One of the ways in which our poor rural ancestors could survive economically was to glean. Gleaning was the practice of collecting leftover crops from fields after farmers had finished their harvesting. It was carried out by all members of a family, but women were commonly to be found gleaning with their children – a way of helping the family economy while the husband took on work as a day labourer, for example.

During the late summer, gleaning was a valuable addition to people’s household resources. Some contemporary writers depicted the life of a labouring family in idealised terms, seeing gleaning as part of a rural idyll. One writer, in 1760, travelled through rural villages and reported:

Dispersed up and down were the children of the needy, gleaning the scattered ears, and picking their scanty harvest. Nor were the old people absent; but crawling into the sun, or sitting on a shady eminence, they beheld the toils, the pleasing toils they once sustained. This is the most joyful period of the countryman’s life…

Public Ledger, 23/8/1760

This belied the difficulty of gleaning, and the stress that the rural poor were under. Their work was not for the lazy; it could be hard, hurt the hands, and was undertaken outside, whatever the weather. Although gleaning took place in the late summer and early autumn, the weather was not always favourable. Eighteenth century newspapers record more than one death by gleaners working through thunderstorms. In July 1724, in a field between Egham and Staines, a married couple were gleaning. A storm hit and the husband was struck dead by a bolt of lightning. [Newcastle Courant, 25 July 1724]. Weather could also destroy the remains of the crops that the poor relied on, and farmers could be obstructive towards these people trampling over their fields. In August 1739, a Dartford farmer stopped a group of poor people from gleaning in his field, taking away the corn they had found and burning it in the farm bailiff’s oven – an act described by the press as cruelty as he would rather destroy the corn than give it to the poor. He got his comeuppance the following night, when lightning struck near a further crop of corn, setting it on fire and burning it all away. [London Evening Post, 21-23/8/1739]

The rural poor had used a variety of strategies to survive in the past, but during the 18th century, their strategies were increasingly foiled or eroded by those more affluent than them. Enclosure stopped the use of common land by the poor, who had used such areas to grow vegetables and graze animals. Poaching became criminalised under the complex Game Laws, which continued to develop over the early 19th century. Then gleaning became the subject of two legal cases that were designed to classify the practice as an act of trespass – criminalising an act that the poor had long seen as their right under common law.

The background to the legal action was increased resentment by farmers towards gleaners over the mid-18th century. In 1767, one farmer found two poor women gleaning in his field in Tidenham, Gloucestershire. One had a baby in her arms, and was struggling to glean while holding onto her child. The farmer, believing he would lose money from the gleaners taking the remains of his crops, promptly started beating them both, fracturing the skulls of both the mother and her child. The newspaper that reported this crime appeared to have taken against the farmer in describing him as an avaricious wretch, but there was a subtext; the farmer was a former humble servant who had married his mistress and had now forgotten his background. The warning here was more to the poor to remember their place, rather than a warning for all farmers to leave the gleaners alone. [St James’s Chronicle, 29/8/1767-1/9/1767]. Another woman, Lydia Hall, was similarly assaulted by a farmer while gleaning in Cambridgeshire in September 1773. The assault caused her to miscarry, and she subsequently died; the farmer was charged with assault. [Middlesex Journal, 11-14/9/1773]

Resentment continued to grow, especially in East Anglia, where families were particularly dependent on gleaning. By the mid 1780s, tension was at its height between landowners and gleaners in the small Suffolk village of Timworth. The landowners saw gleaners as trespassing on their land; the gleaners simply saw themselves as doing what they had always done, and had a right to do. The tension came to a head with two legal judgements. In 1785, Benjamin Manning went to the next parish of Ingham to glean on the land of farmer John Worlledge, taking away with him some barley. Worlledge resented this act, and sued Manning for trespass in the Court of Common Pleas. In May 1786, the court found in the landowner’s favour and awarded him damages. The judgement was based on the fact that Manning was not from Ingham but from Timworth – therefore he was a stranger to the parish, and had no right to glean there.

The following year, James Steel caught Mary Houghton gleaning on his farmland in Timworth, and, again, sued her for trespass in the Court of Common Pleas. The London Chronicle reported that the case concerned the whole yeomanry of England, as it was looking at whether farmers could prevent and impede the wives and children of poor labouring persons from gleaning in the wheat fields. As part of the case, the Bible was quoted, and a treatise on husbandry, as well as a statement about the immemoriality of the custom – arguments in favour of the gleaners’ time-honoured rights. [London Chronicle, 19-21/6/1787]

However, the judges reserved their opinion, and it wasn’t until 1788 that a judgement was finally made in the House of Lords. The Lords had decided that nobody had the right under Common Law to glean the harvest from a private field. Lord Loughborough, the Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, stated that granting the right of the poor to glean would increase their insolence, raising subsequent arguments that the case would be used to oppress the poor.

The gleaning case did not, contrary to expectations, end the practice. In some cases, the poor simply refused to stop gleaning, or, occasionally, took on the farmer in acts of what historian Peter King – who has studied gleaning – calls collective defiance. They would continue to glean and, if warned by the farmer, turn up the next day with all their friends – making the farmer’s job in evicting them from his field far more difficult.

The poverty-stricken members of rural communities were also helped by a reluctance on the part of magistrates to convict the poor of gleaning, despite their recognition that common law did not give them the right to do so. In 1845, a man and two women in Benson, south Oxfordshire, were brought before the Oxfordshire Quarter Sessions, accused of stealing wheat straw. This was, however, a case of gleaning, where two local farmers – who 15 years earlier had been the victims of the Swing Riots, a response not only to their use of threshing machines, but to their support of enclosure – had decided to take the gleaners to court for theft as an example to others. The small value of the wheat was evidence of this – William Ashley was accused of stealing just one penny’s worth of wheat, and Ann Cooke and Harriet Harding of stealing twopennies’ worth. They were all acquitted. [The Morning Post, 22/10/1845]

Gleaning continued to be a part of the rural economy certainly until the mid-19th century in rural England. In times of hardship, it helped the household. It could be carried out by all members of the family, and women could take their babies with them and carry them while they worked. But it was also an activity that called into question the relationship between farmers and the rural poor, and the issue of how to ensure that poor families could survive continued to cause problems for those in government.