The Holy Days of Harvest

Centuries of agrarian experience by European peasants and yeoman farmers led to adroit adaptations to the typically harsh conditions of life on the land. They learned to survive during the long continental winters through hard work and carefully arranged field operations suited to local conditions. Changes in the winds, soil textures and available moisture, and myriad other aspects of nature informed their management decisions throughout the year. The earth’s fertility meant life, perpetuation of family, and community wellbeing. The center of existence came to be the village church where people gathered weekly in the presence of an altar representing the axis mundi of heaven, earth, and the underworld. Here priests and pastors mediated a secure grace-filled dimension from past to future with hallowed reference to good soil and sowers, gleaners and reapers, and “fields white for harvest.”

Archibald Hartruck, A Harvest Festival in the Cotswolds
Boxwell Church on a manor formerly owned by Sir Walter Raleigh
The Sphere (London, September 21, 1901)

Medieval literature is rich with subjects of agricultural association derived from biblical texts, early church documentary accounts, and regional folklore. St. John the Baptist has been venerated at various times of the year as Herald of the Harvest, and since the Middle Ages on Midsummer Day—June 24, in part because of the metaphorical significance of his prophetic call for repentance before the baptism of Jesus: “His winnowing fork is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:12). The holy days of the medieval harvest season reaffirmed the cycle of the Jewish agrarian calendar although these commemorations typically took place three to four months later with the cooler climates and later harvests of northern Europe.

The patron saint of harvesters and peasants, St. Isidore the Farmer (c. 1070-1130), was curiously honored less because of his agricultural diligence than his attention to prayer and worship even when interrupting field operations on his master’s estate in Spain. But St. Isidore, who is often portrayed in paintings and sculpture with a sickle fastened beneath his belt, remained steadfast in religious observations and his crops flourished. His wife, St. Maria Torriba (d. 1175), was also canonized for the miraculous provision of grain after she shared their few precious seeds with the needy and foraging birds.

Medieval European Harvest Holy Days and Festivals

June 24: St. John the Baptist’s Day—Feast of St. John, Herald of the Harvest (Midsummer Day)

August 1: Lammas Day (Loaf Mass)—Feast of First Fruits and Blessing of the Fields, ceremonial beginning of harvest

September 24: St. Rusticus Day—Feast of the Ingathering, traditional “Harvest-Home” celebrations (Autumnal Equinox)

September 29: Michaelmas—Feast of St. Michael and All Angels, ceremonial end of harvest and the farm year

November 11: Martinmas—Feast of St. Martin, general thanksgiving, end of fall wheat seeding, beginning of winter

Western European Folklore — Oat Goats and Rye Hounds

Scandinavian farmers customarily saved the last harvest cuttings for the ceremonial “Yule Sheaf” (Norwegian Julenek, Swedish Julkarve) of oats or other grain. The sheaf was suspended from a pole or barn roof during Christmas week as a blessing to the birds and goodwill offering for a favorable growing season in the coming year. This tradition continued among some families in eighteenth century America as described in verse by Ohio poet Phoebe Cary’s “The Christmas Sheaf”: 

“And bid the children fetch,” he said,
“The last ripe sheaf of wheat,
And set it on the roof o’erhead
That the birds may come and eat.

And this we do for His dear sake,
The Master kind and good,
Who of the loaves He blest and brake
Fed all the multitude.”

Adolph Tidermand (1814-1876), Traditions—The Christmas Sheaf (1846)

Oil on canvas, 14 ¼ x 16 ½ inches

National Gallery, Oslo

Upon completion of harvest in some parts of Germany during medieval times, farmers preserved the last remaining grain as “Wödin’s Share” (Vergodendeel, Vergodenstruss), an offering to the ancient pagan Allfather (Norse Odin, Slavic Volos). To solicit Wödin’s favor for the coming year, the cuttings were left for his thundering herd of horses sometimes glimpsed swirling aloft as heaps of roiling clouds. Four-wheeled “Wödin’s Wagon” was known in some German traditions as the four stars of Ursa Major with the three that descend from the corner forming the wain’s tongue. German folklorist-philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) found evidence of these traditions persisting well into the nineteenth century. After the ceremonial final reaping, some Saxon and Hessian farmers then struck the sides of their scythes three times with the strop, spilled a small amount of their beer, brandy, or milk on the ground, and waved their hats and beat their scythes three more times. Grimm further described a custom among some farmers to then parade home to the cry of “Wôld, Wôld, Wôld!/haven hüne weit schüt/jümm hei van haven süt….” British antiquarian John Symonds Udal (1848-1925) found vestiges of these beliefs in the celebratory end-of-harvest “crying of the neck whooping” of some Wessex descendants of Anglo-Saxon farmers in southern England. (“The neck,” in some places pronounced “knack,” was a small tied bundle of large heads gathered from the last cuttings.) Udal supposed their shouting “We hav’en” three times was “a survival of the old invocation to the great god Woden” that had remained through the centuries.

