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.

Ancient farmers discovered that repeatedly growing the same crop on the same plot of land soon led to falling yields and crop failure. We now understand this is the result of falling soil fertility: as successive harvests extract nitrogen and other essentials from the soil, without their replenishment there’s none for the plants to incorporate into their fruit or seed. Although animal fertiliser could compensate to some extent, the only solution was to ‘rest’ that land, to allow its soil fertility to be restored.

In southern Europe, including lands bordering the Mediterranean, crop rotation had been adopted by classical times, and was described by the Roman poet Virgil. This typically followed a two-year cycle:

• In one year, the plot would be ploughed and sown, sometimes in both Spring and autumn, to grow crops for harvest.
• The following year, that plot would be left unused, lying fallow.

As a result, at any time half the arable land would be productive, and half fallow and without a crop.

In northern Europe, a three-year cycle developed during the Middle Ages and later. This might run:

• In one year, the plot would be ploughed and sown in the autumn with a winter grain crop.
• The following year, that plot would be sown in the early Spring, with a grain or forage crop, or legumes (peas or beans).
• The third year, that plot would left fallow until the autumn, when it started the cycle again with autumn ploughing.

This is reflected in a different pattern in arable land, with only a third of it being left fallow at any time.

During the seventeenth century, farmers in the Low Countries appear to have adopted more elaborate rotations, and those were imported to England as the Norfolk Four-Course Rotation in the following century. In this:

• The first year brought a wheat crop, sown in the Spring and harvested at the end of summer.
• The second year brought roots, such as swedes or turnips, normally used to feed cattle, which grazed the land and enriched it with manure.
• The third year brought barley or oats, sown in the Spring and harvested at the end of summer.
• The fourth and final year the plot was rested with grass and clover, again used to graze cattle which enriched it with manure.

This depended on integrating livestock production with arable farming, by adding cows to the sheep-corn system, which had become increasingly popular over this period.

One way to assess this is in paintings of farmed countryside, looking at the patterns of usage in fields. I show a small selection of examples here.

In Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Harvesters from 1565, much of the land visible is devoted to a single wheat crop, sown at the same time, and harvested together at the end of the summer. Some fields on the lower ground, closer to the town and estuary in the distance, are still green, though, suggesting they may be pasture being grazed during their fallow year.

At the same time as crop rotations were being developed, land was being enclosed and its use transformed from communal grazing for livestock to arable fields. John Crome captures this in this painting of Mousehold Heath, Norwich (c 1818-20), showing the low rolling land to the north-east of the city which had been open heath and common land until the late eighteenth century. By 1810, much of it had been enclosed and ploughed up for agriculture.

At about the same time, Alexandre Calame’s Swiss Landscape shows the shore of one of the country’s large lakes, probably Lake Geneva, with much smaller plots of land within large open fields, and a range of different crops being cultivated. This is more typical of the older sub-divided fields close to villages during earlier centuries in England.

By 1853, when the Pre-Raphaelite landscape artist Thomas Seddon visited Brittany and painted Léhon, from Mont Parnasse, Brittany, this small village had retained similar small plots being farmed in different ways, almost like the allotment gardens that developed around cities at this time.

Fields shown on the side of Les Jalais in Camille Pissarro’s Côte de Jalais, Pontoise from 1867 are divided into larger strips, and are at different stages of cultivation. Some are still earth brown following ploughing, others are green, and some may be ready to harvest. These appear to be in a longer crop rotation, perhaps four-course.

Although the classical two-year cycle was retained for longer in southern France, by 1890-92 when Paul Cézanne painted this Hillside in Provence, the pattern of colour in the fields makes it more likely that a three-year or longer rotation was in use.

By the early twentieth century, most farmland in England had been enclosed, but the fields in Percy Shakespeare’s painting of December on the Downs, Wartime, from the period 1939-44, remain open and still in use for a sheep-wheat system.

