E. L. Jones Seasons and Prices

I picked up this 1964 work second-hand and read it with great pleasure. People wrote so much better in those days. There’s an old world charm about a book that can unselfconsciously use the word nutter (i.e. somebody gathering hazel nuts). The subtitle is The Role of the Weather in English Agricultural History, and the focus is mainly on Southern England and the Midlands. The impact of the weather on farming is a terribly complicated area, and Jones does very well to extract any generalisations from it. As he says, apart from really extreme weather events, the weather that’s good for one type of farming or one type of soil can be bad for another, so fluctuations tend to cancel out in national statistics, while local histories are too specific to yield any patterns.

Price fluctuations are also very hard to relate to the weather – when communications were poor and imports limited by the Corn Laws, farmers’ losses in bad seasons tended to be compensated by scarcity prices.

Jones’ approach is mostly discursive. He shows how different types of farming are affected by the weather – what sorts of weather at particular points in the farming year can crucially affect success, and how changing practices over time have helped to dampen down the impact of weather conditions. He discusses the gradual shift of grain growing in England from the low-lying clays, where wet summers were disastrous, to the uplands, once these were improved by the new rotations. But he mainly concentrates on livestock farming. For instance he describes the flexibility of pig farming in response to adverse conditions, because of the short breeding cycle and the wide variety of possible feedstuffs. He discusses liver rot in sheep. He shows the impact of the weather on the production of feed, including the unreliability of turnips in the face of winter frosts before the introduction of the swede.

Something that really engaged me was the way he began his survey of different types of farming by looking at the small harvests of the countryside, what he calls the ferae naturae, such as pigeons and rabbits; primroses, holly and mistletoe to sell; crab apples and other hedgerow fruit; and sticks for the fire. He writes as a countryman, and as he says, “Not so long ago the countryman was the ordinary man” (p.29).

In the final part of the book, he gives a summary of most years from 1728 to 1911. That reminded me that there are particular years remembered in Scottish tradition for their extreme weather. There are several mentions in School of Scottish Studies recordings (online, Tobar an Dualchais) of the year of the short corn (search for ‘short corn’), some time in the mid 19th century – possibly 1868 if the weather was the same as in England. A summer drought stunted the straw, but fortunately the winter was mild so there was grass for the beasts. Also on the Tobar website, Andrew Gibson, a shepherd, talks about his experience of the hard winter of 1916-1917, and he reads from the diary of another shepherd, William Laidlaw, describing a severe storm in May 1887 (search for ‘Andrew Gibson’). Jones also has a few remarks (p.93) on the hardiness of blackface sheep and their ability to survive for weeks under snowdrifts.

Next stop has to be volume 2 of the Compendium of Scottish Ethnology - Farming and the Land. I’ve been meaning to get my teeth into this monster anyway. There’s a section on the environment, which will presumably cover this sort of ground.