In the more northerly latitudes, grass that’s essential for cattle to graze grows little during the winter months. Farmers keeping cattle therefore have to provide alternative feed for their livestock for several months each year. This can include root crops such as brassica varieties including turnips and swedes (also known as rutabaga), but the most widespread is cut and dried grass as hay.

Where climate and day-length are suitable, as in much of England and France, dedicated hay meadows can provide two harvests each year. Left ungrazed through the winter, the first is normally ready to mow in the late Spring, and when there’s sufficient rainfall during the early summer, a second hay harvest can be obtained before the weather deteriorates in the early autumn. The mowing of hay has also been known as math, and mowing a second time is thus the aftermath or lattermath.

The essential requirement for hay is that it’s dried thoroughly, or it will rot over time and become unusable as fodder. In the centuries before mechanisation during the nineteenth century, this process was described as: first mow the grass, “scatter it about, gather it in windrows, cock it overnight, scatter it about, windrow it, cock it, and so on to the stack and stack it”. (Fussell) Those steps are shown well in paintings.

The companion to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting of the grain harvest, The Hay Harvest from 1565 shows all stages in progress. In the left foreground a man is beating the blade on his scythe to sharpen it ready for mowing. Three women are striding towards him with the rakes they use to scatter and gather the mown hay. Behind them, in the valley, others are gathering the hay into small stacks or cocks, where it continues to dry before being loaded onto the hay wagon to be taken back to the farm.

At the right are wicker baskets containing other crops, including what appear to be peas or beans, together with a red fruit.

Ferdinand Hodler’s marvellous Mower from about 1898 is seen sharpening the blade on his heavy scythe using a whetstone, as the sun rises behind and to the left.

The couple in Jules Bastien-Lepage’s Haymakers from 1877 are enjoying a short break from their labours, with the mown hay behind them still scattered to dry, before it can be raked into cocks.

Henri-Jean Martin painted Summer, or Mowers in 1903, as mechanisation was spreading across Europe. Several small clusters of men are mowing the hay in this meadow with their scythes, as three young women are dancing in a ring on the bed of flowers, and another sits nursing an infant.

Henry Moret’s Haymaking in Brittany from 1906 shows a smaller team busy mowing and raking on steeper ground.

In Camille Pissarro’s Divisionist painting of Haymaking, Éragny from the summer of 1887, a team of women are raking the cocks into haystacks.

Women in this hay meadow in Ukraine are raking in the harvest to be transported by a hay wain drawn by a pair of oxen, as painted in Mykola Pymonenko’s undated Haymaking.

In Jean-François Millet’s Haystacks: Autumn from about 1874, the harvest has been gathered, and three huge haystacks dominate the canvas. At the foot of one of them, a shepherd leans on his staff, resting from his labours as his flock grazes on the stubble.

Surplus hay was also a good cash crop for those who could get it transported to towns and cities. Along the east coast of England, barges were filled with hay then taken to London for sale. Much of the land in the county of Middlesex, to the west of London, was devoted to producing hay to feed horses in the city.

Robert Bevan’s painting of Hay Carts, Cumberland Market from 1915 is a view of London’s last hay market, near to the artist’s studio. By this time, the bales shown were made by mechanical baling machines and brought to London by barge.

In the next article in this series, I’ll look at a novel crop that soon became the staple food for many, the potato.

The climax of the year in arable farming is the harvest, when the sustained labour of the previous year pays off. For the farmer, this is the return on that investment, and for the labourers it’s when they hope to get paid their bonus. It’s the one time of the year when everyone turns to and works from before dawn until well after dusk in a united effort to harvest the ripe crop, before the weather breaks and it might be ruined.

The harvest depends on the crop being grown; as cereals, particularly wheat, were the most important across much of Europe, I’ll here concentrate on the processes required to turn them from ripe plants to grain ready for the miller to grind into flour. This article looks at the first step in that, cutting the crop, bundling it into sheaves and stacking those in stooks.

Current accounts of the grain harvest distinguish several tools used to cut the crop:

• handheld sickle, lightweight and normally with a serrated blade,
• handheld reaping hook, lightweight and with a smooth blade,
• handheld bagging or fagging hook, heavier and with a smooth blade, used in conjunction with a hooked stick or metal pick thank,
• long-handled scythe, heavy and held with both hands, with a smooth blade.

