TALES FROM THE HILLS

(Ashmansworth and Crux Easton)

When we look at the healthy open-air life of farmworkers (and there’s no place more beautiful to work in than the fields of Ashmansworth and Crux Easton), we can easily forget the risks they run. It is sobering to think that, in one particular year some 30 years ago, farmworkers came fifth highest after seamen, airmen, builders and railway lengthmen in the league table of percentages killed at work; in actual numbers they came top. Even up here, we’ve suffered missing eyes, chronic chests and lameness.

It’s the powerful machinery, the steep hills, the heavy and often skittish livestock; but also it’s working alone, working when you’re tired, and working against the weather. On a farm, people are conscientious: they don’t simply leave things when conditions don’t suit. The variety, the difficulty, and the self-reliance are probably the appeal of the job, but it comes at a price.

As for deaths, the only ones on record are a threshing-machine accident in Ashmansworth and young Geoff Webb at Crux Easton.

Besides the physical, there are the financial threats always hanging over farmers.

Nearly 200 years ago, while checking farm prices for his newspaper at Weyhill Fair, near Andover, William Cobbett reported:

“Mr Jolliff, of Crux Easton, was asking sixteen shillings for just such ewes as he sold, last year (at this fair), for thirty-two shillings … How many, many farmers’ families are now just preparing the way for their entrance to the workhouse!”

A loss on his sheep and the rent still to pay! If the worst had happened, Jolliff and his family would have gone to Kingsclere Workhouse. Bad enough, but it could have been worse: under the Poor Laws, the parish was part of Kingsclere Union; had they lived in nearby Faccombe parish, they’d have gone to the notorious Andover Workhouse.

Andover became a national by-word for its degrading treatment of its poor inhabitants, but we know that Mr Jolliff and his family did survive at Crux Easton for at least five more years. He re-appears in 1831 at the auction of the Crux Easton Estate when, thank goodness, he is still the tenant of Crux Easton Farm. 

Agricola, April 2023