Perhaps the lesson here is that accounts of land use and crop rotations are too generalised to reflect the rich variety of local farming methods. As I have so far concentrated on arable and sheep farming, in the next article I’ll look at cattle and milk production.

Once a cereal crop had been harvested and gathered for threshing, the fields might then be scavenged for any remaining grain, a process known as gleaning. Although this has been described since Old Testament times, there’s uncertainty as to who gleaned, and where they were able to glean. This article shows a selection of paintings from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries showing gleaning, to see if they cast further light on those questions.

Biblical accounts establish that gleaning was then a means for the poorest in society to acquire their own free supply of grain, and was a right of the poor. Some assume that the same practice continued, under the same right, until it fell into disuse in the late twentieth century. That ignores complex changes in land ownership and rights, and national law, and makes assumptions about rural economies that may not be correct.

The majority of those living in the country between 1500 and 1800 had little need for money. Almost everything they required in life was grown or made locally, and there were few if any consumer goods that they would need to purchase. Most lived in two sets of clothes: working dress, which was handed down, patched and repaired until it was unwearable, and a Sunday outfit worn when attending church, similarly inherited. Furniture was scant, made from local wood, and handed down through generations. Food and other goods that the family couldn’t supply itself would normally be obtained by barter with a neighbour. While those with more land and animals could sell them at market, and use the proceeds to buy luxuries, that remained out of the reach of the majority. It appears to have been that majority who gleaned the fields after harvest.

Although some countries in Europe retained gleaning rights on the strength of Biblical law, as land was enclosed and brought into increasingly complex systems of private ownership and rights, some land owners challenged that ancient right, and in 1788 a notable English legal case set the precedent that there was no universal right to glean, no matter how poor you might be. Nevertheless, many landowners continued to allow gleaning on their land, and in some areas these were celebrated alongside the harvest itself. Gleaning, like much else in the country, thus varied from country to country, and by region and village, but wasn’t confined to the poorest by any means.

One pitfall in looking at paintings of gleaning is that some are retelling the Biblical story of Ruth and Boaz, rather than depicting contemporary gleaning.

In Samuel Palmer’s The Gleaning Field (c 1833), as in other accounts, gleaners appear to have been mostly women.

In 1854, Jules Breton returned to live in his home village of Courrières, not far from Calais in north-east France, and started painting agricultural workers in the local landscape. His style changed dramatically, and the following year he enjoyed success with his first masterpiece, The Gleaners (1854), which won him a third-class medal at the 1855 Paris Salon. Overseeing this gleaning is the garde champêtre or village policeman, an older man distinguished by his official hat and armband, who was probably an army veteran. In the background, behind the grainstacks that were later to be such popular motifs for the Impressionists, is the village church tower, surrounded by its houses.

Breton had started to plan this painting soon after his return. He made a series of studies, several of which survive, for its figures, but the view appears to be faithful to reality. The figure of the young woman walking across the view from the right (in front of the garde champêtre) seems to have been modelled on the daughter of Breton’s first art teacher, whom the artist married in 1858.

Jean-François Millet’s hope for the Salon two years later was his substantial painting of The Gleaners (1857), which is completely different in concept. The distant wagon, grainstacks, and village may appear common elements, as are the three women bent over to glean in the foreground, but that is as far as the similarities go.

Millet’s composition is sparse, concentrating on those three figures. There are no distractions, such as the garde champêtre to add colour or humour: it’s all about poverty, and smacked of socialism; unlike Breton’s painting it got the thumbs-down from both the rich and the middle classes who frequented the Salon. Millet had also been born and brought up in the country, in his case further west on the north coast of France, in the Normandy village of Gruchy, where he had worked on the land.

Breton’s Calling in the Gleaners (also known as The Recall of the Gleaners, Artois) (1859) is one of the treasures of the Musée d’Orsay. With the light now fading, and the first thin crescent of the waxing moon in the sky, the loose flock of weary women and children make their way back home with their hard-won wheat. At the far left, the garde champêtre calls the last in, so that he can go home for the night. Behind them a flock of sheep is grazing on the adjacent pasture.

