DOI Artikel:
Collins, Edward John T.: The diffusion of the threshing machine in Britain, 1790-1880
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.48999#0030
28
E. J. T. COLLINS
stick’, parish authorities paid a subsidy to far-
mers who consented to use it (Evans 85). As
one Northamptonshire farmer explained: -
‘Threshing by the flail is a very tedious opera-
tion, but living in a populous parish where
there has ever been a want of employment for
the labourers, I have never made use of the
machine, excepting at those times when my
men had rather do anything else than thresh
with the flail’ (Caird 84, Hillyard 48-49). The
‘open’ parish, with its faster expanding popula-
tion and greater volume of winter unemploy-
ment, may have had less discretion as to choice
of technology than the ‘closed’ parish where
population growth was more rigorously cur-
tailed and continuous employment more the
rule.
The Swing Riots of 1830 brought home the
fact, generally admitted, but not always strictly
observed, that the parish was a closely inte-
grated socio-economic unit, within which it
was often not possible to reconcile the interests
of capital and labour without a certain oppor-
tunity cost to the farmer. As an outcome of
the Riots, and to placate the labourers, many
farmers voluntarily laid their machines aside,
or were instructed to do so by their landlords
(Hobsbawm & Rude 233-36).
On his part the labourer preferred work to
parish relief. In hard times the threshing-floor
was his ‘little freehold’, and the flail his symbol
of independence. He opposed the machine not
out of any special affection for the flail, for
hand-threshing was hard, monotonous and
dusty work, but because it infringed upon the
rights of labour. When submerged in the mo-
rass of parish relief he derived little comfort
and much resentment from the knowledge that
the machine ‘extracted from their masters and
the public benefit ten per cent more corn than
they [the labourers] could hammer out with
their free arms’ (Hammonds 245). He reason-
ed, correctly, that unless the money saved by
the machine was used to create other work on
the farm, the raising of labour productivity
at the one point meant less work and reduced
earnings at another. He preferred slow work
and low wages because it made for more con-
tinuous employment.
The more rapid spread of the threshing ma-
chine after 1835 was closely correlated with an
expanding on-farm demand for labour, and
more critically, from 1850, with the fast rising
tide of rural migration and declining agricul-
tural labour force. The New Poor Law of
1834 may also have helped generate employ-
ment because, with casual outdoor relief now
curtailed, employers more often found it
cheaper to carry a man than to support him
and his family in the workhouse. Large reduc-
tions in winter unemployment (and in Poor
Law expenditure) were reported from many
areas of eastern and southern England in the
late 1830s; in five Norfolk Unions, for ex-
ample, numbers of able-bodied males receiving
relief fell by 20 per cent between 1835 and
1840, and Poor Law expenditure by almost
25 per cent( Collins thesis 179-99, Bacon 162-
98). The position may have deteriorated some-
what in the 1840s, but in 1849 the Raynbirds
were extolling the very much improved con-
dition of the Suffolk labourer, while in North-
amptonshire, a notorious Old Poor Law black-
spot, there were then only a few young la-
bourers out of v/ork in winter, where previ-
ously as many as 30-40 families a village had
been permanently on relief (Raynbirds 286,
Bream 89-90).
Generally speaking, employers took the les-
sons of 1830 to heart and were still applying
them in the 1860s and beyond. It was perhaps
fear of ‘overkill’ that induced a number of
them to experiment with hand-threshing ma-
chines in the 1840s. For the same reason, that
is, to avoid displacing too much labour too
quickly, many farmers initially threshed only
their wheat by machine while retaining the
more labour-consuming flail for barley and
E. J. T. COLLINS
stick’, parish authorities paid a subsidy to far-
mers who consented to use it (Evans 85). As
one Northamptonshire farmer explained: -
‘Threshing by the flail is a very tedious opera-
tion, but living in a populous parish where
there has ever been a want of employment for
the labourers, I have never made use of the
machine, excepting at those times when my
men had rather do anything else than thresh
with the flail’ (Caird 84, Hillyard 48-49). The
‘open’ parish, with its faster expanding popula-
tion and greater volume of winter unemploy-
ment, may have had less discretion as to choice
of technology than the ‘closed’ parish where
population growth was more rigorously cur-
tailed and continuous employment more the
rule.
The Swing Riots of 1830 brought home the
fact, generally admitted, but not always strictly
observed, that the parish was a closely inte-
grated socio-economic unit, within which it
was often not possible to reconcile the interests
of capital and labour without a certain oppor-
tunity cost to the farmer. As an outcome of
the Riots, and to placate the labourers, many
farmers voluntarily laid their machines aside,
or were instructed to do so by their landlords
(Hobsbawm & Rude 233-36).
On his part the labourer preferred work to
parish relief. In hard times the threshing-floor
was his ‘little freehold’, and the flail his symbol
of independence. He opposed the machine not
out of any special affection for the flail, for
hand-threshing was hard, monotonous and
dusty work, but because it infringed upon the
rights of labour. When submerged in the mo-
rass of parish relief he derived little comfort
and much resentment from the knowledge that
the machine ‘extracted from their masters and
the public benefit ten per cent more corn than
they [the labourers] could hammer out with
their free arms’ (Hammonds 245). He reason-
ed, correctly, that unless the money saved by
the machine was used to create other work on
the farm, the raising of labour productivity
at the one point meant less work and reduced
earnings at another. He preferred slow work
and low wages because it made for more con-
tinuous employment.
The more rapid spread of the threshing ma-
chine after 1835 was closely correlated with an
expanding on-farm demand for labour, and
more critically, from 1850, with the fast rising
tide of rural migration and declining agricul-
tural labour force. The New Poor Law of
1834 may also have helped generate employ-
ment because, with casual outdoor relief now
curtailed, employers more often found it
cheaper to carry a man than to support him
and his family in the workhouse. Large reduc-
tions in winter unemployment (and in Poor
Law expenditure) were reported from many
areas of eastern and southern England in the
late 1830s; in five Norfolk Unions, for ex-
ample, numbers of able-bodied males receiving
relief fell by 20 per cent between 1835 and
1840, and Poor Law expenditure by almost
25 per cent( Collins thesis 179-99, Bacon 162-
98). The position may have deteriorated some-
what in the 1840s, but in 1849 the Raynbirds
were extolling the very much improved con-
dition of the Suffolk labourer, while in North-
amptonshire, a notorious Old Poor Law black-
spot, there were then only a few young la-
bourers out of v/ork in winter, where previ-
ously as many as 30-40 families a village had
been permanently on relief (Raynbirds 286,
Bream 89-90).
Generally speaking, employers took the les-
sons of 1830 to heart and were still applying
them in the 1860s and beyond. It was perhaps
fear of ‘overkill’ that induced a number of
them to experiment with hand-threshing ma-
chines in the 1840s. For the same reason, that
is, to avoid displacing too much labour too
quickly, many farmers initially threshed only
their wheat by machine while retaining the
more labour-consuming flail for barley and