Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 75, No. 463, May, 1854Various
History
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 75, No. 463, May, 1854
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Amid the limited society of the
unproductive sandy plains these habits not unfrequently degenerate.
Upon this estate two farms were let to tenants. We visited one of them.
It was let on a lease for fifteen years, contained 2000 acres of
corn-land, and 550 of meadow. The rent was 1800 dollars in money, 200 in
kind, and about 500 in taxes—in all, about 2500 dollars, or a dollar
(3s.) an acre. The tenant had upon it 800 sheep, 14 cows, 18
draught-oxen, and 10 horses. Twelve families of labourers were lodged
upon the farm, and extra labour was employed as required. Everything in
the way of stock and implements was defective. The sheep are kept under
cover in the winter. They are fed on hay, the breeding ewes receiving,
besides, chopped turnips and carrots. The sheep-houses, both here and
elsewhere, we found to be warm and comfortable. The lord worked his own
land with 64 horses and 76 draught-oxen, and had a yearly increasing
flock of sheep, amounting at present to 4500.
The farm labourers are but poorly off. Those who live on the farm (the
_hausinnen_) receive for the man’s wage four silver groschen, and for
the woman’s three silver groschen a-day. (Five silver groschen make an
English sixpence.) They have a house, for which each of them, the man
and woman, must pay two days a week in summer, one day and a half in
autumn, and half a day in the three first months of the year. They are
allowed also two acres of corn-land, and a third of an acre for a
garden. They have pasture for a cow, and are permitted to cut the
inferior wood on the heath for fuel, and to gather the pine-needles from
the forest for manure. Day-labourers, not resident on the farm, receive
5 silver groschen a-day—the unhappy sixpence of our Irish peasant.
There are on the outside, and here and there indenting the large estate,
numerous small properties of from five to eighty acres, formerly
belonging to the lord, and many of them owing him still a yearly
acknowledgment. These people, though in a sense independent, yet upon
such land are generally poor. They keep one or two horses, or two cows,
to plough their light sandy soil, from three to thirty sheep, and a few
pigs. With a single horse a man will work his farm of forty or fifty
acres. Milk is their principal diet, and many never eat meat once a
year, unless it be a bit of their own home-fed pork.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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