For those working the land to grow crops, the start of the year was after the harvest was complete, when the first cooler days of autumn came in, before rain turned the fields and tracks to mud, and the winter’s frosts began. This was the time to start preparing arable fields for the growing season next year, with their first ploughing.

Robert Bevan’s The Turn Rice-Plough, Sussex from about 1909 shows two ploughmen turning a plough in a field in the south-east of England. Its title is probably a simple error for turnwrest, a dialect name used in Kent and Sussex to describe any type of one-way plough that needed to be turned at the end of a furrow as shown here.

Depending on the soil, weather and intended crop, this could be the first of more than five sessions with the plough, before the seed could be sown.

Pastures by rivers were often encouraged to flood during the winter, particularly in the month of February Fill Dyke as shown so well in Benjamin Williams Leader’s painting of country near Worcester in 1881. This both improved soil fertility and kept weeds at bay.

Jean-François Millet revisited his successful painting of a sower from fifteen years earlier in two pastel paintings with the same title, The Sower, from around 1865. In the distance to the right are two horses drawing a spike harrow, used following ploughing to prepare the surface of the earth for seed.

Once the young plants were growing vigorously, all that remained for the growing season was to keep them free from weeds, a laborious and back-breaking task commonly assigned to women.

Jules Breton’s The Weeders from 1868 is set in the fields just outside his home village of Courrières, where these labourers are pulling up thistles and other weeds until the moment the light becomes insufficient for them to work any longer.

Farmers with sheep or cattle usually timed the arrival of the lambs and calves for the spring, to give the young animals as much benefit as possible from the fine weather of the summer.

Rosa Bonheur’s Weaning the Calves (1879) is set in a glorious summer Alpine or Pyrenean landscape, with a dry stone herdsman’s hut at the left, where the menfolk lived while they were away from their families during the summer transhumance to upland grazing.

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

In some cattle areas at least, once the Spring lambs and calves had been safely delivered into the care of their mothers, couples took the opportunity to get married, as confirmed by analyses of English parish registers. For those growing crops, though, there was little respite during the growing season, when fields had to be kept free of weeds before harvest.

By the end of the Spring or early summer, sheep and cattle were moved to summer grazing to allow the grass in hay meadows to grow ready for mowing during July or August, depending on the latitude and weather.

Mykola Pymonenko’s undated Haymaking shows women in Ukraine raking in the harvest to be transported by a hay wain drawn by a pair of oxen.

Samuel Palmer’s Shearers from about 1833-35 shows the seasonal work of a shearing gang, relieving these adult sheep of their fleece before the weather became too hot.

Meanwhile, the summer’s grain crop ripened and was ready for harvest.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Harvesters from 1565 includes most of the outdoor stages from cutting the grain using scythes to transporting the harvest by cart for threshing.

Once the harvest was home, demands on the arable farmer eased, and some English parish records show a peak of marriages during the early autumn in areas predominantly farming sheep and grain. This was also the time for the harvest of fruit such as apples.

Camille Pissarro’s overtly Divisionist painting of Apple Picking, Éragny, was largely completed during the autumn of 1887.

This decisive phase of the year is shown well in Evelyn De Morgan’s Cadence of Autumn from 1905, here centred on the fruit harvest. Five women are shown in a frieze, against a rustic background. From the left, one holds a basket of grapes and other fruit, two are putting marrows, apples, pears and other fruit into a large net bag, held between them. The fourth crouches down from a seated position, her hands grasping leaves, and the last is stood, letting the wind blow leaves out from each hand. They wear loose robes coloured in accordance with their phases in the season.

The landscape behind them contains a watermill and surrounding buildings. At the left, the trees are heavy with fruit and the fields either green or ripe corn. At the right, the trees are barren, and the landscape hilly and more wintry. Soft blue-white patches of mist are visible in the foreground on the right. The passing of the season, and the fruit harvest, progresses in time from the left to the right.

By that time, the first fields were being ploughed in preparation for the following year.

Before the nineteenth century, when many farms either concentrated on sheep and arable, or on the raising of cattle, their economies were contrasting. The arable farmer was committed to labour-intensive work and investment throughout the year, with any cash return occurring once the harvest had been sold. Livestock farmers had lower labour requirements for much of the year, with their peak demand during Spring calving, and could spread the sale of animals more evenly over the year, with more immediate returns on their investment. This also enabled those involved in livestock farming to have more free time to engage in crafts and other sidelines.

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.