Published by the East Yorkshire Local History Society back in 2020 this A4 size book is mostly a product of the author’s oral history interviews in the 1970s of elderly ex-farm workers who had worked in the Yorkshire Wolds and Holderness. The chapters are arranged across the farming year from autumn and winter ploughing to autumn harvesting and threshing. The gentlemen interviewed were mostly being asked about their memories as young men; ploughboys, because it was young single boys/men and their two or three heavy horses that slowly did the early winter ploughing, usually ahead of spring sown wheat, barley, roots or clover.
The analysis of what Dr. Caunce recorded is all very informative and brings to life a farming era now long gone. His concluding paragraphs, pp.50-55, provide a really good analysis of farming in Edwardian times, and more condensed than any textbook on the same era.
I have a personal interest in the subject matter as my father was a farm worker most of his working life, indeed being born in 1899 he was older than a couple of the men interviewed in the 1970s (he was 50 when I was born and I am now 77). I’m not sure but I don’t think he was ever a ploughboy. He drifted into farm work after being de-mobbed in the early 1920s and seems to have spent much of his life as a pigman, a seven days a week job, and more or less the same routine every day. In later life he looked after the laying chickens on the farm and was gardener to the farmer and his ‘big house’, (see the two long essays in section three of this website, one about Sidney Walter (mostly his war service) and Richard Clarke, which is mostly about my mother’s family tree – successive generations of farm workers.
Dr. Caunce emphasises the distinction between plough lads and older (usually married men) who worked on diverse jobs on the land dictated by the seasons.