Manure Seasons
My Medieval Farming Life. Part 1
This series My Medieval Farming Life is drawn from real, personal experience. It is about farming as a job, but without electricity, gas, machinery, fertilizers, indoor plumbing, or other important inventions that Industrial Revolutions brought.
I hope these stories will entertain and educate. I hope they will surface in your memory from time to time. I hope that we no longer romanticize rural agriculture work. I hope that we remember the gritty lives in a far corner of the world, the lives transformed by much delayed arrival of the Industrial Age.
Certain names were changed to make the reading experience easier. Part 2 is about invitation to a slaughter, also see part 3 for a year of no importance, and Intermission for variety of life. See full series here.
When I was about six I started a helper job on a plot of farming land. I was too young to take a proper job working in the field or watching the pig pens. I was also too short.
I did manure picking, mostly. The other helper kids were Lucy and Mey, who were about my age; Nib, who was a bit younger; Luke, the oldest, perhaps ten, who did heavier work and filled in whenever he was needed. We were all neighbors, and worked on nearby land plots.
The first thing I could see when closing my eyes, after working some full days in the field, was manures. I saw oxen, cows, goats, donkeys, and pigs lay down manures, from their bodies onto the ground, hot and steamy, muddy brown and stiffened black; the straw bits and grass-ends in them seemed to form pentagons or hexagons.
I saw these bodily excretions not with disgust or aversion, but with a sense of duty, of necessary work to be done.
Luke showed me what to do with the manures. You’d always keep full buckets of straws minced and diced, and have such a bucket with you all the time. Then you’d walk the field from end to end, or follow the roaming animals, to find where they took a dump. As soon as possible, preferably.
“Cover everything. All the top surfaces,” Luke said. He grabbed a fistful of diced straws from his bucket. I followed, scooping up some fibered chippings with both hands. Then he showed me arm and hand movements to cover the entire exposed surface of manure, and how to spread diced straw evenly.
“Slow down, open up your fingers,” he said, “Now, all covered, good! We can go to the next one.” I had to use both hands to spread the covering. He did it with one soil-colored fist.
I huddled my bucket to the chest and followed him. Lucy and Nib trailed me. It was late Summer and the sun would set late.
“And don’t forget when the manure collection wagon comes.”
I had to think before realizing what he meant by “wagon”. It was a slender and boarded-up cart that still leaked from different sides on occasion. In front of the four wheels was a gangling old man. He’d put a neck yoke onto his shoulders, and wrap cloth reins around himself like an ox would bound himself to the plow. When he pulled, the cart would wobble, the wheels would squeak, and he would swing from side to side as if he was balancing on a giant, slippery ball.
The neck yoke must have pressed permanent bruises into the old man, I thought. But the ridges and contours of his wasted body and sun-darkened skins must have hidden those bruises well.
“The guy collects wet manure,” Luke walked across a few bared rows, “Keep the manures piled up.” He took another hold of diced straws and spread them on a fresh warm pile of oxen manure and startled a few gadflies.
“Manures will dry up. You can collect when they are dry. Like this,” Luke scooped up a spadeful of soil and dipped it back into the field, “Use a wicker pan or spade. Do not use your hands!” He poked the hand spade into his other bucket, and perched up a hardened manure disc. Some maggots fell off from the edge, others still trailed on the disc.
We asked if we could use those maggots to feed fish. Nib tried to grab those still on the disc but Luke slapped him off. He then put the dried manure back, letting out a smell of rotten grass.
“You got education?” Luke turned to me.
I did not know how to respond.
“What are maggots?”
“Larva of flies.”
“You got education,” he said, nodding. “Maggots are dirty! They are everywhere. Just dig them up. Now go and pick some manures. Me? I’ll pluck weeds and pack firewood.”
If Luke had not shown us, we might still be decent manure pickers. We were used to helping out: I cleaned chicken coops, Lucy fed pigs, Nib made straw bales. In winter, we were fire keepers at home, adding dried manures to the hearth at the first sign of flame’s dimming and coldness’ return. As the fire ate away the smell of rotten grass, waves of warmth would flow all over our humble abodes.
Soon I used up the diced straw and went to the straw shed for a refill. Nobody was there. Everyone was gathering in a further end of the field, where some adults were unloading buckets from a slender, boarded-up cart. I could not make out what it was. Then I saw Mey and Lucy running towards the shed and called out for me:
“The manure wagon’s here!”
I hurried towards them, and saw it was indeed the manure collection wagon. Nib was holding a bamboo pole, and Luke was tying a wicker basket to its end. The adults lined up the buckets with the crop rows of the field. The wagon puller and manure collector, when the last bucket was unloaded, tilted the empty cart and leaned his head on the neck yoke to reset.
The adults thanked the manure collector profusely. Then, everyone sprang to a bucket and took off its lid. A smell of fermented manures rose up, and each adult took a container — a hand bailer, a smaller bucket, a wicker basket, a terra pot — and reached into a big bucket, taking a scoopful of thick, brown liquid.
Holding their scoops close, they tread onto the crop rows, bent down under the still restless sun, dispersed the fermented manures around the root areas.
It went on: the adults hurried to fermented manures in large buckets, and carried back small scoops to nurture each root and stalk. Luke’s basket-on-a-pole worked precisely four times before it started leaking, and he was barred from this transgression of wasting fertilizers. He and Nib stood around, with longing looks at the adults and the big buckets.
“It’ll be a good harvest this year!” I heard Mey’s well-wish.
“If the Fall is not too cold,” an adult voice responded, “Heaven just does. We cope with whatever it is.”
“Manures go into veggies. Veggies go into our mouths and —” Lucy cut herself off.
“I’ll pick more dry manures. Maybe Fall will be cold. And Winter colder.” Luke said.
“The sun’s still out. We can pluck weeds too.” I said.
So we went back to the field.
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