Painted in 1880, Eugène Burnand’s Gleaners are set in high Alpine meadows, two girls with meagre gleanings. They are dressed in plain working clothes, but don’t appear particularly poor. Behind them a cart carries away the main harvest.

Léon Augustin Lhermitte’s most enduring expression of rural poverty was in showing four women salvaging the remains left in the fields after the harvest: the Gleaners, here his version of 1887. Lhermitte was another son of the country, this time Mont-Saint-Père in Picardy, inland in north-east France, although his father was a schoolteacher.

Cowed from 1887 shows gleaners at work in a field after the harvest in Denmark, but there’s much more to Hans Andersen Brendekilde’s story than that. The owner of the large farm in the left distance has gathered in their grain, and their harvesters have been paid off for their effort. Then out come the gleaners to scavenge what they can from the fields.

The family group in front of us consists of three generations: mother is still bent over, hard at work gleaning her handful of corn. Her husband is taking a short break, sitting on the sack in his large blue wooden clogs. Stood looking at him is their daughter, engaged in a serious conversation with her father, as her young child plays on the ground.

The daughter is finely dressed under her coarse gleaning apron, and wears a hat more appropriate to someone in service as a maid, or similar, in a rich household in the nearby town. She looks anxious and flushed, and is almost certainly an unmarried mother, abandoned by her young child’s father, and it’s surely she who is oppressed or ‘cowed’. Their difficult family discussion is being watched by another young woman at the far left, who might be a younger sister, perhaps.

Brendekilde took his name from the small village of Brændekilde, near Odense on the island of Funen in Denmark. The son of a clog maker, he lived with his grandparents for several years when a child, and at the age of ten made his living as a shepherd.

The Impressionists seldom seem to have painted controversial social issues. One of the few exceptions to this proved a lesson for Camille Pissarro in the practicality of Divisionism. He started work on his intensely sensory and idyllic painting The Gleaners in early 1888, using a squared-up study in gouache to finalise his composition. He found the painting hard, and wrote that he needed models so that he could complete its detail, which did the following year.

As Europe moved into the twentieth century, gleaning became increasingly unreal and romantic.

Gleaners were still commonplace in the Essex grain fields at harvest time, trying to scrape enough waste grain from the ground to feed their families. In Sir George Clausen’s Gleaners Coming Home from 1904, swirling brushstrokes make the gleaners’ improbably smart clothes appear to move as they walk home in the evening sunlight.

Clausen’s The Gleaners Returning (1908) is a marvellous contre-jour (into the light) view, again with swirling brushstrokes imparting movement in the women’s clothes, and no hint of their poverty.

Lhermitte’s Gleaners Near Haystacks (1912) shows a group of women gleaning, two of them almost bent double.

Even when he was well into his seventies, Lhermitte seemed able to find time and energy for just another painting of gleaners, in his Gleaning Women of 1920.

With the increasing depopulation of Europe’s rural areas and the introduction of mechanical methods of harvesting, gleaning seems to have died out by the middle of the twentieth century, only to reappear around 2000. It’s now an organised voluntary activity arranged with farmers, to recover crops unsuitable for mechanical harvesting, and other recoverable sources.

As with many other aspects of rural life, gleaning appears to have varied according to era and location. In some areas it seems to have been confined to those who were struggling to provide sufficient food for themselves, in the Biblical tradition. In others it was more general, and a normal phase of the harvest supplying most families with a free top-up of grain they could get ground by a miller to add to their supply of bread in the coming winter. It could also yield substantial amounts of grain: one report claims a widow and her three sons gleaned 325 kg (720 pounds) of wheat from one harvest. After all, if left in the field where it was, it would only have been ploughed back into the ground later in the autumn, and gone to waste.

Reference

David Hoseason Morgan (1982) Harvesters and Harvesting 1840-1900, Routledge ISBN 978 1 138 74476 9.