Harvest custom in cider country

Cider fruit was traditionally shaken from standard trees with long poles and picked from the ground, which is labour-intensive and compressed into a few autumn weeks. Orchard districts therefore drew in seasonal labour — from neighbouring parishes, from towns, and in some counties from established travelling networks that moved between hop, fruit and root crops through the season. The social character of the cider harvest followed from that: it was a period when a farm held far more people than it normally did, many of them not resident.

That concentration of temporary workers is the origin of most of the custom. Feeding and housing them, marking the end of their work, and settling with them at its close all generated observances, several of which have parallels in the corn harvest and in the Kentish hop harvest.

In the English cider counties, a daily allowance of cider was a standard component of agricultural employment. Its size varied by farm, by season and by the work being done, and it rose during harvest when the days were longest and the labour heaviest. Contemporary accounts give figures in quarts and gallons per man per day; those figures differ widely between sources and CiderHQ does not average them, because they describe different farms in different decades under different customs.

The economic function was straightforward: cider made from fruit the farm already grew was cheaper for the farmer than cash, and it kept the workforce on the premises. The consequence for the drink was equally direct. Farm cider was made in quantity for consumption by working people during working hours, which put a ceiling on how strong it was worth making and no floor at all under how good it had to be. Much of it was thin, some of it was made by watering the pressed pomace a second time, and quality was not the axis on which it was judged.

Payment of wages in drink was progressively restricted by nineteenth-century truck legislation, which brought agricultural workers within its scope. The legislation reached the practice of paying in cider rather than the practice of supplying it: the allowance continued as a customary perquisite alongside cash wages well into the twentieth century on many farms, and its final disappearance is generally placed in the middle of that century rather than at any legislative date.

The association between cider and agricultural labour that this created is the root of the drink’s class position in Britain, and it is why the same liquid could be simultaneously a Royal Society preoccupation in the seventeenth century and a byword for cheapness in the twentieth.

The completion of gathering was marked, as it was in the corn harvest, by observances attached to the last load. The forms recorded include decorating the final cart, a shout or song on bringing it in, and a supper provided by the farm for everyone who had worked. Harvest suppers persisted longer than most other elements because they had an institutional home in the parish and later in the village hall, and because they cost the farm relatively little.

Pressing itself generated less ceremony than gathering, for practical reasons: it ran for weeks, involved fewer people, and took place in a building rather than in the open. What custom attaches to the press house is mostly occupational — the ordering of work, the naming of parts of the press and the mill, and a body of technical vocabulary that varies sharply between counties.

The first tasting of the new cider is recorded as an occasion in several districts, though the date given for it differs, and in some accounts it coincides with the midwinter orchard visit. This is one of several points at which harvest custom and the wassail calendar overlap.