So far in this series, I have concentrated on the production of staple cereals such as wheat and rye. The fundamental aim of that arable farming is simply to multiply the number of grains of cereal, so that for each seed sown there are more harvested and delivered as food. Example figures given by Mark Overton for a typical English farm in the early sixteenth century suggest a gross wheat yield of 8-12 bushels per acre (forgive the antiquated units!), for a fixed cost in seed of 2.5 bushels per acre, giving net yields of 5.5-9.5 bushels per acre. By 1854, net yield of wheat had risen to 30 bushels per acre.

Early arable farmers realised that soil quality was key to the efficiency of this process. When seed is sown in soil of high fertility, then harvest yield will be higher. Thin soils were easiest to cultivate but also the quickest to lose their fertility, so farmers had to develop methods for increasing soil fertility to compensate. Among those discovered to be beneficial were:

• ‘resting’ the soil by leaving it fallow and uncultivated;
• growing a nitrogen-fixing crop such as clover or legumes (peas or beans);
• applying fertiliser such as dung.

The first two resulted in systems of crop rotation, a subject I’ll cover in the future. This article looks at one of the most popular methods for delivering fertiliser in the form of animal dung, using sheep, the best mobile source available in much of Europe at the time.

Sheep have other value as farm livestock, providing meat, milk and fleeces, but those were limited relative their value as fertilisers of the soil. During the day, sheep both graze and deposit dung and urine on the ground; at night they stop grazing, but continue to drop dung and urine. Daytime dung therefore fertilises their grazing pastures, while that of the night can be used to fertilise the soil used to grow cereals. The value of the latter was so great that many landowners controlled its rights, known as folding rights, to benefit their own land with sheep dung rather than the soil of their tenants.

Jean-François Millet’s Shepherd Tending His Flock shows thin and scrawny sheep feeding on the stubble left after harvest, common practice in areas with lighter soils where sheep-corn farming became popular.

Anton Mauve’s Return of the Flock (1886-7) shows a small flock of unshorn ewes with young lambs, in the late Spring or early summer, possibly on the move to or from folding.

This engraving by Welby Sherman from one of Samuel Palmer’s sketches in his Shoreham sketchbooks, Evening (1834), shows a small flock in a fold at night, where they’re fertilising the soil as the shepherd dozes behind them.

The most famous of Millet’s few nocturnes, The Sheepfold, Moonlight from 1856-60, shows a shepherd working his dogs to bring his flock into a fold or pen on the plain near Barbizon. He is doing this under a waning gibbous moon lighting the backs of the sheep.

Strangely, folding of sheep as a mobile source of dung as fertiliser was widely practised across England, but almost unknown in the Low Countries including the Netherlands. As a practice it could compromise the value of sheep for other purposes. Those grazing on rolling chalk downs in daytime might have to walk several miles each day to drop their dung overnight in arable fields in the valley, and return, so fattening less for slaughter.

Sheep could also be driven longer distances to market, as shown in Constant Troyon’s On the Way to Market from 1859.

Heinrich Bürkel’s Shepherds in the Roman Campagna from 1837 has an almost documentary quality, in the rough and dusty peasants slumped on their horses and donkeys. In the foreground a couple of ewes are looking up at their lambs being carried in a pannier, and a dog is challenging a snake by the roadside.

In areas where domestic animals moved between highland pastures for the summer, and lowland grazing for the winter, including much of Spain, sheep could cover great distances each year in the transhumance.

Realising the value of their fleeces required annual shearing by hand.

The Shearers (c 1833-35) is the most ambitious of Samuel Palmer’s works from his period at Shoreham. This shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, in a sophisticated composition drawing the gaze to the brilliant and more distant view beyond. The curious collection of tools to the right was the subject of preparatory sketches, and seems to have been carefully composed. However they have defied any symbolic interpretation, and may just ‘look right’.

Millet’s Sheep Shearing from about 1854 shows the highly skilled task of hand-shearing the fleece from a sheep. A man holds the animal still, resting over the end of a large barrel. A woman is using hand shears to cut the fleece from the sheep, as was universal before the introduction of machine shearing from 1888. Even with highly skilled hands, this is a difficult process, and it’s hard to remove the complete fleece. In some parts of the world, itinerant shearing teams would have performed this task, but for small flocks on poor farms it had to be carried out by those working the farm.

