Imported historical comment — Dave Hill — 2021-02-27 16:04:32
THE BIG BARN by Dave Hill
Or the Long barn or Tithe barn, as they are variously called although it is doubted now that they were used to store the church's tithe or tenth part of farm produce. I have written about London's famous halls, now it is the turn of another large space that might be more familiar to you, the Big Barn. I was reading about them and was surprised that people are unsure about their original purpose.
The Big Barn is unprepossessing from the outside, usually of black tarred wooden clapboard or brick below and now, tiled roof above. Not until you get inside do you see the soaring roof of handcut timbers, like some large church or cathedral. A feature of these barns are the high double doors, usually on both sides making a clear route thru, claimed to be for the large hay wagons or wains to pass, but this I think was not their original purpose.
Until the early 1800's the grain was separated from the stem of the corn by hand threshing, by flailing. A flail was two 4 foot lengths of wood joined by a hinge of rope or leather, the thresher gripped one piece and bought the other smartly down on the corn. 4 threshers could process a hundredweight of grain a day, at 13 tons to the acre it took about 30 days to thresh the produce of an acre. So threshing was labour intensive and could last all winter. The corn was cut by hand, gathered into sheaves and stood in groups, “stooks", until it could be bought into the farm's rickyard and stored in ricks. It was gradually threshed from the ricks, small amounts may have been stored in the big barn to dry it further before threshing and some threshed grain was stored in sacks as well.
The hand threshing was done on a stout wooden floor on sleepers which stretched from one pair of large doors, across the barn to the other pair. A man stood in each corner with his flail, a boy or woman fed the sheaves of corn onto the floor. It was a strenuous job, even in winter the men would have sweated, one reason for the large doors on each side to stand wide open. Another reason was that that threshers had to stop to separate the grain and straw, the grain needed “winnowing" to separate the grain from the “chaff", the dust, by tossing it in the air, the draught of air thru the double doors blew the chaff away whilst the grain was caught and sacked. In effect the grain was stored in the ricks, gradually threshed, the grain sent to the miller and the resulting flour baked into bread etc as demanded. A valuable by-product was the straw, all buildings apart from the most expensive houses and churches were thatched with the longer straw that was grown in those days. Some of these big barns had 2 or even 3 pairs of double doors for more gangs of threshers to double or treble the output.
In the late 1700's a Scot, Andrew Meikle invented a small horse or water driven threshing machine, small but the output was 4 times greater then by hand flailing, and it fitted in one corner of the big barn. These were the machines that were attacked in the “Swing Riots" of 1830-40. Farm labourers rioted because the machines were putting them out of work, they were already suffering high taxes and low wages. The riots were put down severely, 9 rioters were hanged, 450 transported to Australia.
They were too late anyway, the steam engine was adapted to a larger threshing machine, eventually it developed into the traction engine which drew the threshing machine from farm to farm. The machine was too big for the barn and anyway the steam engine was a fire risk if inside. The wooden threshing floor rotted and was removed, the big hay wains could go inside the barn but the big barn became a dusty cobwebbed store for unwanted machinery much as we might see it today. Of course the combine harvester, developed after WWII made the threshing machine redundant, a few survive but all memories of hand flailing have faded along with the original purpose of the big barn.
The farm labourer found work in the factories of the Industrial Revolution, or emigrated,anyway the new machinery was more suited to the huge prairies of North America or Eastern Europe and we started to import our grain. The big barn may have been cleared once a year for the “Harvest Home" or supper, a big meal for the farm labourers that remained whilst the motive power of the farm was the horse, but after WWI the tractor took over and the farm could be managed with just a few men. The straw from threshing machines could be used for thatch but it didn't last as long and labour became dearer. The big barn was lucky if its owner could afford to tile it, it had originally been built from materials available within a radius of a few miles. Less lucky were the barns where the thatch was replaced by corrugated iron sheets, the corrugated extended the life of the barn 20 or 30 years but unless replaced the big barn rotted as did the thatched ones when it wasn't renewed. Anyway the big barn no longer served much purpose, many farmers were relieved of the responsibility of maintaining them by a convenient fire. Some have survived but many more were destroyed.
The grain was cut and threshed quickly by the combined harvester, grain silos became a feature of docks etc, storing grain before milling.
Original comment #713