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Farndales and Agriculture
Agriculture has always been the heart of the Farndale communities
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Dates are in red.
Hyperlinks to other pages are in dark blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and citations are in turquoise.
Context and local history are in purple.
This page has the following sections:
·
Introduction
·
The
Farndale farmers
·
Farndale
agricultural workers
·
Agriculture
in the Middle Ages
·
Serfdom
·
Tenancy
·
Farming
methods
·
Rural
Life around the North York Moors
·
Agricultural
Labourers
·
Agricultural
Change
·
The
path to modern farming
·
Links,
texts and books
Introduction
Whilst of course the family in the
twenty first century comprises a large range of folk, many now living in urban
areas, the historical family is rooted in the land and agriculture. Until the
industrial revolution, most of the British population was rural and horizons
were small.
Our family’s recorded history began with
the clearing of the land in Farndale by about 1230. There was pastureland
in Farndale by at least 1225.
Even by 1280 there were folk such as William
the Smith of Farndale who specialised in supportive trades. By 1338 people
such as Walter
de Farndale, later Vicar of Haltwhistle, Lazonby
and Chelmsford, and William
Farndale later Vicar of Doncaster, had become chaplains. By 1363, Johannis
de Farndale had moved to York and was working as a saddler in an urban
setting, and his family would stay there for generations, his grandson being a
butcher. There were large numbers of the family who joined the Armed Forces. There were several
policemen.
However the bulk of the family remained in a
rural setting, working for others on the land, and occasionally becoming tenant
farmers themselves.
Indeed even as the family moved its
centre of gravity to the area of Cleveland when Nicholas
Farndale’s family moved there in perhaps about 1565, the focus remained
rural for another four centuries. It is true that there were groups of the
family who moved to the larger urban port town of Whitby
where many turned to the sea for work,
and when the industrial revolution came, others found work in the mines, whilst some large
groups of the family moved to urban centres such as Leeds
and Bradford, particularly to work in the textile
industry. However the bulk of the family continued to work
in agricultural roles and mostly within a comparatively small radius of not
more than about ten miles around Guisborough.
This web page tells the story of the
Farndales and agriculture.
The Farndale farmers
The Farndales who became tenant farmers
included John Farndale, “Old Farndale of Kilton” (FAR000143);
William Farndale, Farmer of Craggs (FAR000146);
William Farndale (FAR00152)
perhaps for a time; John Farndale (FAR00167); John
Farndale (FAR00177);
William Farndale (FAR00183);
Elias Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00184); John
Farndale, for a time before he turned to trade and agency and became a writer (FAR00217); Matthew
Farndale, who then emigrated to Australia where he became rooted to the land of
Victoria (FAR00225);
John Farndale (FAR00230);
Martin Farndale of Kilton (FAR00236); John
Farndale (FAR00240);
John Farndale of Whitby (FAR00244); George
Farndale of Kilton (FAR00252); Elias
Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00274);
Charles Farndale of Kilton Hall Farm (FAR00341);
George Farndale of Brotton (FAR00350C);
Martin Farndale of Tidkinhow (FAR00364);
Matthew Farndale of Craggs (FAR00383);
William Farndale of Gillingwood Hall, Richmond (FAR00531); John
William Farndale of Danby (FAR00537);
John Farndale at Tidkinhow (FAR00553); Martin
Farndale, cattle farmer of Alberta (FAR00571);
George Farndale, farmer at Three Hills, Alberta (FAR00588);
Catherine Farndale and the Kinseys in Alberta (FAR00601);
Herbert Farndale of Craggs (FAR00652);
Grace Farndale and Howard Holmes (FAR00659);
William Farndale of Thirsk (FAR00665);
Alfred Farndale of Wensleydale (FAR00683) and
Geoff Farndale of Wensleydale (FAR00922).
