June Labours: "scents, like a new-made haycock"

As the Labours of the Months are frequently linked with the zodiac signs, here for June, accompanying the mower scything is Cancer the Crab, .  Was this strange humanoid figure copied from a church carving, or a confusing description?  The face suggests that it was a stock image from a copy of a bestiary of the period, when many 'foreign' creatures (like the crocodile) were given these stylised faces.

Charite sur Loire Psalter c. 1175  BL. Hartley 2895 © British Library

Some cycles show the shearing of sheep, another important June activity providing a cash crop and warm clothing for the cold winter months.

June: Book of Hours of Agnes le Dieu, Bourges, 1500s

Utopia armarium codicum bibliophilorum, Stanford collection

The Cancer sign marks the summer solstice, when harvesting the hay crop would be at its height,  absolutely essential fodder for horses and cattle through the winter.  While the central figure is working, the man on the right is hammering the chine (blade) of his scythe, ready to fix to its long handle, the snaithe. The forked sticks the women are holding could be used for separating out weeds, or for raking up the mown hay.  Because the hay had to be cut and dried while the weather stayed fair,  traditionally for centuries women join with the men to get the harvest in.  The mowers are often shown barelegged or with stockings rolled for such hot work, but normally wearing shoes for protection. Is the fully dressed man with the large hat and puffed sleeves the owner of the meadow,  also hoping to make hay while the sun shines?  

French Book of Hours,  Nantes? fifteenth century,  Library of Geneva

Then here we can see the mowers, with legs bared and a variety of hats, working in rhythm while  women rake the dried grass into heaps, or mows, with the cart ready for loading later.  They are also well supplied with ale in wooden flasks.  In many areas haymaking traditionally began on St Barnabas Day, 11th June, but depending on region and weather, haymaking was also done in July.

                           Hours of Henry VIII, c. 1500  by Jean Poyer    Morgan Library

Centuries later haymaking was still a social occasion, although perhaps not quite so imperative a crop as in the past.  Mary Mitford writes (in 1832) about haymaking in Berkshire as "more of an innocent merriment, more of the festivity of an outdoor sport, and less of the drudgery and weariness of actual labour, than any of the other occupations of husbandry."  All the neighbours come to enjoy the party: 

 " Farmer Bridgwater set six men on to mowing by a little after sunrise, and collected fourteen efficient haymakers by breakfast time.  Fourteen active haymakers for our poor three acres! not to count the idle assistants; we ourselves, with three dogs and two boys to mind them, advisers who came to find fault and look on, babies who came to be nursed, children who came to rock the babies, and other children who came to keep the rockers company and play with the dogs; to say nothing of this small rabble, we had fourteen able-bodied men and women in one hay-field, besides the six mowers who had got the grass down by noon, and finding the strong beer good and plentiful, magnanimously volunteered to stay and help to get in the crop."

Our Village Mary Russell Mitford 

"Hay and Ice" : June weather cycles (and the correct way to scythe)

The Haymakers  George Stubbs 1785  © Tate Britain

"It froze hard last night;  I went out for a moment to look at my haymakers, and was starved.  The contents of an English June are hay and ice, orange flowers and rheumatism.  I am now cowering over the fire."   This was Horace Walpole at Strawberry Hill on 14th June, 1791.   He also recorded droughts and inundations: 

 "11th June: We have had an extraordinary drought, no grass, no leaves, no flowers; not a white rose for the festival of yesterday!  About four arrived such a flood, that we could not see out of the windows: the whole lawn was a lake, though situated on so high an Ararat…. You never saw such a desolation.  …It never came into my head before, that a rainbow-office for insuring against water might be very necessary." (Twickenham 1775)

Strawberry Hill, Twickenham     Paul Sandby

Others recorded June temperatures in the 80s (Fahrenheit): thus Walpole's poet friend Thomas Gray: "June 3rd Wind S.S.E.  Thermometer at 84 (the highest I ever saw it): it was at Noon. Since which till last week we had hot dry weather.  Now it rains like mad."  (Cambridgeshire, 1760)

And Gilbert White of Selborne: "June 22nd.  Fruit-walls in the sun are so hot I cannot bear my hand on them.  Brother Thomas's thermometer was 89 on an east wall in the afternoon.  Much damage was done and some people were killed by lightning on this sultry day."  (Hampshire, 1790)
.