German farmers also contended with a malevolent menagerie of imaginary creatures—die Feldgeister (field spirits), including the Kornkuh (Grain Cow), Gerstenwolf (Barley Wolf), Haferbock (Oat Goat), Roggenhund (Rye Hound), and Aprilochs (April Ox). Folklore in Slavic Eastern Europe prescribed sparing the last few stalks of uncut grain for the field’s wild goat-like spirit, or for Baba Yagá (“Grandmother Witch”), though Christian influence confronted tradition in the words of a Russian folksong:

Let’s go girls, let’s go girls,

Out to the grain, out to the grain.

In our grain, in our grain,

Sits a witch, sits a witch.

Get out, witch; get out, witch,

Get out of our grain.

Our grain, our grain,

Has been consecrated, has been consecrated!

Go away witch, go away witch.

To Sen’kovo, to Sen’kovo—

There the grain there the grain,

Has not been consecrated.

Lodewijk Toeput (c. 1550-c.1605), Summer Harvest (c. 1590)

Black ink and gray wash over graphite, 10 ⅝ x 16 ⅝ inches

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.

Harvest Folklore — Mysteries from the East

In Eastern Europe, cutting the last sheaf (Russian dozhinochnym, Ukrainian didukh) was often accompanied by an elder’s petitional prayer so widows and orphans, rich and poor, would all be blessed with a plentiful harvest. (The Russian word for harvest, urozhaí, and Ukrainian zhnýva, derive from a shared root meaning “to cut.”) Fieldworkers festooned the sheaf with flowers and ribbons and honored members of the landlord’s family carried it home with bread and salt in a joyous procession accompanied by the singing of ritual harvest songs. Workers also fashioned colorful wreaths to be worn by unmarried youth. The host ceremoniously placed the sheaf on a peg in the ritual corner of the house (krásni úgol/pokuttia) which held icons, censer, and candles. A festive harvest dinner followed and the sheaf, known in some traditions as the “Grandfather Sheaf,” remained in the sacred niche until Christmas Eve. At that time some grain from the sheaf was used to make traditional kutya cereal dessert while other kernels were ritually scattered outside for the fertility of the fields and blessing upon the household.

In Slavic folklore, decrepit Baba Yagá might be a maternal effigy fashioned from straw that was also identified in some traditions with the summertime Pleiades star cluster. The constellation’s bright appearance portended favorable harvests. Baba Yagá appears ambiguously in agrarian folklore as both guardian of crops and as ogress who could withhold humanity’s bounty from the earth. For this reason the “Old Woman” existed in the fearsome twilight between nature and culture, said to dwell in the unfenced borderlands separating field and forest. Parents warned their children not to wander through the countryside or trample crops lest they be taken by Baba Yagá, though such beings existed as much as pedagogical fictions to prevent wanderers from damaging the grain.

The Russian rural landscape might also be inhabited by frightful polevoi (“field spirits”)—the rural “demons” of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s fictional fourth century Lesniks. These misshapen, clumsy beings tended to appear at midday and bore the color of an area’s soil with hair of wild grass. A polevyk’s appearance usually foreshadowed misfortune. These beings were similar to the more diabolical leshii (“forest spirits”) and vodianoi (“water spirits”). Slavic millers of grain appeased the latter by regular streamside offerings of bread and salt—origin of the Russian word for hospitality.

Scythes, Sickles, and Mr. Tusser

A vivid memory from my Palouse Country boyhood is watching Dad cut tall grasses and weeds around our farmyard with an exceedingly old scythe. He was fond of saying, “There’s a right way and a wrong way” (to just about everything), and I remember him showing my brother and I how to properly hold the handles (“nibs”) and set a rhythm to the cutting. Early cradle scythes appeared in the thirteenth century and are depicted in paintings by Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525-1569). These featured a small half-circle loop attached to the base of the handle that caught the entire mowed gavel that was dropped at the end of each stroke for gathering into piles. Some ten swaths by an experienced fieldworker typically provided enough stalks to fashion a sheaf about one foot in diameter, and a long day’s labor with a scythe kept keen could cover from one to two acres depending on field conditions. A customary fieldworker echelon of four reapers followed by a binder could then harvest about five to six acres per day. The improved cradle scythe featuring a long scythe blade connected to four to six long wooden ribs that could hold several swaths eventually appeared in nineteenth century America. Its more substantial cuttings were then dropped in the stubble to be bundled and placed into rows of shocks. Using the more modern method, a single cradler-bundler pair could cover about the same area as the medieval five-member team.

