The farm and the village;

by George Ewart Evans

The Farm and the Village

Genres: Oral History, History

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

George Ewart Evans was born and raised in the mining community of Abercynon, Glamorganshire, Wales. He wrote a series of books examining the disappearing customs and portraying the way of life as it had been in rural Suffolk. "Ask the Fellows who Cut the Hay" is probably his best known book. The publication of his books gave him deserved recognition as a pioneering oral historian. He was also an accomplished story writer and wrote short-stories, novels and poems.

Reviews

[Michael Bishop · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published over fifty years ago this gem of a book provides a window to our agricultural past and practice that reaches back into medieval times. A narrative authenticated by oral testament of those who once laboured on the farm or in related village crafts before mechanisation.

[Phloebus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 1969 and given as a birthday present from my gran to my grandad in 1976. I was one year old.

There is a lot of talk about dibbling and probangs. (The latter used to help a 'beast that had swallowed an intractable piece of root - turnip, perhaps, or mangel-wurzel.')

Crab harrows, bird clappers, barley hummellers, and scuppits also make appearances.

It sounds so medieval, but this is not the ninth century, this is East Anglia in the childhood (just!) of my grandad. Tractors and big agri-business were still slightly over the horizon, and villages and farms were still using the Old Ways.

There is a lot of nostalgia in here - reports from old boys about the things they got up to when they were lads and a sense that the farmers back then had a much closer union with the land than they do now.

There is more sobering commentary too - the children taken from school to pick stones from fields, the horses commandeered for death on the battlegrounds of WWI, and an awareness that poverty was very present and very far from genteel.

What I enjoyed the most were the vignettes of country life. The tips handed out for the end-of-harvest frolic. The farmworkers in town judiciously buying their wardrobe one item at a time while the shopkeeper kept their beers topped up. The pride in ploughing a straight furrow or having the best looking horse.