Now There Are The Wire And String Binders, That Not Only Cut
The Corn, But Gather It Together And Bind It In Sheaves - A Vast Saving In
Labour.
Still the reaping-hook endures and is used on all small farms,
and to some extent on large ones, to round off the work of the machine;
the new things come, but the old still remains.
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. Men looked upon it as their
most cherished privilege to get that employment in the bitter dark hours
of the hungry months. It was life itself to them: to stand there swinging
that heavy bit of wood all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and
drink, for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as a civil
list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn
villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.
The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed with leather. They
had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in
the wars of old times, - i.e. - Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on
the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are
gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam
threshes our ricks - in a few days doing what used to take months, and you
would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever.
Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms - which it is now
the cry to multiply - for knocking out little quantities of grain for
feeding purposes.
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