Harvest Festival Customs

The time of the Autumn Equinox is one for celebrating the harvest. Out in the hedgerows the red berries of this year’s bumper crop of Hawthorn are weighing down the branches that in late spring were festooned with white flowers, the horse chestnuts are getting ready to drop their conkers and the fields of corn are reduced to stubble.

Few people today are directly connected with the actual growing of crops, although living in Somerset we can at least witness the practises being carried on around us. But in times past, many livelihoods and the very life and prosperity of the populace depended on the safe gathering in of the crops before the onset of winter.

The Wiltshire writer Alfred Williams sums up the feelings of a ruined harvest in 1912:

‘It seems as though you have lived the year for nothing then; that all the bloom and sunshine of the spring and summer were mockery; that Nature brought forth her beautiful children but to destroy them’.

But it didn’t always go wrong and when the crop was good and the weather fine it was a case of everyone out in the fields from dawn until after dusk, cutting, binding and gathering. And even with the advent of mechanisation the race against the weather still applied. As a child I can remember my father coming home well after dark, unrecognisable from the dust in which he was covered but Fourteen acres or Moonslade or Clays (fields had names then, just like the cows) had been harvested, the corn safely despatched from the combine into the trailers and, with the bales of straw, collected and taken back to the farm.

But whereas the 1950s and 60s saw a great sense of achievement, earlier harvests saw a bringing together of the workforce and the community as a whole, giving rise over the years to a number of widespread customs.

The cutting of the last sheaf of corn carried particular importance and would be given special significance by, for example the stalks being tied together and the men taking it in turn to throw their sickles at it to see who could make the last cut. In the east Riding of Yorkshire the last few stalks were made into a little sheaf and then set on fire. But in the West Country, this was taken a little further, with a practise known as ‘crying the neck’ being carried out. This involved the last sheaf being tied with ribbons and being passed from person to person amidst much shouting.

The last load of sheaves was brought home with considerable ceremony, the final cart being decorated with ribbons and greenery and sometimes a king and queen of the harvest hoisted onto the top. Many communities also made a figure of straw which would be used to adorn the last load, the pre-cursor of the Corn Dolly. This was sometimes hung up in the barn to bring luck for next year’s harvest.

After the last load came the harvest supper, which could involve the whole community depending on the size of farm involved. This would entail feasting and drinking, singing and dancing.

It is a season which is rich in history and although we have lost most of those customs with mechanisation, it is still time to reflect on the end of the main growing season and to look around ourselves at the beauty of early Autumn. It is time also to not only look forwards to the darker days ahead, but also to perhaps look backwards and assess what the past season and harvest mean in our own lives.