Martin Farndale
at Tidkinhow about 1920
John
Farndale at Tidkinhow about 1937 Matthew Farndale
and Mary Ann at Craggs Hall Farm, about 1900 George Farndale,
of Kilton Hall Farm, about 1925
The Farndale Farm Labourers
The lives of many members of the family
through time, was a life of work for others on the fields. Many of the farmers
listed above spent periods of time working for others on the land before they
acquired land to farm for themselves. Examples of those who worked as
‘agricultural labourers’ included George Farndale of Brotton (FAR00215);
Jethro Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00218);
Wilson Farndale (FAR00227);
Henry Farndale of Great Ayton (FAR00229);
William Farndale of Brotton (FAR00243);
William Farndale of Whitby (FAR00257);
William Farndale of Seltringham (FAR00258); John
Farndale of Eskdaleside (FAR00262); Martin
Farndale of Kilton (FAR00264);
William Farndale of Great Ayton (FAR00283);
Joseph Farndale of Whitby (FAR00285);
William Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00286); John
Farndale of Kilton (FAR00287);
Richard Farndale of Great Ayton (FAR00288);
Matthew Farndale of Coatham (FAR00297); John
Farndale (FAR00305);
John George Farndale before he emigrated to Ontario (FAR00337); William
Farndale of Loftus (FAR00378);
Thomas Farndale of Ampleforth (FAR00474) and
George Farndale of Loftus (FAR00627).
Agriculture in the Middle Ages
Peasant
woman milking a cow, mid Thirteenth Century
Medieval Farming in Farndale
1086
By 1086,
Farndale was an unknown place in thick forested land. However
there was a tiny settlement which comprised ten villagers, one priest, two
ploughlands, two lord’s plough teams, three men’s plough teams, a mill and a church around the Chucrh of St
Gregory in Chirchebi, now at Kirkdale. It had been a community under Orm’s
suzerainty since at least 1055 and no doubt well before that.
1233
The Abbot
granted that if the cattle of Nicholas or of his heirs or of his men at Kikby, Fademor, Gillingmor or Farndale,
hereafter enter upon the common of the said wood and pasture
of Houton, Spaunton and Farendale, they shall have free way in
and out without ward set; provided they do not tarry in the said pasture.’ 17th
year of the Reign of Henry III. (Yorkshire Fines Vol LXVII) (FAR00007)
1270
John the shepherd of Farndale must have
been a herdsman by about 1270.
1276
By 1276
there was perhaps 545 acres of cultivated land in Farndale.
1282
By
1282 there was perhaps 768 acres in cultivation in Farndale.
‘In a
certain dale called Farndale there are fourscore and ten natives, not tenants
by bovate of land, but by, more and less, whose rents are extended at £38 8s
8d. Each of whom pays at Martinmas two strikes of nuts, four of the aforesaid
tenants only being excepted from the rent of nuts. Price of nuts as above. Sum
of nuts, two and a half quarters and one strike. Sum in money 43s 9d of whom
four score and five shall be harrowing at Lent according to the size of his
holding, that is, for each acre of his own land a 1/2d worth of harrowing.
Those works are extended at 29s 4d. They ought to be talliated and
given pannage as above. The sum of £1 10s 1d. There are there three tenants in
waste places called Arkeners and Swenekelis, holding ten acres of land, an paying 10s a year and giving nuts worth 18d. The
harrowing is extended at 5d. They are serfs as the aforesaid ones of Farndale.
Sum 11s 11d.’
1301
By
1301, there was a sizeable agricultural community in Farndale, with 39
names associatred with the place and the
identification of farmed settlements which can still be identified today,
including Wakelevedy’ (Wake Lady Green), ‘Westgille’ (West Gill), Monkegate
(Monket House) and ‘Elleshaye
(Eller House).
1310
‘In
1310, 20 oxen the property of Nicholas the parker, worth 8s, 6 oxen and
3 stirks of William in the horn worth £1 9s, a cow and a stirk of Hugh Laverock
4s 8d and 6 oxen of William Stibbing de Farndale…….’
Life as a Medieval Farmer
Further
research required.
