The Barn: The Lives, Landscape and Lost Ways of an Old Yorkshire Farm, by Sally Coulthard
In 2007, author Sally Coulthard and her husband and young children bought a North Yorkshire farm — an 1840 farmhouse with pasture and woods, and a barn. The original part of the barn dates to the late 1700s. By European standards, of course, that’s not even that old — New College at Oxford was founded in 1379!
Coulthard knew that her new home had been inhabited by people for centuries, but this knowledge was made especially clear when, while cleaning the barn, she found markings — circles with daisies inside them — etched into the plaster walls. She consulted an archaeologist friend and learned that these were superstitious markings meant to ward off evil and bring good luck. Later, one of Coulthard’s daughters found a Roman coin in the vicinity of the barn.
These findings spurred curiosity, which turned into research, which resulted in a book. More than a simple description of the structure itself — impressive though it is, with three-foot-thick limestone walls and a sturdy timber frame — her work details the history of agriculture in Yorkshire, particularly that of the residents of her actual farm in the late-18th and 19th centuries. It is a fascinating account that reminds the reader of what has been both lost and gained in farming cultures and methods over the last 250 years.
Coulthard discusses all facets of past farm life — from labor conditions to the crops and fertilizers people used, the animals they raised, and how they got their products to market. One of the most interesting aspects of agriculture she recounts is farm labor. Laborers’ lives have always been difficult, but it seems that medieval workers did have some advantages over early modern ones due to the availability of common lands that they had access to for grazing livestock, foraging for their own food, and gathering fuel. As those areas became privatized (“enclosed”), farms began to be run by single farm managers instead of groups of families. Many of those extra workers had to sign annual labor contracts at “hiring fairs” in November. This was a tradition that continued up to the 1930s in some parts of Britain.
What quickly becomes clear in Coulthard’s account is that life for the vast majority of workers in the 19th century was incalculably more difficult than ours today. Whatever the scourges of modern American agriculture, eight-year-olds no longer work 14-hour days six days a week for pennies. Corn and soy turned into pre-packaged food has obviously led to a general decline in the health of our population over the past few decades … but how should we reconcile this with the horrendous labor conditions used to produce the 100 percent organic, local food of the 1800s?
While it is easy to bemoan the ways of life that were lost as a result of the Industrial Revolution, Coulthard argues that pay was two to three times better — and working conditions were even often better, and the risk of starvation lower — when people who moved to cities to work in factories. And while enclosure had severe effects on rural life, it also made farmland much more productive. Growing a bushel of wheat in 1800 in England took 60 man-hours; by 1900 it required only 15. Until farmers began using synthetic chemistry to grow crops, it’s hard to argue against the technological innovations that reduced so much hard manual labor. We certainly don’t begrudge anyone today using horse-drawn sickle bar mowers instead of scythes.
Another interesting facet of farming Coulthard covers is how 19th-century farms maintained fertility. Crushed-up bones were discovered to be helpful in the late 1700s, leading to a massive industry of transporting bones from the cities back to the fields — and even the gruesome importation of bones from cemeteries and battlefields. Bat guano was the next craze, and over a few decades, millions of tons of the stuff were imported from South America. Coulthard also describes lime production — in addition to incorporating it into the fields to sweeten the soil, the walls of her barn were built and plastered with it — and the rise of the Haber process, which made the importation of guano uneconomical.
Readers who enjoy The Barn will appreciate the historical farm series of programs from the BBC. It features “living archaeology” — putting historians and archaeologists in recreated historical agricultural settings to experience farm life at different periods, including the Tudor, Victorian, Edwardian and WWII eras.
One comes away from this book with a deep appreciation for agricultural technology, which has provided a quantum leap in ease and comfort — for better and for worse. Yes, their food was likely more nutrient dense than ours, and they had close-knit communities that supported each other far more than ours today. But it would be naive to romantically long for those days. Famine was a regular occurrence — often at least once a decade. It’s good to grow our own vegetables and butcher our own animals and inculcate deeper community today … but there’s no other part of peasant life we should long for.
The Barn is a fun read that will surely motivate readers to discover the history of their own land. My 10 acres, after being inhabited by various tribes, including the Potawatomi, was farmed until the early 1990s. The broken piece of a plow I unearthed testifies to the fact that I’m not the first person to try to feed myself from this land. It reminds me that nothing is new under the sun — I wasn’t the first person here, and it logically follows that I have a duty to conserve this land for future generations.
