Lizzie Ross

If you go by the August image from Les Très Riches Heures de Duc de Berry, this month is more about the lords and ladies hunting with their hawks than about the harvest, yet look more closely beyond the pond full of bathers, and you’ll see a couple of workmen mowing the hay and tying up the sheaves. That’s the real work of this month.

Harvest time, with all it entails, is at the heart of Hartley’s August chapter in Lost Country Life. It’s a long chapter, covering much more than I ever thought I needed to know about working the south forty. I’ve learned the difference between hay and straw (hay has more green in it and so is more nutritious as animal feed), and also the steps for getting the most out of grain crops — gather the head first, so it can be threshed, then the stalks to be sheaved and stored. Rain is always the challenge for harvesters, for if whatever is left standing or lying about gets wet, it will be good for nothing but plowing back into the land.

Barley, rye, buckwheat and wheat were the main corn crops (“corn” being British for grain; American corn — maize — didn’t reach Europe until the very late Middle Ages, and even then it was used mostly as feed for stock). Hartley explains the complex task of organizing the workers most efficiently, so that no one gets ahead or falls behind the others. She compares it a bit to an assembly line, because field workers do only one task. But the expert “harvest lord” (i.e., manager) knew who would be best where and allowed no shirkers.

“Threshing and winnowing were winter work,” Harley writes, “done under cover.” Inside the barn, that is, and only as needed. Unthreshed grain was easy to store, so there was no need to spend the time required to thresh an entire crop. Threshed grain went to the miller (few individuals had millstones, and often people were fined if they didn’t send their grain to the local mill). Most of the millstones were imported from France, while “special craftsmen”on site cut the edge and grooves before installing the stones. “It is the straight sharp edge of the stone that cuts the corn — the shallow grooves spill out the flour.”

Peter Mayle, in late-20th century Provence, is enjoying his August, despite the crowds and the overall disarray at his home, where their plumber is installing pipes for a heating system: “… the area in front of the house resembled a scrapyard. Piled around an oily workbench … were … boxes of brass joints, valves, soldering guns, gas canisters, hacksaws, radiators, drilling bits, washers and spanners, and cans of what looked like black treacle.” Note that this pile of items doesn’t include the water and fuel tanks, the boiler, and the burner.

On a hot day, Mayle and his wife go up to Bonnieux to bet on an entrant in the annual goat race. Near Gordes, they attend a party packed with elegant Parisians who drop their cool chic when someone puts Little Richard on the turntable:

The barn vibrated, and le tout Paris vibrated with it, arms and legs and buttocks and breasts giggling and shaking and grinding and flailing around, teeth bared, eyes rolling, fists pumping the air, jewelers out of control, buttons bursting under the strain, elegant facades gone to hell as everyone writhed and jerked and twitched and got down.

And finally, Gladys Taber, at her home in mid-20th century rural Connecticut, entertains visitors, deals with kittens and cats and becomes, once again, philosophical. After her housemate, Jill, died, Taber noticed “that I was working myself into a severe nervous state because I never could catch up with the daily chores, the kennel jobs, the errands, and futile attempts to keep some sort of books. I added all this to the major job of adjusting to what was, at that time, compete desolation.” Her solution was to make lists, and then feel happy about tasks completed: “And then, as if Jill spoke to me, I felt the sense of quiet that she always gave me, and it was as if she said, ‘Just do what you can. Forget what you can’t.'”

Good advice, which I plan to follow.

Back in a month!

June’s image from the Limoges Brothers’ Très Riches Heures de Duc de Berry doesn’t match up with the couplet from Sara Coleridge’s poem, “The Months.” I ascribe this to the different worlds featured: the Duc de Berry’s wealthy lands — with nary a posy in sight — at the height of the Middle Ages, versus Coleridge’s middle-class genteel life 400 years later in the early l9th century. She’d have seen field workers, but to her, June means flowers for bouquets.

However, the image from Très Riches Heures does illustrate two stanzas from a 16th-century farming calendar that Dorothy Hartley has been quoting for each month of Lost Country Life. Thomas Tusser (1524-1580), farmer and poet, wrote A Hundredth Good Pointes of Good Husbandrie in 1557 to encourage and instruct his fellow farmers (as well as their wives). The stanzas advise:

If meadow be forward, be mowing of some,
but mow as the makers may well overcome.
Take heed to the weather, the wind and the sky,
if danger approacheth, then cock apace cry.

Plough early till ten a’clock, then to thy hay,
in plowing and carting, so profit ye may.
By little and little thus doing ye win,
that plough shall not hinder, when harvest comes in.

The men mow, while the women rake the cut grain into haycocks. A cloudless sky means they can keep working. Tusser would have approved.

Most of Hartley’s June chapter concerns sheep (washing, shearing, applying salve, preventing sunburn — yes, sheep can get sunburn after they’ve been sheared) and wool (rolling fleeces, packing wool sacks, spinning, dying). Other ovine products (lanolin, tallow, parchment, horns) get a nod. It’s reassuring to know that nothing was wasted.

Down in Provence, Peter Mayle and his wife join their neighbors in an emergency blood drive. Afterwards, he notes with pleasure that in France the reward for donating blood is not the usual tea and biscuit one gets in England but instead a buffet at a long table full of “Coffee, chocolate, croissants, brioches, sandwiches of ham or garlic sausage, mugs of red or rosé wine”.