The early medieval period (1200 to
1399)
Further
research required.
The Late Medieval Period (1401 to
1499)
Many of the folk living in a late
medieval village would have had a one room house. The size of the house, the
way it was built, and the contents reveal the simplicity of the home. The
villagers provided most of what they needed for themselves
and their daily routine was governed by the seasons.
Reconstruction from the
Ryedale Folk Museum
The family lived at one end of the building
and the animals, kept for milk, meat and wool, at the
other. The hearth, where the meals were cooked, was the centre of the home. The
smoke would escape through the thatch.
The cottage was also used to store tools
and those used for raking, hoeing, scything and
chopping varied little over centuries. Hay and grain, needed over winter, were
stored in the loft and salted meats hung from the roof beams.
The most
precious possessions were stored in wooden chests. All the furniture could be
easily moved to allow the room to be used for other purposes.
Further
research required.
Serfdom
Further
research required.
Tenancy
By the late Victorian period, Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter I, Poor People's Houses : The first charge on the labourers' ten
shillings was house rent.
Most of the cottages belonged to small tradesmen in the market town and the
weekly rents ranged from one shilling to half a crown. Some labourers
in other villages worked on farms or estates where they had their cottages rent
free; but the hamlet people did not envy them, for 'Stands to
reason,' they said, 'they've allus got to do just
what they be told, or out they goes, neck and crop,
bag and baggage.' A shilling, or even two shillings a week, they felt, was not
too much to pay for the freedom to live and vote as they liked and to go to
church or chapel or neither as they preferred.
Farming methods
Further
research required.
Rural Life around the North York Moors
Further
research required.
…
There were many foundries across the
North Yorkshire Moors that specialised in the production of parts for ranges.
People could choose features and even decoration, as they wished – for instance
one or two ovens, separate or combined hearths, a turf plate or coal basket and
left or right handed. Complicated flues to alter the
draught could be operated to transfer heat from the main hearth to the ovens to
cook.
There is a manufacturer of wood burning
stoves in Pickering which keeps up the tradition, and they have a Farndale Stove!
…
Supplying water to a nineteenth century house could be
a challenge. Few of the poorer houses had indoor taps and people relied upon
communal supplies such as rivers, wells and springs.
Two buckets might be carried with a yoke.
Local rural communities would have
relied upon local businesses
such as blacksmiths and iron foundries, such as these,
reconstructed at the Ryedale Folk Museum near Farndale today.
Agricultural Labourers
In the late
Victorian period …
Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter III, Men Afield: Very early in the morning, before
daybreak for the greater part of the year, the hamlet men would throw on
their clothes, breakfast on bread and lard, snatch the dinner-baskets which
had been packed for them overnight, and hurry off across fields and over stiles
to the farm. Getting the boys off was a more difficult matter. Mothers would
have to call and shake and sometimes pull boys of eleven or twelve out of their
warm beds on a winter morning. Then boots which had been drying inside the
fender all night and had become shrunk and hard as boards in the process would
have to be coaxed on over chilblains. Sometimes a very small boy would cry over
this and his mother to cheer him would remind him that they were only boots,
not breeches. 'Good thing you didn't live when breeches wer'
made o' leather,' she would say, and tell him about the boy of a previous
generation whose leather breeches were so baked up in drying that it took him
an hour to get into them. 'Patience! Have patience, my son', his mother had
exhorted. 'Remember Job.' 'Job!' scoffed the boy. 'What did he know about
patience? He didn't have to wear no leather breeches.'
The
elders stooped, had gnarled and swollen hands and walked badly, for they felt the effects of a life
spent out of doors in all weathers and of the rheumatism which tried most
of them.
The men's
incomes were the same to a penny; their circumstances, pleasures, and their daily field
work were shared in common; but in themselves they
differed; as other men of their day differed, in country and town. Some
were intelligent, others slow at the uptake; some were kind and helpful, others
selfish; some vivacious, others taciturn. If a stranger had gone there looking
for the conventional Hodge, he would not have found him.
