In Itself The
Reaping-Hook Is An Enlarged Sickle, And The Sickle Was In Use In Roman
Times, And No Man Knows How Long Before That.
With it the reaper cut off
the ears of the wheat only, leaving the tall straw standing, much as if
it had been a pruning-knife.
It is the oldest of old implements - very
likely it was made of a chip of flint at first, and then of bronze, and
then of steel, and now at Sheffield or Birmingham in its enlarged form of
the 'vagging' hook. In the hand of Ceres it was the very symbol of
agriculture, and that was a goodly time ago. At this hour they say the
sickle is still used in several parts of England where the object is more
to get the straw than the ear.
On the broad page of some ancient illuminated manuscript, centuries old,
you may see the churl, or farmer's man, knocking away with his flail at
the grain on the threshing-floor. The knock knocking of the flail went on
through the reigns of how many kings and queens I do not know, they are
all forgotten, God wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old
days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets
printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and
when the corn laws starved half England - those were the times of the
flail. Every barn - and there were then barns on every farm, think of the
number - had its threshing-floor opposite the great open doors, and all
the dread winter through the flail resounded.
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