The Medieval Garden Enclosed

Above, from left to right: Calendar page for August from the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry, 1405–1408/1409. Pol, Jean, and Herman de Limbourg (Franco-Netherlandish, active in France, by 1399–1416). French; Made in Paris. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, The Cloisters Collection, 1954 (54.1.1); detail of the activity for the month; detail of the zodiacal symbol Virgo. See the Collection Database to learn more about this work of art.

Sometimes busy, bound by rings,
I must eagerly obey my servant,
Break my bed, clamor brightly
That my lord has given me a neck-ring.
Sleep-weary I wait for the grim-hearted
Greeting of a man or woman; I answer
Winter-cold. Sometimes a warm limb
Bursts the bound ring, pleasing my dull
Witted servant and myself. I sing round
The truth if I may in a ringing riddle.

—Anglo-Saxon riddle from The Exeter Riddle Book, translated by Craig Williamson

Dorothy Hartley, in her classic work on the late medieval English agricultural year, Lost Country Life, confidently asserts that the answer to this Old English riddle is a flail. [Further investigations indicate that the matter is by no means settled. The possible solutions to the riddle provided in the link above include both a flail and a bell, among others, and scholars continue to debate the matter. A recent scholarly article has come down on the side of the plough. See the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 108, No. 3, July 2009, University of Illinois Press.]

The flail is an ancient agricultural tool that was used to free harvested grain from its husk. As Hartley explains, the flail consists of two pieces of wood, a staff that is grasped in both hands, and a free-swinging swipple or swingle, the length of which is brought down hard on a pile of unbound grain. (”Flail” is derived from the Latin word flagella, or “whip,” and “swipple” from the Middle English swepe, or “to scourge.”) The two pieces were usually joined by a short chain, but leather hinges were sometimes used. When the thresher made a swinging stroke, holding the staff in both hands, the swipple swung around behind his head—the head of the staff was brought down to the threshing floor at the end of the stroke. The swipple banged down on the resilient, springy pile of wheat; the resistance of the wheat and the bounce of the swipple made a vibration that shook the kernels out, rather than beating them out, thus preventing any bruising or damage to the grain.

Not all of the harvested wheat would be threshed in late summer, even though grain stores would be low and in need of replenishment at Lammas. (See the July 6 post “Gaining Grain” for more about grain stores.) Despite the calendar convention common to medieval Books of Hours, which shows one or two threshers at work in the open in August, threshing would not ordinarily have been done outdoors, lest the precious grains be scattered and lost, but rather on the floor of large barns that could be opened to sun and wind, providing good light and a draft that would be helpful at the next stage, winnowing.

Wheat sheaves were stored against the day when the grain would be separated from the husks. (The straw was not discarded but was put to other purposes.) Since the task was performed indoors, it could be done in wet weather when field work could not, and threshing could be spread out over the rainy months. While the thresher in the Belles Heures shown above works alone on a small store of grain, threshing was more often done by a circle of as many as eight or ten men working in perfect rhythm and keeping perfect time, lest skulls be cracked. (There was also a danger that the swipple—the business end of the flail—might fly off the staff). Dorothy Hartley provides a wonderful diagram of the circular figures described in the process, which she compares with those described by bell-ringers. As in bell-ringing, a leader called the changes or kept time with a chant. All the threshers brought their strokes to a simultaneous close when the leader called “Flails down!”

—Deirdre Larkin

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On Saturday, August 15, at 12:00 and again at 2:00 p.m., I will be giving a special gallery and garden talk related to the feast of the Assumption. The talk, titled “The Garden of the Queen of Heaven,” will focus on the foliage framing the representation of the Coronation of the Virgin on the tympanum of the thirteenth-century limestone doorway from the abbey of Moutiers-St.-Jean, and on the many Marian plants represented in the collection and grown in the gardens of The Cloisters.

Tags: August, flail, sweple, threshing, Virgo, wheat

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14, 2009 at 12:40 pm and is filed under Medicinal Plants, Medieval Agriculture, The Medieval Calendar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.