Their
favourite virtue was endurance.
Not to flinch from pain or hardship was their ideal. A man would say, 'He says,
says he, that field o' oo-ats's got to come in afore
night, for there's a rain a-comin'. But we didn't
flinch, not we! Got the last loo-ad under cover by midnight. A'moost too fagged-out to walk home; but we didn't flinch.
We done it!' Or,'Ole bull he
comes for me, wi's head down. But I didn't flinch. I
ripped off a bit o' loose rail an' went for he. 'Twas
him as did th' flinchin'.
He! he!' Or a woman would say, 'I set up wi' my poor
old mother six nights runnin'; never had me clothes
off. But I didn't flinch, an' I pulled her through, for she didn't flinch
neither.' Or a young wife would say to the midwife after her first confinement,
'I didn't flinch, did I? Oh, I do hope I didn't flinch.'
The farm
was large,
extending far beyond the parish boundaries; being, in fact, several farms,
formerly in separate occupancy, but now thrown into one and ruled over by
the rich old man at the Tudor farmhouse. The meadows around the farmstead
sufficed for the carthorses' grazing and to support the store cattle and a
couple of milking cows which supplied the farmer's family and those of a few of
his immediate neighbours with butter and milk. A few fields were sown with
grass seed for hay, and sainfoin and rye were grown and cut green for cattle
food. The rest was arable land producing corn and root crops, chiefly wheat.
Around
the farmhouse were grouped the farm buildings; stables for the great stamping
shaggy-fetlocked carthorses; barns with doors so wide and high that a
load of hay could be driven through; sheds for the yellow-and-blue
painted farm wagons, granaries with outdoor staircases; and sheds for
storing oilcake, artificial manures, and agricultural implements. In the
rickyard, tall, pointed, elaborately thatched ricks stood on stone
straddles; the dairy indoors, though small, was a model one; there was a
profusion of all that was necessary or desirable for good farming.
The field
names gave the
clue to the fields' history. Near the farmhouse, 'Moat Piece', 'Fishponds',
'Duffus [i.e. dovehouse]
piece', 'Kennels', and 'Warren Piece' spoke of a time before the Tudor house
took the place of another and older establishment.
One name was
as good as another to most of the men; to them it was just a name and meant
nothing. What mattered to them about the field in which they happened to be
working was whether the road was good or bad which led from the farm to it;
or if it was comparatively sheltered or one of those bleak open places which
the wind hurtled through, driving the rain through the clothes to the very
pores; and was the soil easily workable or of back-breaking heaviness or so
bound together with that 'hemmed' twitch that a ploughshare could scarcely get
through it.
There were usually
three or four ploughs to a field, each of them drawn by a team of three
horses, with a boy at the head of the leader and the ploughman
behind at the shafts. All day, up and down they would go, ribbing the pale
stubble with stripes of dark furrows, which, as the day advanced, would get
wider and nearer together, until, at length, the whole field lay a rich velvety
plum-colour.
The
labourers worked hard and well when they considered the occasion demanded it
and kept up a good steady pace at all times. Some
were better workmen than others, of course; but the majority took a pride in
their craft and were fond of explaining to an outsider that field work was not
the fool's job that some townsmen considered it. Things must be done just so
and at the exact moment, they said; there were ins and outs in good land work
which took a man's lifetime to learn. A few of less admirable build would
boast: 'We gets ten bob a week, a' we yarns every
penny of it; but we doesn't yarn no more; we takes hemmed good care o' that!'
But at team work, at least, such 'slack-twisted 'uns' had to keep in step, and the pace, if slow, was steady.
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter XV, Harvest Home:
After the
mowing and reaping and binding came the carrying, the busiest time of all.
Every man and boy put his best foot forward then,
Harvest
home! Harvest home!
Merry,
merry, merry harvest home!