Fleeces generated the wool trade, centred on towns and cities that grew rich from the proceeds of wool and its weaving into fabrics. Ports specialising in the import and export of wool flourished around the coasts of Europe, and prosperous and powerful families made their fortunes from fleeces sheared on farms hundreds or even thousand of miles away.

In this period, one of the natural predators of sheep, the Eurasian wolf, was hunted to extinction in much of Western Europe. Pieter Brueghel the Younger’s The Good Shepherd from 1616 shows a shepherd being attacked by a wolf, as he tries to save his flock, which are running in panic into the nearby wood.

Other parts of the British Isles saw rural areas stripped of their human, farming populations, only to be replaced by sheep. William Watson’s Highland Wanderers – Morning Glen Croe, Argyllshire (1906) shows a valley in the middle of the Arrochar ‘Alps’, an exceptionally rugged mountainous area of the Cowal Peninsula, to the north-west of Loch Lomond in Scotland. By this time, the Highland Clearances had driven most of the human population into the cities further south, or to flee overseas as migrants.

Next week I’ll conclude this account in paintings of arable farming by considering cash crops, such as flax and madder.

At the end of the Calydonian boar hunt, what should have been an occasion for rejoicing turned sour when the two sons of Thestius objected to Atalanta being given the prize, and the enraged Meleager ran them both through with his sword. This leads Ovid on to describe the strange death of Meleager, following that with a series of stories told at a feast hosted by the river god Achelous.

When Meleager’s mother Althaea first hears of his success in killing the boar, she gives thanks to the gods. She then learns that he has also killed her two brothers, and is plunged into profound grief, and anger at her son. She determines to avenge the deaths of her brothers, and recalls that when Meleager was born, the Fates gave her a burning log they said would determine the life of her child: he would live as long as that log remained, and wasn’t consumed by fire. As soon as the Fates had gone, Althaea took the log from the fire, extinguished its flame, and kept it in a safe place, so preserving her son’s life.

She now decides to throw that log of life onto a fire of her hatred. Four times she tries to throw the log onto the flames and cannot bring herself to do it. She lets loose a long soliloquy (one of Ovid’s finest) in which she frames her dilemma, then finally throws the log on the fire, where it’s rapidly consumed.

Meleager doesn’t know what is happening, only that he has a deep internal burning pain. As he groans, he calls for his mother, brothers, and sisters in his suffering, and dies with his sisters at his side. Two of Meleager’s sisters are thus transformed into birds, most probably guinea hens.

This marble relief from a Roman sarcophagus shows the Death of Meleager using multiplex narrative. At the right, Meleager has killed one of the sons of Thestius, and is about to kill the other. In the centre, he lies on a couch, in the throes of death, his sisters beside him. At the left, his mother Althaea throws a log or brand onto the fire to bring about her son’s death.

By comparison, François Boucher’s The Death of Meleager from 1727 is more formulaic. Meleager is ailing fast on the left, his family and friends around him. One sister at the right is apparently being fondled quite inappropriately by the man behind her. Although there is a figure in the centre background who might be Althaea, there’s no clear visual reference to the burning log.

Ovid then moves on to the next set of stories, which take place during Theseus’ journey home after the boar hunt. It has been raining very heavily and the rivers are swollen when he reaches the River Achelous, whose river god invites Theseus to pause with him until his waters have fallen. Theseus accepts this invitation, and is taken to a hut made of pumice and volcanic tufa, with a damp and mossy floor, and a ceiling decorated with conch and murex shells. There Achelous hosts a banquet, his guests being Theseus, Ixion’s son Lelex, and others, who recline on couches as they feast.

Theseus looks out and sees an island which he doesn’t recognise. Achelous informs him that it’s actually five islands, the Echinades. They had been five nymphs, who had sacrificed ten bullocks to the gods, but forgot to invite Achelous. The river god raged in anger, and washed them out to sea, where they formed those islands. Achelous points out one island in the distance which is dear to him, and named Perimele: she had been a nymph beloved by Achelous, but had lost her virginity. Her father Hippodamas was so incensed that he threw her from a cliff. Achelous saved her, and called on Neptune to turn her into an island too.

