CUSTOM REVIVED
GLEANING IN CORNFIELDS (Times Air Mail Service) LONDON, August 8 Boys and girls of the Holbrook (Suffolk) Young Farmers’ Club, reports the Evening Standard, have persuaded the local farmers to let them revive the old custom of gleaning in the harvest fields—a practice which the modem reaping and binding machine long ago made obsolete. The boys and girls will go into the fields when the sheaves have been “carried” and pick up what is left They want it for the poultry, which they are rearing at their school. Before the last war and for a little while after it, poor families of the villages enjoyed an immemorial, though unwritten, right to glean. The local millers ground the com into flour, sometimes keeping the bran as payment. It helped the villagers through the winter. Many Essex parishes used to maintain the custom of ringing a “gleaners’ bell” in the church tower to indicate when gleaning could Start.
The name of the man chosen to ring the bell was posted in the church porch, and each family gave him something for his services.
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Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21222, 19 September 1940, Page 9
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183CUSTOM REVIVED Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21222, 19 September 1940, Page 9
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