Well, sadly - or perhaps luckily - I am old enough to have been born when the wheat harvest was cut by a Sail Reaper pulled by two horses. It threw out loose sheaves and everyone on the farm except the Farmers sons would be in the fields binding and stooking the sheaves as fast as they were thrown out of that hellish machine. I am not old enough to have seen the crop cut by scythe though, but I am sure it must have been a more sedate atmosphere.
It might come as a surprise, but the sheaves were not bound by cord. Cord is too thin and cuts into the outside of the sheaf, crinking the all important straw. You might think the crop was only the grain, but not so, the straw was just as vital a part of the crop, and if it was going for thatching or equally important -corn dolly making- then the straw was not to be damaged by crinking.
I was only a child, and only saw a couple of harvests brought in with the Sail Reaper, but at least I was taught how to bind the sheaves and stook them. For a child, it was almost impossible to handle the man sized sheaves wafted out by the sails of the reaper, so I was given permission to bind half sheaves. To watch the men binding sheaves, all you saw was a blur and a punch and the sheaf was bound and bound tight at that. My dad showed me in slower motion.
He picked the loose sheaf up and laid it against his legs. As he scooped up the sheaf, he also took hold of a small bunch of straw in his left hand. He reached behind the sheaf with his right hand and grabbed the ends of this small bunchl and brought it round the back of the sheaf , then both ends came together in front of the sheaf. In the process of wrapping this tie round the sheaf it had been given about a turn twist which bound the straws together into a soft rope.
Then the two ends were brought together with a heave which tightened the sheaf, and in one movement the ends were crossed, twisted and tucked in behind the band. No knot, just a twist and a tuck - the very stiffness of the straw locked the binding in place. An important trick turned out to be gauging the amount of straw selected to make the band with. Too much and it would be impossible to bend and tuck, too little and the sheaf would just collapse in a whirled splay.
Although I was shown how to tie the sheaves, our job as farm kids was to follow the men, pick up two sheaves and stook them, making a long row of sheaves, six each side to make the sheaves stand in the wind and let the grain finish drying.
Later, the sheaves would be stacked onto huge carts and taken to the farm yard, where they would be built into round stacks, wider at the top than at the bottom. Then some very long ladders would be laid on the stacks and two thatchers would set to work using sheaves and hazel pegs to thatch the stacks. There the stacks would stand until a huge steam threshing machine drove into the farm and the whole harvest would be threshed.
Thinking back, it was a dangerous time, with the great belts flapping around, taking power from the steam engine to the thresher and the elevators. The grain was bagged into sacks far too large for a boy to lift and the chaff went into sacks that seemed bigger than a man, while the straw went back up an elevator into what would become the main yard straw stack, and as it was being built, the thatchers were at work again giving it a new roof.
Some sheaves escaped threshing. Good looking sheaves went into a barn by themselves and a braided straw girdle was made to cover around the tie, these sheaves would then go into the church at harvest festival as a backdrop for all the produce the villagers would bring to dress the church with. For a short time the church would smell wonderful instead of its usual dank mustiness, polish and death watch beetle spray.
Hmm, sorry, got off the topic a bit there.
One thing to note, is that the straw in those days was very long and strong, often 3ft long, so it was easy to use for a binding. Try it today with modern short straw varieties and I doubt you will manage it.
Derek
