Virtual Grub Street: Harvest Home and Hock Cart: English Harvest Festivals.

Bringing the Harvest Home is the descendant of a celebration that dates back into prehistoric times. Frazer gives his usual insightful overview:

In Russia also the last sheaf is often shaped and dressed as a woman, and carried with dance and song to the farmhouse. Out of the last sheaf the Bulgarians make a doll which they call the Corn-queen or Corn-mother; it is dressed in a woman's shirt, carried round the village, and then thrown into the river in order to ‘secure plenty of rain and dew for the next year’s crop.[1]

In England, during the Middle Ages and Early Modern times, it was celebrated whenever the final day of the harvest might fall on a given estate.

The custom of the Harvest Queen appears to have been common in England. Brand quotes from Hutchinson’s History of Northumberland the following I have seen, in some places, an image appareled in great finery, crowned with flowers, a sheaf of corn placed under her arm, and a scythe in her hand, carried out of the village in the morning of the conclusive reaping day, with music and much clamour of the reapers, into the field, where it stands fixed on a pole all day, and when the reaping is done, is brought home in like manner. This they call the Harvest Queen, and it represents the Roman Ceres ”[2]

We have more than a few references available to how it was celebrated in England. The German tourist, Paul Hentzner, left a record having been impressed by the procession of the Hock Cart he witnessed during his 1598 tour of Windsor Castle.

As we were returning to our inn, we happened to meet some country people celebrating their Harvest Home; their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which perhaps they would signify Ceres: this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maidservants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.[3]

The Hock Cart carried the ceremonial last wagon-load of the harvest back from the fields. This, of course, is just the kind of picture at which the poet Robert Herrick excels. In the poem “Hock-Cart, or Harvest Home” he describes the procession in his locale during the early 17^th century.

Come, Sons of Summer, by whose toile

We are the. Lords of Wine and Oile,

By whose tough labours, and rough hands.

We rip up first, then reap our lands,

Crown’d with the eares of corne, now come,

And to the pipe sing Harvest Home.

Come forth, my Lord, and see the Cart,

Drest up with all the country art.

See here a Maukin, there a sheet

As spotlesse pure as it is sweet:

The horses, mares, and frisking fillies,

(Clad, all, in linnen, white as lillies,)

The harvest swaines and wenches bound

For joy, to see the Hock-Cart crown’d.

About the Cart, heare, how the rout

Of rural younglings raise the shout;

Pressing before, some coming after.

Those with a shout, and these with laughter.

Some blesse the Cart; some kisse the sheaves;

Some prank them up with oaken leaves:

Some crosse the fill-horse;[4] some, with great

Devotion, stroak the home-borne wheat:

While other Rusticks, lesse attent

To prayers than to merryment,

Run after with their breeches rent,

Well, on brave boyes, to your Lord’s hearth

Glitt’ring with fire; where, for your mirth,

You shall see, first, the large and cheefe

Foundation of your feast, fat beefe:

With upper stories, mutton, veale,

And bacon, (which makes full the meale)

With sev’rall dishes standing by,

And here a custard, there a pie,

And here all-tempting Frumentie.”

Among the many definitions of “Maukin” over the centuries, in this poem it would seem to indicate that the “image richly dressed” of Hentzner’s description was actually a flesh-and-blood kitchen maid. That she might realize her lineage from the goddesses of the Ceres line is unlikely. But, then, that is part of the romance of it all.

Harvest Home was more than simply a great feast. It was a feast at which the lord of the manor and the harvesters and servants sat together at the same table as equals.

Harvest Home was celebrated throughout Europe. In each place the last wagon of the harvest — in most of England the "Hock Cart" — had its own name. In each, a woman or image of a woman rode in the wagon with the last sheaf or wisp[5] of the harvest. Often the last wisp was tied to the top of a long pole — sometimes garlanded. In many places she was called some variation of the “Old Woman”.[6] In others she was a maiden until All Hallow’s Eve was passed, after which she became the “Old Woman”.

[1] Frazer, James George. Spirits of The Corn and of the Wild (1914). I.146.

[2] Frazer, I.146. quoting Hutchinson, History of Northumberland, quoted by J Brand Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, lI. 20, Bohn’s edition.

[3] Hentzner, Paul. A Journey Into England In the Year M.D.XC.VIII. (1757, 1807). 41.

[4] fill-horse] Thill horse. A horse hooked up between the thills or shafts of a wagon.

[5] Hentzner, 41. “The farmers here do not bind up their corn in sheaves, as they do with us,…”

[6] Frazer, I.135. “Sometimes the last sheaf is called, not the Corn-mother, The but the Harvest - mother or the Great Mother. In the or province of Osnabruck, Hanover, it is called the Harvest- the Great mother; it is made up in female form, and then the reapers dance about with it.”

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