Daniel Fahrenheit and his thermometer  (Wikimedia)

Mercurial Samuel Pepys reacted to a late June heatwave: "June 28th: Up; and this day put on a half-shirt first this summer, it being very hot; and yet so ill-tempered I am grown that I am afeard I shall ketch cold, while all the world is ready to melt away."   (London, 1664)

Erratic weather particularly threatened the hay and other essential fodder crops.

James Tyrrell reported frosts and drought to his friend John Locke, a regular weather observer.
"June 24th:...  alas for news all that we talk of here is of the rain and are still praying for more,….I hear at Oxford, that the Drought hath bin so great about Paris……for the honour of our Northern Climate, there hath been seen severall times this month, ice of the thickness of half a Crowne…   I am hayning* my ground againe as if it were but Lady day haveing almost no hay yet: but however I hope I shall be able to bid the horse, as well as the Master welcome…" . ( Shotover, Oxford 1681)  Correspondence, ed. E.S. De Beer

" June 21st:  We now have frosty mornings, and so cold a wind, that even at high noon we have been obliged to break off our walk in the southern side of the garden, and seek shelter, I in the greenhouse, Mrs Unwin by the fireside.  Haymaking begins here tomorrow."  (William Cowper, Buckinghamshire 1784)

Sainfoin (Fr. holy hay)  Onobrychis viciaefolia  (Wikimedia)

"June 9th: Everything seemed parched and dried up by the two months drought except some brilliant patches of the crimson sanfoin which lighted up the white hot downs and burning Plain. " (Frances Kilvert, Wiltshire  1874)

And the same the previous year: "July 22nd: Today the heat was excessive and as I sat reading under the lime I pitied the poor haymakers toiling in the burning Common where it seemed to be raining fire." (Frances Kilvert, Wiltshire, 1873)

What would these observers have thought of  meteorologist Eduard Bruckner's 35-year weather cycles of alternate periods of warm dry and cold damp weather?   Readers of Cassell's Magazine in June 1899 (particularly umbrella-makers) were reassured that the twentieth century would begin with the 17 year period due of rainy weather.


But if you are planning to make hay while the sun shines this summer, here is how to do it:

"July 24th:  Robert says the first grass from the scythe is the swathe, then comes the strow (tedding),
then rowing, then the footcocks, then breaking, then the hubrows, which are gathered into hubs, then sometimes another break and turning, then rickles, the biggest of all the cocks, which are run together into placks, the shapeless heap from which the hay is carted."  (Gerrard Manley Hopkins, Lancashire 1871)

Haymaking  Alfred Glendening  1898  ©Tate Britain 

* Haining:  fencing grass to protect  from cattle.

Most of these quotations are from Geoffrey Grigson's anthology "The English Year"

August: Royal Wilding to Redstreak, and Somerset harvests

The Haymakers (La Recolte du Foins)  Julien Dupre  1881

"Back in 1851, the census listed more than seventy farms in the parish, most of them less than fifty acres in area.  These were, as you might expect from this lush, wet area, mainly dairy farms producing milk, butter and cheese; although sheep, pigs and poultry were also kept in good numbers.  These animals - and the meat they produced -  were fuelled by the main crop of the parish: hay.  Even in the 1950s haymaking was still a common sight, and one villager recalls that any ricks left untouched the following spring  would be colonised by nesting birds.  Today, it's almost all silage.

The other major crop was, of course, apples; still used to make Somerset's traditional drink, cider.  Cider-making dates back at least to the thirteenth century (and probably far longer).  The boom time for planting orchards was the second half of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth. In those days, cider was mainly for drinking at home rather than for commercial sale, using long-forgotten varieties of apple with wonderfully evocative names:  Royal Wilding, Flood-Hatch, Woodcock, Red-Hedge Pip, Old Jeffrey and Redstreak.  Odd clumps of cider-apple trees still grow in gardens all over the parish, including my own.  Their fruit is pale, bitter and, unfortunately, completely inedible."

Wild Hares and Hummingbirds  Stephen Moss

And here are some rather more genteel Haymakers by George Stubbs (1785)  on view at Tate Britain.