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

i8o

S.MACDONALD

threshing machines rather than shorten the
lives of their horses in wheelhouses (Hender-
son 227), itinerant threshing machines would
have been less likely to travel to areas where
the terrain was difficult, the farms dispersed
and the arable acreage small. It would seem, in
the absence of contrary evidence, that these
highland threshing machines may well be of
the later 19th century, some of the latest to
have been built in the country (Harvey 153)
and among the last to remain functional (NC
21lf> 1844; Ritchie 28).
The comparative shortage of wheelhouses
in the north of the county is attributable to the
large farm size in that region, but this is only a
partial explanation (Hellen 148). More im-
portant is the factor evident on Figures 8, 9
and 10, that most threshing machines in this
area were water-powered and required no
wheelhouse.6

Fig. 14. One of the many surviving Northumber-
land wheelhouses, built to shelter horses and
horse-works.


Eines der vielen in Northumberland bewahrten
Pferdegbpel-Hauser, erbaut, um Pferde und
»horse-works« zu beschiitzen.

Tenant and Landlord. The Northumberland
threshing machine was, almost without excep-
tion, static until the second half of the 19th
century. Elsewhere, there was often consider-
able doubt as to whether such static machines
were fixtures and therefore the property and
responsibility of the landlord. In Essex in
1848, one main reason tenants had not intro-
duced fixed threshing machines was said to be
because they could then have been claimed by
the landlord as fixtures, without compensa-
tion to the tenant (RSCAC 122). In Lincoln-
shire, such machines would apparently have
had to have been physically split between
landlord and tenant (RSCAC 23). North-
umberland evidence suggest that local tradi-
tion had declared that, no matter how fixed, a
threshing machine was not a fixture and
would remain the property of the tenant if he
had supplied it (RSCAC 194). Even buildings
associated with the threshing machine re-
mained the tenant’s property.
Sometimes threshing machines were built

by the landlord and this was occasionally
stated in advertisements (NC 1832). The
Greenwich Hospital Commissioners were
especially keen to build threshing machines.
Of the 15 mentioned as having been built on
the estate between 1805 and 1815, 12 had been
provided by the Hospital - each at 8 % interest
payable by the tenant (NCRO/NRO/
467/42/3). This represented something of
a change of policy; of the 12 machines con-
structed by 1805, the owners of which are
discernible, only 3 had been built by the Hos-
pital (NCRO/NRO/467/42/2). The Visita-
tion Report of 1817 suggest that the gener-
osity of this landlord was exceptional and that
if it was to continue then rather more than 8 %
should be demanded (PRO/ADM/79/59/
435-36). It, therefore, seems clear that the role
generally played by the Northumberland
landlord was the not unimportant one of
establishing and accepting a situation of lim-
ited tenant right: the actual provision of the
threshing machine seens generally to have