Cradle Scythe (c. 1890), Columbia Heritage Collection

In medieval times, a landowner typically appointed a bailiff to preside over the day-to-day operations of the manor’s agricultural enterprises. Reporting to the bailiff were the reeve (Old English gerefa), the workers’ representative in civil affairs, a hayward (heggeward) responsible for safeguarding fields of hay and grain from theft and roaming livestock, and harvest overseer (“lord”) who urged timely completion in Thomas Tusser’s sixteenth century poem, “The End of Harvest.”

COME home, lord, singing,

Come home, corn bringing.

'Tis merry in hall,

Where beards wag all.

Once had thy desire,

Pay workman his hire:

Let none be beguil'd,

Man, woman, nor child.

Thank God ye shall,

And adieu for all.

 Tusser’s classic was among the most popular printed works in Elizabethean England and reflects his own experience as a small farmer. Some proverbs on thrift and country life that appear in his verse may not have been original with him, but appear for the first time in such writings from the period and also testify to harvest labor and equipment from the time (“Threshe sede and go fanne”). Tusser also offers qualified support to the era’s controversial enclosure of open fields which was widely opposed by rural commoners who had long benefited from access to the commons (“champion farming”). But Tusser saw economic benefits for all from individualized stewardship of natural resources that would improve efficiency and diversify crop production (“More profit is quieter found / Where pastures in severall be; / Of one seely acre of ground / Than champion maketh of three”).

Gleaners and Mowers, Gavellers and Carters

Although few references to gleaning are found in early medieval farm records or literature, the practice was known to parishioners through sermons and readings from biblical texts like Ruth. Agrarian by-laws after the thirteenth century that regulated peasant manorial obligations provide scant evidence that gleaning in the traditional sense was widely practiced. Virtually all able-bodied villagers worked in harvest and received a share of the crop for meagre although sufficient sustenance, and hordes of migratory workers seasonally roamed throughout Europe to meet area labor shortages during the critical weeks of summer. Until the advent of mechanical reapers and threshers in the nineteenth century, the cutting and binding of sheaves could not be done without some loss of the stalks, and more grain fell by the wayside when the sheaves were set into shocks to facilitate drying and gathering onto wagons. Although barley and oats lacked the level of gluten that made wheat the preferred grain for baking, they still offered the poor important sources of nutrition as flatbreads, soups, and other foods. Oats tended to shatter more easily than wheat when ripened and barley stalks could be more brittle, so both crops may have been gleaned to some extent to supplement villagers’ diets.

Johann Schönsperger, Scything and Reaping (1490)

Johann Schönsperger, Teutscher Kalendar (Munich, 1922)

Since landlords sought to turn out their livestock to forage on harvested stubble fields cleared of shocks, gleaners generally had only a week or two to complete their labor. Landowners zealously guarded the harvest from sheaf-stealers, not an uncommon crime at the time, which led to by-laws specifying limits and qualifications for gleaning in the traditional sense. English royal manor instructions of 1282 permit only those incapable of earning any income to glean: “The young, the old, and those who are decrepit and unable to work….” William Blackstone’s Commentary later explains, “By the common law and custom of England the poor are allowed to enter and glean upon another’s ground after the harvest without being guilty of trespass.”

Well into the present era throughout much of Europe, great bands of contract laborers, including both men and women, were led by the overseer who organized teams of workers as if a military operation. Mowers were usually teens (“lads”) and men who wielded sickles, broadhooks, or long-handled scythes and carried whetstones to keep them razor-sharp throughout the day. (The Proto-Indo-European root of the terms “scythe” and “sickle” is sek, also cognate to schism and sex, means to divide, or cut.) The men were followed by gavellers, often wives of the mowers or younger women, who raked the stalks into rows (gavels) for tying into substantial sheaves, or which were left unbound in rows to be thrown with wooden forks by pitchers into horse-drawn wagons. These were driven by carters to large barns and piled and piled by stackers into enormous heaps to await wintertime threshing by flail or horse “treading.”

