of England, written in 1796. William Marshall managed the estate at Buckland Abbey in Devon and thus his work is of direct relevance to the imaginary farm activities I have invented in this volume for Richard Trist who was farming at about the same time at Dittisham.

Another valuable source of information has been a standard work on the English yeoman, Mildred Campbell’s The English Yeoman in the Elizabethan and Stuart Age. Whilst she does not have any direct farming experience of her own, her book complements Stanes’ book well. Her survey of many hundreds of yeoman wills and inventories and other documents, including diaries and farm journals, is extensive and reaches into almost all English counties.

Perhaps the best source for recreating the daily life of our farming forbears is semi-archaeological. Farming was not mechanised as it is today. A collection of hand-tools in a museum of English rural life like that at the University of Reading illustrates the kind of agricultural hand tools which were in daily use by our farming ancestors. The list is almost endless but included:

Special protective shoes for digging

Protective gloves for hedging work

Ingenious seed broadcasting implements

Double-headed hoes

Weeding hooks

Scythes & sickles

Rakes for harvesting and gleaning

Hay knives

Winnowing fans

Turnip choppers for feeding stock

Sharpening batts

Bird-scaring clappers

All these implements and others were commonplace and would have been stored in the farmhouse and in barns ready to be used when needed. Mechanisation and the increasing ownership of tractors and combine harvesters etc has replaced dozens of agricultural hand tools. These are conveniently pictured and explained in Agricultural Hand Tools, a book by Roy Brigden who happens to be the curator of the collection at the University of Reading in England.

In attempting to re-create the daily life and work of my farming ancestors it would have been very helpful to be able to refer to the inventories of farm equipment, animals and crops which would have been listed when each of them died. Unfortunately, all wills and inventories stored in the Devon Record Office were destroyed by enemy bombing in 1942. Only one Trist inventory survived because it had been transferred to a superior court in 1710. This was the will and inventory of Richard Trist of Cornworthy, (1668-1710, Chart 1 No 41.3

A great deal can be learnt from this inventory about Richard’s own farming activities and probably those of his father, Thomas (1619-1702, Chart 1 No 5) and his nephew Richard Trist of Dittisham (1705-1774, Chart 1/55). For this reason I am re-printing it here as a reference point for the discussion of the farming calendar and the daily activities of our farming forbears:

An Inventory of the Goods and Chattles of Richard Trist late of Cornworthy in the County of Devon Deceased

The above list of articles and crops enumerated at Gitcombe for Richard Trist briefly lifts a curtain giving us a rare glimpse into the kind of farming activities pursued by our male forbears.

But Richard Trist’s inventory is also valuable for comparative purposes because his was not the only Devon inventory to survive. Through another quirk of history, 266 wills and inventories from the parish of Uffculme also survived.8 These have been edited and analysed by Robin Stanes and others and thus we can compare these to Richard Trist’s and work out the relative scale of his farming enterprise.9 Using this comparison we can ascertain that Richard Trist of Cornworthy was, like his father Thomas, a very active and enterprising yeoman. I have summarised the results in the table below:

In addition to the crops listed above Richard had another £30 of wheat stored in his barns at Cornworthy and £10 of pease and barley stored in his barns at Harberton. He also had £15 of hay stored in various barns. Considering that this was winter when some of it would already have been consumed by the animals this was a relatively large reserve of hay.

These high figures are surprising because this branch of the Trist family did not seem to own large amounts of freehold land. Outright ownership of land is not easy to determine from the records but I think that the only freehold land owned by Richard Trist’s family would have been the small holding of Thornwell at Dittisham and (probably) Gitcombe Farm at Cornworthy.10 I think that much of the land farmed by Richard Trist and previously, his father Thomas, would have been leasehold.

The surprising scale of Richard Trist’s farming enterprises implies large leasehold acreages. Leaseholds were expensive to buy.11 In the prevailing system of three-life leases the initial payment required was usually much larger than the capital possessed by most yeomen. This purchase money was usually borrowed.

Provided that the borrower had a good reputation as a farmer, there was a network of local people prepared to lend money.12 People in the pastoral age were sometimes simultaneously both lenders and borrowers, which is rather odd to our modern eyes.

Richard Trist was both a lender and a borrower on a large scale. He had (unwisely) lent £400 to his brother Edward for his farm at Fishacre in Ipplepen. Perhaps as a consequence of this reckless loan he had, at his death in 1710, not paid out substantial legacies of £250 and £300 due to his sisters, Elizabeth and Agnes, from their father Thomas’ estate. Nor had he paid them the £100 bequeathed to them by their mother Agnes by her will dated 14 July 1705. Similarly he had not paid them their share of a £160 bequest from Anna Lipscombe of Dittisham.

However, Richard Trist had also borrowed £350 from two members of the local gentry, George Strode Esq. (£250) and Christopher Narracott (£100) both of Dittisham and a further £135 from Henry Vavasour, a grandson of Henry Lane, a merchant of Dartmouth. The interest rate on the Strode loan was five per cent and on the Narracott loan three and a half per cent.13

It is significant that Richard Trist had been able to borrow substantial sums from the local gentry and merchants. His local reputation and standing as a farmer must have been sufficient for his creditors to advance him large sums of money at a reasonable rate of interest.

The reputation of the family itself was also an important consideration and this could only have been enhanced by the high social standing of Richard’s relative, Nicholas Trist (Chart 2/238). Moreover, the family’s future credit worthiness would have been affirmed when Richard’s sisters, Elizabeth and Agnes, after his death in 1710, paid off both the Narracott loan plus interest (£107) and also the Vavasour/Lane loan plus interest totalling £135.

To recoup all this investment in his leasehold farm, the farmer needed to work skilfully to make a profit from his farming activities and any sidelines he might have developed. In Chapter 2 of this volume we shall follow a farmer’s daily work in each season of the year.

But, of course, for our imaginary visit in this book, we shall be taking Nigel Harvey’s advice by