Our bottles
are empty, our barrels won't run,
And we think
it's a very dry harvest home.
the farmer
came out, followed by his daughters and maids with jugs and bottles and mugs,
and drinks were handed round amidst general congratulations.
the harvest
home dinner everybody prepared themselves for a tremendous feast
Agricultural change
Further
research required.
By 1870 John Farndale was writing about the dramatic impact
of agricultural change on the rural landscape of Kilton.
Realising the profound effect of change on his homeland, he has recorded the
events which occurred in his native place, Kilton and the neighbourhood, and
which took place when spinning wheels ad woollen wheels were industriously used
by every housewife in the district, and long before there were such things in
the world as Lucifer match boxes and telegraphs, or locomotives built to run,
without horse or bridle, at the astonishing rate of sixty miles an hour (Guide to Saltburn by the Sea and the Surrounding District,
John Farndale, 1870). Kilton had started to realise the impacts of the
"monstre farm" and the Industrial
Revolution. "And now dear Farndale, the best of friends must part, I
bid you and your little Kilton along and final farewell. Time was on to all our
precious boon, Time is passing away so soon, Time know more about his vast
eternity, World without end oceans without sure."
Thomas Hardy …
The effects of
the new innovations b y the late nineteenth century …
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter IV, At the ‘Wagon and Horses’: All
times are times of transition; but the eighteen-eighties
were so in a special sense, for the world was at the beginning of a new era,
the era of machinery and scientific discovery. Values and conditions of
life were changing everywhere. Even to simple country people the change was
apparent. The railways had brought distant parts of the country
nearer; newspapers were coming into every home; machinery was superseding hand
labour, even on the farms to some extent; food bought at shops, much of it from
distant countries, was replacing the home-made and home-grown. Horizons were
widening; a stranger from a village five miles away was no longer looked upon
as 'a furriner'. But, side by side with these changes, the old country
civilization lingered. Traditions and customs which had lasted for
centuries did not die out in a moment. State-educated children still
played the old country rhyme games; women still went leazing,
although the field had been cut by the mechanical reaper; and men and boys
still sang the old country ballads and songs, as well as the latest music-hall
successes. So, when a few songs were called for at the 'Wagon and Horses', the
programme was apt to be a curious mixture of old and new.
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter III, Men Afield: Machinery was just coming into use on
the land. Every
autumn appeared a pair of large traction engines, which, posted one on
each side of a field, drew a plough across and across by means of a cable.
These toured the district under their own steam for hire on the
different farms, and the outfit included a small caravan, known as 'the
box', for the two drivers to live and sleep in. In the 'nineties, when they
had decided to emigrate and wanted to learn all that was possible about
farming, both Laura's brothers, in turn, did a spell with the steam plough, horrifying
the other hamlet people, who looked upon such nomads as social outcasts.
Their ideas had not then been extended to include mechanics as a class apart
and they were lumped as inferiors with sweeps and tinkers and others whose work
made their faces and clothes black. On the other hand, clerks and salesmen of
every grade, whose clean smartness might have been expected to ensure respect,
were looked down upon as 'counter-jumpers'. Their
recognized world was made up of landowners, farmers, publicans, and farm
labourers, with the butcher, the baker, the miller, and the grocer as
subsidiaries.
Such
machinery as the farmer owned was horse-drawn and was only in partial use. In some
fields a horse-drawn drill would sow the seed in rows, in others a human sower would walk up and down with a basket suspended from
his neck and fling the seed with both hands broadcast. In harvest time the
mechanical reaper was already a familiar sight, but it only did a small part of
the work; men were still mowing with scythes and a few women were still reaping
with sickles. A thrashing machine on hire went from farm to farm and its use
was more general; but men at home still thrashed out their allotment crops and
their wives' leazings with a flail and winnowed the
corn by pouring from sieve to sieve in the wind.
The path to modern farming
Gale
Bank Farm, Wensley where Alfred and Geoff
farmed.
Gale
Bank Farm early twentieth century
Links, texts and books
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