Hendrick de Clerck’s The Banquet of Achelous was probably the first of a run of depictions of this myth in the seventeenth century, and was painted in about 1610. The four men are feasting, sat around a table rather than reclining in Roman style. The rock pergola surrounding them is suitably decorated with shells, and a bevy of bare-breasted young women serve seafood and fruit. In the distance, to the right, nymphs are cavorting in a bay, a delightful reference to Achelous’ story of the creation of the Echinades.

Jan Brueghel the Younger and Hendrick van Balen combined talents to paint The Feast of Achelous slightly later, by about 1620. It follows a similar composition to de Clerck’s painting, but is reversed, with the distant nymphs on the left. (I apologise for the poor quality of this image.)

At about the same time, around 1615, Peter Paul Rubens collaborated with Jan Brueghel the Elder (father of Jan Brueghel the Younger) in The Feast of Achelous. There are now nine men around the table, and the distant nymphs are nowhere to be seen.

At some time during the first half of the seventeenth century, a painter from Rubens’ school made this rather less convincing and closer composition of The Banquet of Achelous. The stone hut has closed in on the group, and the distant landscape views are gone. The arrangement is reminiscent of the Last Supper or a New Testament wedding feast, with the figure of Theseus presiding, even down to a loaf of bread on the table, and wine being poured. There is precious little to link this painting with Ovid’s story of the Echinades.

After Achelous has told this story, Lelex starts the next, of Philemon and Baucis, one of Ovid’s most touching myths, which doesn’t appear in any other source.

The architect and artificer Daedalus had been introduced by Ovid in his account of the death of the Minotaur, and the next myth in Metamorphoses tells of the tragic end to Daedalus’ stay on the island of Crete, where he and his son Icarus had effectively been imprisoned since the construction of the labyrinth that had confined the minotaur. Much as Daedalus yearned to leave the island and King Minos, there was no hope of him departing by sea, so he decided to take to the air.

Daedalus built two sets of wings made from feathers held together by beeswax. Once they were completed, he tested his by hovering in the air. He then cautioned his son to fly a middle course: neither so low that the sea would wet the feathers and make them heavy, nor so high that the heat of the sun would damage them. He also told Icarus to follow his lead, and not to try navigating by the stars.

Daedalus fitted his son with his wings, and gave him further advice about how to fly with them. He shed tears as he did that, and his hands trembled. Once they were both ready, Daedalus kissed his son, and flew off in the lead just like a bird with its fledgeling chick in tow.

Towards the end of his career in Rome in 1645-46, the great French painter Charles Le Brun painted Daedalus and Icarus. This shows the master artificer fastening wings made of feathers and wax on his son’s back, prior to their escape from Crete.

Andrea Sacchi’s Daedalus and Icarus (c 1645) shows Daedalus at the left, fitting Icarus’ wings, prior to the boy’s flight. Icarus has his right arm raised to allow the fitting, and looks intently at his new wings. Daedalus is concentrating on adjusting the thin ribbons passing over his son’s shoulders, and may be explaining to him the importance of flying at the right altitude.

Anthony van Dyck’s Daedalus and Icarus (1615-25) shows Daedalus giving his son the vital pre-flight briefing. From the father’s gestures, he is here explaining the importance of keeping the right altitude.

Frederic, Lord Leighton’s Icarus and Daedalus (c 1869), shows the pair on the roof of a tower overlooking the coast. Daedalus is fitting his son’s wings, and looks up at Icarus. The boy holds his right arm up, partly to allow his father to fit the wings, and possibly in a gesture of strength and defiance, as the two will shortly be escaping from Crete. Icarus looks to the right, presumably towards their mainland destination, and Daedalus is wearing a curious scalp-hugging cap intended for flight.

Charles Paul Landon’s (1760–1826) Icarus and Daedalus (1799) shows the moment that Icarus launches into flight from the top of the tower, his arms held out and treading air with his legs during this first flight. Daedalus stands behind, his arms still held horizontally forward from launching his son.

The pair flew over a fisherman holding his rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook, and a ploughman with his plough, amazing them with the sight. They flew past Delos and Paros, and approached further islands, but Icarus started to enjoy the thrill of flying too much, and soared too high. As he neared the sun, the wax securing the feathers in his wings softened, and his wings fell apart.

