Orchard tools as material culture

Picking from standard trees required height, so the orchard ladder is the defining object: long, narrow, and tapered towards the top so that it can be pushed up into a crown between branches, sometimes with a third leg for stability on uneven ground and sometimes pointed to be set against a limb rather than a rung of the tree. Its shape is entirely dictated by the tree form it was made for, and it is useless in a modern bush orchard.

Where fruit could not be reached it was knocked down with a long pole, worked from the ground or from a ladder, and gathered from the sward afterwards. Cider fruit and perry pears tolerate this treatment in a way that dessert fruit does not, which is why the method persisted in cider orchards long after it had been abandoned for market fruit.

Everything else is a container or a blade. Baskets of woven withy for carrying and tipping; hessian or jute sacks for moving fruit in quantity; a wooden fork or scoop for gathering windfalls without bruising the hand; a hooked blade or billhook for cutting out dead wood; a pruning saw; and a knife for grafting, which was often the same knife the owner carried anyway.

Most of these objects were made locally and many were made on the holding. Ladders were built by estate carpenters or by the farm; baskets came from a basket maker who might be in the next parish; blades came from a village blacksmith and were reshaped by him as they wore. A tool was not a purchase so much as an ongoing relationship with the person who maintained it.

The consequence is that orchard tools vary between districts in ways that are not functional. Ladder proportions, basket shapes and blade curves differ because different makers made them, and a collection with good provenance can show those regional differences clearly. This is the same phenomenon as regional variation in any hand trade.

Repair is the other constant. A handle replaced three times, a blade ground back to half its original width, a basket with a new rim: these are evidence that the object was worth keeping. A tool showing that history is telling you something about the economy it belonged to, in which buying a new one was not a casual decision.

Museum collections in the cider counties hold mills, presses, casks and the small tools of the press house, and they are the principal physical record of the work. They are also a biased sample, and the bias runs in a consistent direction.

Large objects survive because they are difficult to destroy and impressive to display: stone mills, timber presses, great casks. Iron survives because it does not rot. Wood and fibre do not: ladders were burnt when they failed, baskets fell apart, sacks were used until they disintegrated, and none of these was thought worth keeping by anybody. The ordinary equipment of picking is therefore under-represented relative to the equipment of pressing.

A second bias favours the decorated and the unusual. A carved cider mug or an engraved glass is collected; a plain wooden scoop is not. Anyone building a picture of orchard work from what is in cases is looking at a selection made by later collectors, and the selection was made on aesthetic grounds.

A worn tool carries information that no document does. Wear patterns show how it was held and what it was used for; a blade worn asymmetrically indicates a right- or left-handed user; a handle polished in one place shows the grip. Where several tools survive from one holding, they show something about how work was divided.

Marks of ownership are common and easily missed: initials cut into a handle, a notch scheme, paint, or a brand. Tools were shared, borrowed and lent between holdings, and marking them was a practical necessity rather than decoration. In districts where a travelling presser moved between farms, the distinction between his equipment and the farm’s mattered.

What the tools do not record is who used them. Objects are silent about the sex, age and status of the people who held them, and the assumption that orchard work was men’s work is not supported by the tools themselves. That question has to be answered from other evidence, and the photographic record answers it differently from the documentary one.

The modern equivalents are bulk bins, forklifts, tractor-mounted trunk shakers and self-propelled harvesters, and the older objects have no place in that system. A bush orchard picked by machine does not need a ladder shaped for a standard tree, and the skills expressed through the old tools have no application.

This is worth stating without lament. Mechanised harvesting removed work that was genuinely hard, dangerous and badly paid, and the people who did it were not sorry to see the ladders go. Falls from orchard ladders were a common and serious agricultural injury.

What was lost with the tools was a way of knowing an orchard. A person who has climbed a tree to pick it has been inside it, has seen the crop, the dead wood and the crown from within, and knows the individual tree. A machine operator does not, and neither arrangement is straightforwardly better; they are different relationships between a person and a field.