On an Autumn day in 1870
the master at Bures village school wrote: "Attendance Bad. Some
are absent acorn picking".
The Log book of the school (kept as required from 1863) has recorded
many occasions when school attendance was poor; most of these were linked
to the seasonal demands of agriculture. In 1870 the harvest was poor,
one of a series of poor harvests, and fetched poor prices. Cheap grain
was coming in from the prairies of North America and as a side effect
of bad times in farming, the old custom of acorn picking was revived
all over Britain.
Other seasons made their demands on the school children of Bures; the
master's laments in his log book on poor school attendance figures,
continue year by year through the seasons. In the same month as the
acorn picking reference, October 1870, children were absent from school
dropping seeds (Winter Corn, into holes made with dibbers, the ancient
method in use before the invention of the Seed Drill).
The earliest account which
we have received of the revival of acorn picking by schoolchildren dates
from the year 1868. Gloucesteshire farmers had great faith in acorns
for fattening pigs. In Shropshire, pigs were fattened at the farmyard
on acorns collected by the local children. On the day after the Bures
schoolmaster had entered his lament in the school log book, on October
13th 1870 the Reverend Francis Kilvert, of Clyro in Wales, noted down
in his diary that the local schoolchildren were gathering acorns to
make up for the bad harvest. The farmers were paying them at the rate
of two shillings or two shillings and fourpence (that's ten or twelve
new pence) per Bushel
A meet of the foxhounds in Bures or the horse races at Sudbury also
reduced the attendance figures; and in 1864 the same thing happened
when a steam barge came up the river Stour in the village and in 1879,
when the river froze over, there were very few in school. In 1880 attendance
at school was made compulsory up to the age of ten years, by Mr Gladstone's
Government.
Before that there was a temptation for elder children to earn a little
money by working in the Maltings or in Mr Dupont's Matting factory in
Bridge street, or the brick yard by the railway line
Gleaning, coming immediately after the corn harvest, was an activity
of the utmost importance, involving every available child and able bodied
woman in the parish.
Published 27/06/17