Some claim that reaping using a handheld sickle or hook was used for wheat and rye, but that barley and oats were more usually mown with a larger scythe. Although that doesn’t appear to be accurate, it’s clear that the use of scythes was considerably more efficient. While it took about 4 worker-days to cut an acre of grain using a sickle or hook, using a scythe typically took only 2 worker-days per acre. Scythes appear to have been used almost exclusively by men, while sickles and hooks were used by both men and women.

The tool used also determined the length of straw stalk cut with the head of grain, thus the height of the stubble left on the field. Sickles and hooks were often used when less straw was required, leaving high stubble that might be mown with a scythe later. Low reaping or bagging, or mowing with a scythe, created longer straw that was suitable for thatching.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 shows men cutting a crop of wheat close to the base of the stem using scythes, leaving short stubble. This ensures the best yield of straw as well as grain.

Behind these workers eating bread baked from flour ground from cereal grown in the same fields, cut cereal is tied first into sheaves before they’re gathered into stooks.

Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Garden Still Life, with Implements, Vegetables, Dead Game, and a Bust of Ceres (The Attributes of Hunting and Gardening) from 1774 shows at its left edge a long-handled scythe, and at the right a sickle or reaping hook. Scythes were also used extensively for mowing hay and weeds.

In about 1833, when Samuel Palmer painted his wonderful Harvest Moon near Shoreham in Kent, harvesting went on well into the night. These are mostly women wielding sickles or reaping hooks to cut a small field of wheat. The cut stalks are then formed into stooks and piled onto the oxcart for transport to nearby farm buildings.

Palmer’s mentor John Linnell painted The Harvest Cradle twenty-five years later, in 1859. The harvesters have their backs to the viewer, but appear to be using scythes to cut this wheat crop. Bundles of cut grain are tied as sheaves, then assembled into stooks in the foreground.

Jean-François Millet’s Ceres (The Summer) from about 1864-65 is unusual in that the goddess is shown holding a sickle with a serrated edge, and is surrounded by sheaves of wheat.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s famous Harvesters’ Pay from 1882 shows four harvesters, bearing their heavy-duty scythes, as they await payment by the farmer’s factor, who holds a bag of coins for the purpose. In the right foreground are two tied sheaves of cut wheat, with a lightweight sickle resting on them.

During the nineteenth century some attached cradles to the blade, to make sheaving easier. This is shown in Laurits Andersen Ring’s painting of Harvest. The crop being cut here may well be rye rather than wheat. The artist got his brother to model for this “monument to the Danish peasant” during the summer of 1885, while working on his farm near Fakse, on Sjælland (Zealand), Denmark.

Volodymyr Orlovsky’s Harvest in Ukraine from 1880 shows wheat being cut on the steppe, with the worker in the foreground carrying a scythe, but those cutting in the middle distance bent over as if using hooks instead.

The young woman in Mykola Pymonenko’s portrait of a Reaper from 1889 has been cutting what could be rye or wheat using a heavier bagging hook, although she isn’t using the hooked stick normally required for the technique, so could be using it as a regular reaping hook. The woman behind her demonstrates that these harvesters are cutting low to keep a good length of straw on the harvested crop.

Anna Ancher, wife of Danish painter Michael Ancher, caught this procession of Harvesters on their way to their work in 1905, near her home in Skagen on the north tip of Jylland (Jutland). The leader carries his scythe high as they pass through ripe wheat.

Finally, conventional corn stooks were by no means universal across Europe.

By tradition on Norwegian farms, cut corn (cereal) wasn’t left to dry in low stooks, as in most of Europe and America, but built onto poles. In a series of paintings and prints, Nikolai Astrup developed these Corn Stooks (1920) into ghostly armies standing on parade in the fields, the rugged hills behind only enhancing the feeling of strangeness.

These paintings suggest that, between 1550 and 1890, wheat was generally cut using scythes when suitable men were available. Otherwise, it would be cut using a hook, most likely for reaping rather than bagging. Wheat was normally cut low to preserve the stalk as straw suitable for thatching, then tied into sheaves before being stacked into stooks.

That left the fields ready for gleaning.