192-2.] 



Ploughing and Ploughing Matches. 



1085 



centred around other things than driving a furrow straight and 

 setting it up and showing off a fine team. Nevertheless, so long- 

 as the spirit lives which underlies all matching of skill with 

 skill or pride with pride, there will be a transformation only, the 

 spirit will clothe itself in a new guise. Not a little may be 

 learnt from the story of the rise and progress of ploughing 

 matches, and of the days before ploughing matches were 

 inaugurated. 



One of the most poignant passages in the whole of the litera- 

 ture of agriculture may be found in a little Latin reading book 

 which was written for English boys of the eleventh century. 

 Each of the boys in the class is made to assume a different 

 character and describe his day's work. This is the ploughman's 

 story : — 



'•I work hard: I go out at daybreak, driving the oxen to the field, and I 

 yoke them to the plough. Be it never so stark winter I dare not linger at home 

 for awe of my lord; but having yoked my oxen, and fastened share and coulter, 

 every day I must plough a full acre or more. I have a boy driving the oxen, 

 with a goad iron, who is hoarse with cold and shouting .... Miglity hard 

 work it is, for I am not free."* 



Long after the eleventh century the typical Englishman was 

 the unfree ploughman wearily ploughing the acre strips in the 

 open field. Quite humane and enlightened people could con- 

 template with equanimity a state of society in which " the 

 poor bondman's son is disposed by his birth to be a bondman 

 all his life, as his fathers have been before him a hundred years."! 

 As Wyclif said : " rulers think it as just and as natural for the 

 whole class of bondmen to serve them. and their class in worldly 

 affairs, as it is natural for wood to burn. "J 



It is not an accident that improvements in agriculture during 

 the Middle Ages were so slow as hardly to be perceived, and that 

 the recognition of serfdom as a disgraceful anachronism and its 

 consequent disappearance § should have been followed by that 

 burst of agricultural invention and teaching which marks the 

 seventeenth century. || The gradual relaxation of the bonds which 

 had enslaved the unfree labourer not only freed his spirit but it 

 brought about a gradual and subtle change in the attitude of 



* Aelfric's Colloquies in"* Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, pp. 19-20; York 

 Powell's translation. 



f Dives and Pauper (earlv fifteenth century): Berthelet's edition (1536) 

 p. 33b. 



% De Civili Dominio, i. 247. 



§ Cunningham, Grrowth of English Industry, 533-4. 

 [| Lord Ernie, English Farming, Ch. V: 

 McDonald, Agricultural Writers, p. G7. 