As Icarus fell from the sky, he called to his father, before entering the water in what’s now known in his memory as the Icarian Sea, between the Cyclades and the coast of modern Turkey. All Daedalus could see were the feathers, remnants of wings, on the surface of the water.

Rubens’ initial oil sketch of The Fall of Icarus (1636) above, was presumably turned into a finished painting by his apprentice Jacob Peter Gowy, below. Icarus, his wings in tatters and holding his arms up as if trying to flap them, plunges past Daedalus. The boy’s mouth and eyes are wide open in shock and fear, and his body tumbles as it falls. Daedalus is still flying, though, his wings intact and fully functional; he looks towards the falling body of his son in alarm. They are high above a bay containing people with a fortified town at the edge of the sea.

Merry-Joseph Blondel’s spectacular painted ceiling showing The Sun or the Fall of Icarus (1819) combines a similar view of Daedalus flying onward, and Icarus in free fall, with Apollo’s sun chariot being driven across the heavens.

Joos de Momper’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c 1565), above, show Icarus’ descent within a much bigger landscape, including some of Ovid’s finer details:

• an angler catching a fish with a rod and line,
• a shepherd leaning on a crook,
• a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough.

To aid the viewer, de Momper has painted their clothing scarlet.

De Momper may also have made the copy, below, of Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Here, Brueghel makes the viewer work harder to see the crucial elements of the story: all there is to be seen of Icarus are his flailing legs and some feathers, by the stern of the ship at the right. Daedalus isn’t visible at all, but the shepherd leaning on his crook is looking up at him, up to the left. As in de Momper’s own version, Brueghel also shows the ploughman and the angler.

Vlaho Bukovac (Biagio Faggioni) (1855–1922) painted two different versions of Icarus reaching earth: in The Fall of Icarus (1898), one panel of a diptych about this story, he shows Icarus on the seabed, as he drowns, the remains of his wings still visible.

His earlier Icarus on the Rocks (1897) departs from Ovid’s account and has Icarus crash onto rocks; his posture is similar in the two paintings.

Finally, Herbert Draper’s (1863–1920) Lament for Icarus (1898) shows an apocryphal and more romantic view, in which three nymphs have recovered the apparently dry body of Icarus, and he is laid out on a rock while they lament his fate to the accompaniment of a lyre. Perhaps influenced by contemporary thought about human flight, Draper gives Icarus huge wings, and those are shown intact, rather than disintegrated from their exposure to the sun’s heat.

Daedalus was full of remorse, and buried his son’s body on the nearby island. As he was digging his son’s grave, a solitary partridge watched him from a nearby oak tree. The partridge had originally been Daedalus’ nephew, who had been brought to him as an apprentice. As the nephew’s skills and ingenuity grew, Daedalus became envious of him, seeking to kill him and pretend it had been an accident. When Daedalus threw him from the roof of her temple on the Acropolis, Pallas Athena saved the apprentice by transforming him into a partridge in mid-air. The bird still remembers being saved from its fall, and to this day won’t fly far above the ground.

In the past, hospitality to strangers was high on the list of virtues expected of everyone, however rich or poor they might have been. To ensure that those living in the ancient world respected the code of hospitality, there were several myths to help guide the mind. Today I look at how paintings of those myths have communicated the need to be hospitable, and tomorrow’s sequel will look at more recent religious and moral teaching.

The first myth is brief, part of the saga of Perseus and Andromeda, but memorable.

After Perseus has beheaded the gorgon Medusa, he flies over the desert sands of Libya, the blood still dripping from Medusa’s head and falling onto the sand to form snakes. With dusk approaching, he decides to set down in the lands of the giant Atlas. He introduces himself to Atlas, including explanation of his divine paternity, and asks for rest and lodging for the night.

The giant, mindful of a prophecy that a son of Jupiter will ruin him, rudely refuses his request, and starts to wrestle with his spurned guest. Perseus responds by offering him a gift, then, taking care to avert his own face, points Medusa’s face at Atlas, who is promptly transformed into a mountain.

In Edward Burne-Jones’ Atlas Turned to Stone (1878) the giant has been turned to stone and now stands bearing the cosmos on his shoulders as Perseus flies off to Aethiopia.

