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.

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.