Tools & tillage: a journal on the history of the implements of cultivation and other agricultural processes (3.1976/1979)

48

J.A.PERKINS

others the ‘hand-tool revolution’ was excep-
tionally delayed. Yet it is not possible to corre-
late the condition of the labour market with
the early or delayed adoption of the scythe in
place of the sickle or reap-hook. And neither
is it possible to identify any ‘deterioration’ in
the supply of harvest labour from the stand-
point of farmers between 1790 and 1850. In-
stead, it would seem that, both in districts that
pioneered the use of the scythe as a corn-har-
vesting implement and in those in which the
process of diffusion was retarded, the supply
of labour generally improved in favour of
farmers during the first half of the nineteenth
century. Therefore, it is the basic contention
of this essay that the ‘hand-tool revolution’ in
Lincolnshire and the East Riding was over-
whelmingly the result of a combination of
numerous developments, some of which are
mentioned by Collins, in the modes of hus-
bandry of the various farming regions. More-
over, it is argued that regional variations in the
structure of landownership and holdings, and
in soil, topographical and climatic conditions,
retarded or facilitated - and even precluded or
necessitated - the adoption of the scythe as a
corn-harvesting implement.
The Harvest Labour Market and the Diffu-
sion of the Scythe in the Harvesting of Grain
Crops.
During the middle decades of the eighteenth
century farmers in the East Riding and in Lin-
colnshire were amongst the pioneers in the
adoption of the scythe for cutting crops of
cereals, and in certain districts mowing be-
came the standard corn-harvesting method
long before it was widely adopted in other
counties. In the East Riding about the year
1750, according to one source, the practice of
mowing wheat was ‘a new method’ lately
adopted; and Arthur Young observed in the
1760s that it was ‘the custom to mow wheat’ in
the Hull district of the East Riding. By the

close of the century nearly all the oats and
barley produced in the two counties was cut
with the scythe; and in the upland districts of
light soils, consisting of the Wolds of the East
Riding and Lincolnshire and the Lincolnshire
Heath, where a considerable acreage of pas-
ture was brought permanently under the
plough during the French Revolutionary and
Napoleonic wars, the scythe became the
standard implement for harvesting wheat. On
the Wolds, in particular, at least by the 1830s,
it could be said that ‘the scythe has taken the
place of the sickle: all the wheat is mown’
(Stillingfleet cited in Collins: Harvest Techno-
logy 1969, 4j6n; Young 1771 I, 170; British
Husbandry III 107).
In the lowland districts of the two counties,
comprising the claylands of the Vales of York,
Trent and Central Lindsey and “Howden-
shire”, the marshlands of Holderness and
Lincolnshire, and the fens of southern Lin-
colnshire and the Isle of Axholme, the pace of
diffusion of the scythe as a corn-harvesting
implement was remarkably slower than in the
upland districts. Within the former districts
the scythe was earlier and more readily adop-
ted on the claylands, the traditional corn-
growing districts in which the tillage acreage
and cereal yields tended to stagnate during the
first half of the nineteenth century, than in the
marshland districts and more especially the
fens. In the southern parts of the Vale of York
by the early 1790s, it was said to have been ‘the
usual practice to mow oats and barley with the
scythe’. In parts of the Central Vale of Lin-
colnshire adjoining the Wolds, all varieties of
cereals were mown in the early nineteenth
century; although, on the clays and in the
marshland districts generally, farmers were
slow to adopt the scythe for harvesting wheat
- the crop upon which their incomes largely
depended. In gathering wheat in Holderness
during the late 1830s: ‘When the period of
harvest arrives about one-half of the crop is