These records of farm labouring in the 1870s were recorded by J. H. Ingram when he worked on Tom Mullins’s farm at Wincle, Macclesfield, in 1941. ‘It was while working together in the fields and woods that he told me the details I have written down. He was a fine story—teller, full of old tales and proverbs and country lore.’ Mulling was born about 1863, and the district he describes is known as ‘the Moorlands’, a landscape of high hills and deep valleys isolated from the nearest town of Macclesfield by a steep ridge impassable in a snowy winter. Mullins died some time in the 1950’s and is buried in the hamlet of Rushton Spencer.

His description of farming in Staffordshire in the 1870s indicates that the ‘agricultural revolution’ had not progressed very far in this part of the country; many of the practices described were still almost medieval.

When I was seven I started as half-timer at a rope-works in Leek, and earned 1s. 6d. a week by turning the handle of the rope-winding machine., I liked the job and remained a twelvemonth. My stepfather was a hasty-tempered man, and once when I showed him a half sovereign which I had found, he declared it was one which he had lost and whipped me for stealing. Afterwards he found his coin in the seam of his trousers, but he did not give me my half sovereign back. I saved my pocket-money and bought a bicycle for 2s. 6d. It had a wooden frame and handlebars, but no chains or pedals, you simply pushed it along the ground with your feet.

I wanted to be a blacksmith and had just started learning the trade when my parents moved to a village near Burton-on-Trent. When I was ten I left school to work on a farm for £3 a year and my keep; later I got £5. As a carter’s lad I helped drive the horses, and when there were two I had to walk between them while leading and often got trodden on. Harvest was later in those years and when the snow came early in October much of the corn was buried and was never got in. I was always hungry at that place, but after a year I moved to a bigger farm where the living was better.

Before bridges were built we often had difficulty in getting our horses and wagons across flooded streams. Often my clothes were quite wet when I took them off at night and still wet when I put them on again next morning. On Sundays I walked ten miles home to have dinner with my parents, and then walked ten miles back to start milking. One stormy night my Mother and I crossed a stream when it was breast-high, and I was nearly swept away. We still had five miles to walk through the dark. There were many toll—gates on the road and it cost a penny a mile for a wagon to pass them. When I was eleven the under-carter was taken ill, so I was given two horses, and after a little instruction, was told to start ploughing.

I then went to work on a farm belonging to Michael Bass. He was an easy man to talk to and you did not realize he was titled. I often went to his house for the hot soup, meat and dripping which were distributed free to the poor of the parish; at Christmas there was a bigger distribution of eatables. The Bass family was well thought of in the neighbourhood.

One of my jobs was to take the letters to the post-box, and this I did not like doing for the lane ran alongside a dark wood where rough men wandered about. When I was thirteen I milked and tended seven cows singlehanded. I used to watch where the master got his best apples and then go and help myself. It puzzled him to discover how his apples kept disappearing, but I was never caught.

There was a public house attached to the farm and as I had a good singing voice I used to sing there at nights. I could have had a barrel of beer if I bad wanted, but I was never that way inclined. About this time somebody discovered that feeding wet barley grains to cows made them give more milk, so one of my jobs was to take the horse and cart to Burton for a load of grains and maltcombs. Before that our beasts were fed on horse-beans ground into meal, and on roots, rye and crushed oats. There was no Indian meal in those days.

I worked on a milk-round in Leek for a year, and then went to work at a farm in Rusholme, Manchester, but the family lived like pigs and expected me to exist on bread and dripping, so at the end of the first week I left. About 1880 I started as a carter at a seventy-five-acres farm called Weathercock, near Leek, where I remained seven years. When not ploughing I carried coal from the pits. Coal was 3d a hundredweight at the pit— head, and they would throw in an extra hundredweight or so for good measure.

It took a team of three horses to carry a load of thirty hundredweight or two tons, and you’d be at it from six in the morning until nine at night. One winter’s day my team fell down on the ice coming from Biddelph, and I had to remove their shoes and take them to a smith to be sharpened before I could get my load back to the farm.

There was little farm machinery used in those days. ‘Hand work is best work,’ my master used to say, and he did not like to have even a horse in the field. Corn was cut with a short ‘badging’ hook and hay was cut with the scythe. A man could cut half an acre of corn a day and bind it into sheaves, but usually the farmers banded, themselves together and worked in groups of from twelve to twenty.