The definitive classical myth stressing the importance of showing hospitality is the story of Philemon (husband) and Baucis (wife), as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book 8. This pious elderly couple live in a town in Phrygia, now west central Anatolia, in Turkey. One day, two ordinary peasants walked into the town, looking for somewhere to stay for the night. Everyone else rejected them, but when they asked this couple, who were among the poorest inhabitants and had but a simple rustic cottage, they were welcomed in. Philemon and Baucis served their guests food and wine, and when they realised they were entertaining gods, the couple raised their hands in supplication and craved indulgence for their humble cottage and fare.

Revealing themselves as the gods Jupiter/Zeus and Mercury/Hermes, the guests told them to leave town, as it was about to be destroyed, together with all those who hadn’t offered them hospitality. The gods then took the couple out to climb a mountain, telling them not to look back until they had reached the top. Once at the summit, they turned to see the town obliterated by a flood; their cottage had been spared, turned into a temple, and Philemon and Baucis were made its guardians.

Adam Elsheimer, in his small oil on copper painting Jupiter and Mercury with Philemon and Baucis (1609-10), shows Philemon (right) and Baucis (centre right) giving their hospitality generously to Jupiter (left) and Mercury (centre left), in their tiny, dark cottage. All four are depicted in more contemporary dress, although Mercury’s winged helmet is an unmistakeable clue as to his identity. Their modest stock of food is piled in a basket in the right foreground, and a goose is just distinguishable in the gloom at the lower edge of the painting, below Mercury’s feet.

David Rijckaert, in his Philemon and Baucis Giving Hospitality to Jupiter and Mercury, gives what has become the most popular depiction: Mercury (left) and Jupiter (left of centre) seated at the table, with Philemon (behind table) and Baucis (centre) waiting on their every need, ensuring that they eat and drink their fill. Baucis has almost caught their evasive goose, and an additional person is shown in the background preparing and serving food for the gods.

Rembrandt’s Baucis and Philemon (1658) shows Jupiter (looking decidedly Christlike) and Mercury (the younger, almost juvenile, figure) sat at the table of a very dark and rough cottage, lit by a lamp behind Mercury.

Philemon and Baucis are crouched, chasing their evasive goose towards Jupiter. A humble bowl of food is in the centre of the table, and there is a glass of what appears to be beer. As is usual in Rembrandt’s narrative paintings, he dresses them in contemporary rather than historic costume.

The moral here doesn’t need to be spelled out any further: fail in your duty to offer hospitality to strangers and the gods may end your life. Another myth told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses isn’t quite as damning. Instead of death, you could be turned into a frog instead. So says Ovid’s account of the Lycians who shunned the goddess Leto when all she needed was a drink of water.

Fearing reprisals from the jealous Hera (Juno), when Leto (Latona) is about to give birth to her twins, she flees to Lycia, at the western end of the south coast of modern Turkey. This was a centre for Leto’s worship, but at some stage the goddess must have become scorned by those living in the country there.

When the twins, Diana and Apollo, had drunk Leto’s milk and she was dry and thirsty under the hot sun, she saw a small lake among marshes, where local peasants were cutting reeds. She went down and was about to drink from the lake when those locals stopped her. Leto told them that drinking the water was a common right, and that she only intended to drink and not to bathe in it.

The locals continued to prevent her, threatening her and hurling insults. They then stirred up the mud on the bottom of the lake, to muddy the water, incurring the goddess’s anger and causing her to curse them to remain in that pool forever as frogs. It’s this transformation that forms the basis for the many paintings of this myth.

Annibale Carracci’s Latona and the Lycian Peasants probably from 1590-1620 is the first truly masterly painting of this myth. Latona is here placing her curse on the locals, and behind them one appears to have already been transformed into a frog. Although the babies’ heads are disproportionately small (as was the case for several centuries), they and their mother are very realistically portrayed, and contrast markedly with the uncouth and obdurate locals.

Jan Brueghel the Elder’s panel showing Latona and the Lycian Peasants (1595-1610) is one of the finest depictions. Set in a dense forest, surely inappropriate for Lycia, the locals are busy cutting reeds and foraging. Leto, at the bottom left, is seen remonstrating with a peasant, over to the right. As the detail below shows, the goddess is in need, as are her babies. The peasant closest to her, brandishing his fist, is already rapidly turning into a frog. There are many other frogs around, including a pair at the bottom left corner, near the feet of one of the babies.

