WALKS IN THE WHEAT-FIELDS. 141 



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 eveiy 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 flails 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. The 

 gleaners used to use them to thresh out their collections. 

 There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody 

 had a mind to make a museum of such things ; and if 



