How to be a Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Everyday Life by Ruth Goodman

Author:Ruth Goodman [Goodman, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780241973721
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2015-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

To do this a ploughman began at the centre of his ridge and set his mould board to throw the earth to the right. When he reached the end of the row he turned clockwise, set his next furrow as close as possible to the first, and returned, throwing the earth again to the right on top of the earth thrown up before. He continued to work in a long thin spiral out, each time throwing the soil to the centre, gradually moving soil from the sides of the ridge to the middle. If the land was very wet, he might have to go over the same ground several times to create a big enough difference between ridge and furrow to drain the water away.

Wet and heavy soils generally spent the whole of the winter in this configuration. Remnants of this pattern can still be seen up and down the country where old plough land has lain for many years under later pasture, preserving the outlines in grass mounds when modern machinery and methods have flattened out the arable fields. If you spot an area of ancient ridge and furrow, note how closely it is related to the contours of the land, aiming as it does to collect and channel water. In some places you can trace out a ploughman’s day, spotting the places where he turned his plough round, and may well have rested to drink from his flask of ale. You will also notice the uniformity of those ridges in both width and length. These reflect the distance that a plough team (whether oxen or horses) could comfortably pull before they needed a quick breather, and the width of ridge that drained effectively. Too wide and the water never made it to the furrows; too narrow and there was little land left to plant. This uniform ridge size had long ago become semi-fixed as a unit of landholding; each could theoretically be rented individually.

In the wettest areas these ridges had to remain high all year round to keep the crop’s roots out of the bog, but most land was somewhat drier in the summer and ridges that were too high could suffer from the opposite problem, becoming too dry. For many farmers, therefore, good drainage meant building the ridges up over winter (known as ‘ridging up’) and then casting them down again before planting to a more even and flatter profile that held moisture in the heat of summer. This casting down was again the job of the plough, setting the mould board to the opposite side of the plough and making furrows a little more widely spaced. John Fitzherbert’s advice in his Boke of Husbandry was to set the plough three or four feet from the ridge and cast (or plough) down the outer sides of the ridge. He could do this either by having his mould board throw the earth to the left, or by leaving his mould board fixed and working anticlockwise. Then he was

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