The cider maker in a village economy

The organising fact about traditional cider making is that it was a use for surplus fruit on a mixed farm. The work was seasonal, it fell in the autumn alongside everything else that falls in the autumn, and it was done by the people already on the holding. Nobody was employed to make cider; people who were employed to farm made cider for a few weeks.

Within that, competence was concentrated. One or two people on a holding knew how finely to mill a given fruit, when a cask was sound, when to rack and what to blend, and that knowledge was held in the hands rather than written down. A farm with a person who knew those things made better cider than a farm without one, and the difference was recognised locally.

This is the reason the occupational record is silent. Censuses and directories list farmers, agricultural labourers, carters and dairymaids; they do not list cider makers, because the category did not exist as an occupation to declare.

Small holdings could not justify a mill and a press. What served them was an itinerant operator with a portable outfit — a mill and a screw press mounted on a wagon, drawn by horse, moving from farm to farm through the pressing season and setting up in the yard for a day or two at each.

This occupation is documented across the West Country and in northern France, and it appears in nineteenth-century fiction accurately enough to be usable as evidence. Payment took several forms: cash by the hogshead, a share of the cider produced, or an exchange against other work. The operator supplied the equipment and the skill and the farm supplied the fruit and the labour.

It was a good position to hold in a small way. The travelling presser saw more fruit and more cellars in a season than any farmer saw in a decade, carried news between holdings, and was in a position to advise. It was also physically punishing, weather-dependent, and confined to about six weeks of the year, which is why it was generally combined with something else.

The alternative to a travelling press was a neighbour’s pound house. Holdings without equipment took fruit to a farm that had it, and paid in kind, in labour or in a share, or simply within a running set of obligations that were settled over years rather than at the time.

Arrangements of this kind are the ordinary fabric of a village economy and they are almost entirely undocumented, because nothing was written down. What survives is the physical evidence — a pound house larger than one holding needed — and occasional references in accounts and disputes.

They were not necessarily comfortable. An arrangement in which one household controls a piece of equipment that others need at a fixed season, under time pressure, is an arrangement with power in it. Whose fruit was pressed first, and on what terms, is exactly the kind of question that produced long-running local grievance, and it should not be described as neighbourliness without qualification.

A reputation for making sound cider was real and locally valuable. It affected what a farm could sell at the gate, what it could offer a visitor, and how the household was regarded. It did not translate into anything institutional.

The contrast with the trades makes this clear. A cooper, a miller, a blacksmith or a wheelwright served an apprenticeship, belonged to a recognised occupation, could move and find work under that name, and had a defined place in the social order of a parish. A man who made good cider had none of that, and if he moved he was simply a farm labourer somewhere else.

The consequence for the historical record is severe. Trades leave apprenticeship records, guild material, trade directories and occupational censuses. Cider making leaves almost nothing except the equipment and the buildings, which is why so much of what is known about it comes from museum collections rather than from documents.

The commercial trade dismantled the arrangement rather than absorbing it. A farm that could sell fruit for cash to a works with a railway siding had no reason to keep a mill, a press, a cellar and the person who knew how to use them, and the intermediate layer of parish milling disappeared over two generations.

What the twentieth century put in its place was a grower on one side and a factory on the other. The grower is running an orchard enterprise with a buyer; the factory employs process workers, chemists and engineers. Neither is a cider maker in the older sense, and neither occupies any position in a village.

The modern small producer is a third thing again, and it is worth being clear that it is new rather than continuous. A person whose occupation is making cider, who identifies as a cider maker, who sells under their own name and is known for a style, is a figure that essentially did not exist before the revival of the last fifty years. The title is old and the occupation is recent.