Each man had a distance of so many yards to cut, known as a ‘natch’. He would take hold of the corn stalks and hold them with his left hand and sever them near the base, holding them until he had collected enough to make half a sheaf, which would be laid at the end of the ‘natch’; by the time he had worked his way back again he had cut enough to finish the sheaf, which was then tied with a straw ‘bant’. Men would follow one behind the other, sometimes twenty in a line; they could soon clear a field. Gangs of ‘paddies’ contracted at so much a field. They used a sickle with a thin curved blade a yard long, having teeth like a bread knife, which would cut nearly haifa sheaf at one stroke.

How country folk laughed when the first machines appeared. A few mowing-machines had already reached Staffordshire. Some had reaping-gear fixed to them and were used as reapers, with a dozen men following behind binding. There were a few threshing machines also, but corn was mostly threshed by flail. Men were paid sixpence a ‘threap’, or bundle of twenty-four sheaves, and had to make their own straw ‘battens’. Tedding-machines came next, before swathe-turners. Beans were threshed (after being cut by machine) earlier by hand, by a threshing-machine driven by water. We tried ploughing using a long wire and two stationary steam engines; it made a rough job but was quicker.

Little artificial manure was used. Cows’ water was collected in tanks and carted out into the fields in barrels, where it was spread with a long— handled ladle. Contractors used to collect night—soil from the towns and sell it to the farmers. Good money was made at this job, and at least one man I know saved enough money to buy his own farm. Women earned is. 6d. a day by following the horses grazing in the pastures and breaking up the dung with a long fork.

Little wheat bread was eaten. We lived mainly on oatmeal which was made into flat, sour cakes shaped like gramophone records. A cream-stean filled with oatmeal and water with a little sour dough to start it fermenting was left to stand for twenty-four hours. Every house had its ‘bakston’, a brick fireplace with a circular iron top, standing beside the kitchen range. When the iron top was hot it was greased with a little fat, and enough oatmeal mixture to make a thin cake was poured on it.

They cooked in about three minutes, and usually enough were made at one baking to last a week or ten days. By that time they would be covered with a green, furry mould, which would be scraped off so that they could be toasted before the fire and eaten with butter or cheese. There was nothing better you could wish for. Oatmeal was also made into porridge known as ‘lumpty-tums’, made by stirring the meal into boiling milk; this was eaten with salt.

Our cattle were fed on oatmeal, for there was little corn imported, and also on turnips and cabbage. Kale did not come into use until later and was thought little of. A great many beans were grown and ground into meal; they made strong food for cattle. Pigs were not killed until they reached fifteen or twenty score. We had little meat in those days, for fewer beef cattle were kept, but there was often pork and we were never without bacon. Hams were not smoked, but after being hung up to dry for two or three weeks they were put in the ‘meal ark’, a great oak chest nine feet long and a yard wide, in which the oatmeal was kept. The hams were buried out of sight in the meal, and were thus kept airtight until required.

When we needed extra meat we shot rabbits, and almost every farm had a fishpond where trout and pike could be caught. Rhubarb and gooseberries were the fruits most grown, and wines were made from damsons, cowslips, sloes and elderberries. There were few eggs, for few hens were kept. About 1890 wheat flour started to come into favour. Few houses had an oven, and the women used to make their own dough and take it to the bakehouse; baking cost a halfpenny per quartern loaf.

When I was seventeen I earned £16 a year and my keep, the highest wage a man could get. Though wages were low people managed on them and also saved a bit. Ten shillings went a lot further then than now. Bread was 3d. the qutrtern loaf, milk 3d. a quart, tobacco 3d. an ounce (what a cry went up when it was raised to 3/12d.), while beer was 2d. a pint, the best was 3d.

The year’s work ended at Michaelmas, when all farm workers took a week’s holiday, and then went to the Hiring Fair, about October 10th. But I never needed to hire myself out, as I always had more jobs offered than I could undertake. Pity I couldn’t have spread myself a bit! Farmers were always wanting lads, and some lads would take the shilling hire-fee, and then never turn up. Other holidays were May Day and Well-dressing.

When I was twenty-three I married and a year later I rented a small— holding of seven acres for £15; an extra five acres brought the rent to £20. I temained there fourteen years. My wife managed the holding and our three cows, while I worked as labourer for neighbouring farmers. When idle between hay-making and harvest I broke stone in the parish quarry with box and ‘scrat’. Rates were 6d. a ton for large stone, 1s. 6d. to 2s a ton for small. A man could break four tons a day if he worked hard.

Sometimes I cleaned ‘dyches’. The pay was 8s. a week or 2d. the rood of eight yards; I preferred the latter rate. I also did carting and pig-killing. Once a week I walked six miles to Leek market with a basket containing two hundred eggs on one arm, and another basket with twelve pounds of butter in it on the other.

In 1902 I was able to move to my present farm, which I rented for twenty years and then bought.