His friends don’t believe him when he says he’s too busy to go to Avignon or Arles, the Camargue or Marseilles. It’s just too pleasant at his little house in the countryside, with all the interesting neighbors and workmen. Even the odd visitor or two is welcome

But Aix-en-Provence is an exception. They travel down the terrifyingly fast and busy RN7 (Route Nationale Sept, now the D7N) to Aix for a day of wandering, shopping, and eating. He mentions cafés, restaurants, streets, boutiques — and thus Aix moves up a few notches on my must-get-there list. I understand this is the price I pay for reading travel books, the ever-growing list of places I’d like to travel to. But better to have that list than none at all. Nothing wrong with dreams.

And finally, Gladys Taber at her country house on The Stillmeadow Road spends June dealing with dogs. She and her housemate, Jill (another divorced mother who lived with Taber for decades), already have, if I’ve counted correctly, three cocker spaniels and one Irish setter. But now the dog show is in town and other dog owners visit, bringing even more dogs into the mix. Taber has referenced a local breeder from whom she’s gotten puppies, so among her own dogs are no mutts or animals rescued from the pound. But she is a glutton for dogs — there can never be too many, for her, and even the noisy ones are just “having their say.”

Yet Taber’s narrated year — and I use “year” loosely, as each chapter is filled with memories that range across the 30+ years she has lived with Jill at her house on Stillmeadow Road — is interrupted by a “Between Seasons” interlude. She and Jill and Holly, one of the spaniels, are at Cape Cod. “If there were any warnings of disaster, I do not remember them,” she writes in the interlude’s first paragraph. At first I thought something was going to happen to the dog. Then, when she visits the doctor, I wondered what life-threatening disease she’d picked up. But it was neither. Jill had anemia whose cause the doctor couldn’t pin down. It was perhaps 4 weeks from initial tests to Jill’s death, and the last few pages of this chapter take us through Taber’s anguish as she works towards hope.

Taber has written in earlier chapters about her deep religious faith, and it plays a critical role in her process of recovery from the loss of her companion. Through her children, Jill’s children, and various grandchildren, as well as the dogs, Taber reconnects with life and moves forward. She even regains her optimism. “What do I believe?” she writes at the end of this chapter. “I believe we never lose those we have loved…. I believe eventually good overcomes evil, and that we are put on earth for a purpose which has to do with love and with good.” A few lines later, she adds, “Faith is the evidence of things hoped for, and the substance of living. With faith, we may face the fact of death and not be defeated.”

More to come next month, as we move into summer.

Well, nothing so pastoral as lambs cavorting around the ewes in the May image from the Limbourg brothers’ Très Riches Heures. It’s the Duke with his lords and ladies who are cavorting, their gorgeous gowns and cloaks competing with the gilded reins and bridles draped across their horses. It’s the colors that make these images so “rich”. I particularly love the fern-green of the ladies’ gowns.

But on to the main part of this post, my comments on the three books that include chapters set in May. For Peter Mayle, May begins with a short bicycle ride that he and his wife expect will be easy — after all, other cyclists (wearing spandex, which should have been a clue) whipped up and down the tiny hills of Provence all day long. The ride starts well, the two of them wheeling easily along the quiet roads, but 5 miles later, after making the climb to Bonnieux, they stagger into a café and drink beer “in the comfort of chairs designed for human bottoms”. They have still another few miles to reach their goal, and then, of course, the ride home.

Mayle usually took his house guests to the Sunday markets, where “Faded sepia postcards and old linen smocks were jumbled up with fistfuls of cutlery, chipped enamel signs advertising purgatives and pomade for unruly mustaches, fire irons and chamber pots. Art Deco brooches and café ashtrays, yellowing books of poetry and the inevitable Louis Quatorze chair, perfect except for a missing leg.” And so on. Then they would drive another 30-60 minutes for lunch. He writes that because the French love and respect good food, even an obscure little restaurant in a tiny village will have its devoted customers. He found one whose owner/chef was happy exactly where he was and hoped to still be there in 25 years. Mayle writes that he and his wife “hoped we would still be in a fit state to totter up and enjoy it.” (I checked against the publication date, and 25 years later would have been 2016; Mayle died in Provence in 2018, so I like to think that he did.)

May at Glady Taber’s home in rural Connecticut is for starting the garden, when she begins to wonder if they’ve over-committed themselves with their seed purchases. “Now it is planting time,” she writes, “and all the packets of seeds that seemed so small in February take on huge proportions.” It’s a thin line between not enough and whoa, there, too many! Anyone who gardens, or with neighbors who garden, understands the challenge. What do you do with all the tomatoes, squash, and beans? There’s only so much preserving a person can manage.

Yet Taber, who quotes Edna St. Vincent Millay (“I am waylaid by beauty”), can’t resist the glories of this month. “After a thunderstorm, it is an opalescent world.” I’ll look for this pearly effect on leaves and grass and sky the next time it rains.

Finally, in her May chapter on medieval life in England, Dorothy Hartley tells us all about sheep, including sheep dogs, shepherds and their crooks, and musical pipes. First she explains that “A flock is just a lot of sheep; a herd is a lot of sheep of the same breed; a hirsel is much larger, and more mixed, than a herd and is sometimes an entire breeding settlement.” That last phrase explains why it was still, at the time of Hartley’s writing (1979), illegal to sell off a hill’s entire hirsel. Sheep don’t wander aimlessly; they know where and when to find feed, shade, water, and protection from inclement weather. Without old sheep to show them the pathways, new arrivals would starve or die of exposure, because sheep are not adventurous.

No more highlights for this month. Get out and enjoy whatever weather comes your way, and keep safe! See you in June.