David Teniers the Younger’s Latona and the Frogs from around 1640–50 isn’t in the same class as Brueghel’s, but still tells the story well, and shows Lycians being transformed for refusing to help the goddess.

François Lemoyne’s Latona and the Peasants of Lycia (1721) stops short of showing the metamorphosis or resulting frogs, but Latona and the peasants are clearly engaged in their dispute.

The story survived in narrative painting well into the latter half of the nineteenth century, when Gabriel Guay, an eminent former pupil of Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted his Latona and the Peasants (1877). Leto and her babies now seem not just real but almost contemporary, minimising her divinity.

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.

By 1500, towns remained small throughout Europe. These days, a populated area with up to twenty thousand inhabitants is recognised as a small town or large village; France had only fourteen towns larger than that, and England had just one, London. The contrast between urban and rural life is illustrated well by some of the most remarkable frescoes from before the Renaissance, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena in 1338-39.

These frescoes for the Council Room are overt social and political commentary forming a lesson in civics. In six different scenes, he shows allegories and examples of good and bad government in the city and country. The Effects of Good Government in the City (1338-39) is modelled after Siena, and intended to illustrate peaceful prosperity resulting from wise politics. There are no beggars, no street crime. Life is peaceful and orderly, and the citizens are prosperous and healthy. During its golden age before the Black Death in 1348, Siena reached a population of fifty thousand, huge by the standards of the day, and similar to its present size.

Essential to the prosperity of the city were the Effects of Good Government in the Countryside (1338-39), where crops were grown and livestock farmed to feed the city and provide materials for its trade. This is a neat, almost manicured countryside with a patchwork of fields, and all the peasants fully occupied and working hard.

Almost all farms combined the rearing of livestock such as cattle with the production of cereals and vegetables, and few were able to specialise in either, or in a single crop. Almost all had the joint tasks of feeding locals at a subsistence level and trying to grow a surplus to sell into the city.

Key to the growing of crops was soil quality. The only fertiliser available to increase soil nutrients came from livestock, and the only way to prepare the soil to give the best yields was ploughing. Little land at this time had any form of drainage, so in many parts of Europe it was wet for much of the year. That made the soil heavy, particularly if it was clay, and ploughing was used to break the soil up into a fine tilth, and to build that into ridges and furrows to help it drain.

This is shown in the foreground of this copy, possibly painted by de Momper, of Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus from about 1558. Although its landscape is fictitious, the ploughman in the foreground appears true to life, and his plough typical of much of Europe at that time, as shown in the detail below.

At the very front of the plough is a small jockey wheel, behind which is a vertical metal blade, the coulter or skeith, whose task is to cut into the ground just ahead of the share, a wooden board that turns the surface of the earth to one side. The effect on the ground is to cut furrows into its surface and turn the soil onto ridges. When repeated five or more times over the course of the autumn and winter, this could build ridges high enough for the water to drain into the furrows, and coupled with the action of ground frost could break up even heavy clays into a tilth ready for sowing in the Spring.

An interesting detail revealed in Brueghel’s painting is how the course of the plough is curved, and swings wide to make the turn, as I explained in the introduction to this series last week.

Ploughing required considerable pulling power, usually delivered by a team of oxen, generally bullocks (castrated males), rather than horses. Where the soil was heavy going, a team of six or even eight were required. Even after the introduction of the heavy mould-board or turning plough in the eighteenth century, it wasn’t unusual to see large teams still in use.

Rosa Bonheur’s Ploughing in Nevers, painted in 1849, shows two teams of six oxen each drawing more modern mould-board ploughs through heavy soil to build high ridges.

Further improvements in plough design and possibly lighter soil enabled the reduced team seen in Eugène Burnand’s Ploughing in the Jorat in 1916, with a single horse leading a pair of oxen.

By 1931, when Grant Wood painted Fall Plowing, the recently-developed walking plough had a steel ploughshare, bringing a major advance in cultivating the prairie in Iowa. By this time many farms had started to replace their horses and oxen with tractors, a subject I’ll return to later in this series.

Ploughing was arduous work for all concerned, and working even relatively small areas of arable land was time-consuming. In more northerly latitudes, winter days are short, and it wasn’t easy to find sufficient daylight to plough enough land five times over for the following year’s crops. Arable farming demanded a great deal of time and effort year-round.