An Agrarian Guide to Health and Happiness

The Tacuinum Sanitatus (Almanac of Health) is one of the most richly illustrated fourteenth century Herbals though it is based on an earlier compendium written by the renowned Arab physician Ibn Buṭlān in the eleventh century and translated into Latin. The book  focuses on prevention rather than cures, and is based on the traditions of ancient Greek and Roman medicine. But the works of Hippocrates (c. 460-377 BC) and Galen (129-200 AD) had disappeared in the Latin West after the fall of Rome. In this way Ibn Buṭlān reintroduced Europeans to their own medical heritage. Although relating understandings from Antiquity, Tacuinum was a popular manual of practical guidance for a healthy, happy life with advice on diet, exercise, regulation of temperament, and other topics. The five illustrated versions that survive were created for wealthy Italian patrons and are remarkable for their magnificent illuminations, a term from the Latin expression “light up.” These present a window into daily life during the early Renaissance with depictions of farming, food preparation, and other activities. Considerable attention is devoted to grains, pulses, vegetables, fruits, and other culinary staples.

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Above: Silago (Cutting Rye) and Spelta (Flailing Spelt), Tacuinum Sanitatus (c. 1400); Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome; Wikimedia Commons

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 The Tacuinum depictions of Estes (Summer) show a peasant couple mowing with sickles as a young man stands behind them wearing a crown and belt of wheat and holding up sprays of grain as a likely personification of summer. In Silago a man wielding a broad sickle grasps a handful of rye to cut, while Spelta shows a barefoot couple threshing grain with flails before a shelter of stacked sheaves. Heads of various types of crops are prominently featured, even if the stands appear to be sparse, and also include Furmentum (wheat), Ordeum (barley), Milium (millet), Avena (oats), Rizum (rice), Lenta (lentils), Cicera (chickpeas), Melega (sorghum), and Faxioli (flax).

Tacuinum’s agrarian depictions significantly contributed to the magnificent Cycles of the Months frescos (c. 1400) that decorate Trento, Italy’s Castello del Buonconsiglio. Probably the work of a Bohemian artist commissioned by the temporal ruler of the diocese, the colorful panels show the affairs of both peasant and privileged. The August scene is devoted to the wheat harvest and shows a phalanx of sickle-wielding reapers followed by binders and a stacker. Both men and women share in these tasks. In the foreground a man leads a wagonload of sheaves to a shed where another worker pitches the bundles into an open upper window. A woman carrying pitcher and basket heads to the field to refresh the laborers under the approving eye of a cleric.

Saint Hildegard and “Labors of the Months”

English Fleta and other European manuals on model agricultural practices for landlords and manorial managers appeared widely in the late thirteenth century, followed by others like Pietro de Crescenzi’s exceptional fourteenth century Agricultural Calendar. Although many of these manuscripts were heavily influenced by the classic Latin treatises of Varro and Columella, that they were penned in vernacular languages was significant and reflects the growing appreciation of agriculture beyond abbeys and royal libraries as a subject worthy of intellectual interest and susceptible to systematic improvement. 

Hildegard of Bingen, The Wheel of Life

Detail showing harvest reaper at center left; Codex Latinus 1492 (Liber Divinorum Operum); State Library, Lucca, Italy; Wikimedia Commons

The progression of European summer climate from Mediterranean to continental influenced these artistic arrangements with representative reaping scenes in Italy typically shown in June (Cancer), and in July (Leo) in France. Similar views are found for August (Virgo) in Germany and England, though fewer depictions of the “labors of the months” are known during this time in northern Europe.  In de Crescenzi’s Calendar the emerging Italian conception of realism holds colorfully active sway with men and women in period clothing shown more naturally working together to reap and thresh the crop. De Crescenzi’s illustrated treatise on agriculture, Liber Ruralium Commodorum (Book of Rural Benefits, c. 1309), became the first printed book on the subject when it was published in Augsburg in 1471. 

Personified cycles of diligent rural endeavor, which often prominently feature lightly clad men and women in wide-brimmed straw hats, are typically shown with accompanying signs of the zodiac and more realistically depicted than earlier, passive symbolic forms in earlier illuminated manuscripts like the Calendar of Salzburg (c. 820). Benedictine abbess and visionary mystic Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179)—the “Sibyl of the Rhine” who wrote extensively about botany and plant cultivation, composed and illustrated her remarkable Liber Divinorum Operum (Book of Divine Works) from 1163-1174 which described a holistic cosmology of the temporal and divine realms. Hildegard conceived of a natural world (in regno mundi) that remained vital and inseparable from Christ’s divine kingdom (in regno Christi) as people lived in accordance with the perpetual calendar of natural processes and religious observances. In this way of viriditas (fecundity), the microcosm of an individual’s life could more fully conform to the universal divine macrocosm as revealed in Scripture, evident in nature, and shown in the Book of Divine Works’ illuminated Universal Wheel of Life that depicts the entire calendar from fall sowing to summertime harvest.