Read Online Ulverton by Adam Thorpe - Free Book Online

Her skirts were too far up about her waist to shield any particular from me and I remonstrated with her, but am recognisant of the fact that my prayers have gone unanswered. The Lord works in mysterious ways.
    My wife beat me, on my instructions, again this night. I am much disturbed, at present, by appearances in my sleep of our youngest, who has not been gone from this world more than a year now. I woke deeply troubled by this. I was about the yard early overseeing the oxen and a coulter was badly nipped, I noticed. If the Lord has not granted me a son, and only sickly daughters who do not live, my cousin must take hold of this land when I am gone, and the thought weakens my resolve. This morning was deadly cold, and the foddering barton was stone-hard in white heaps. Despite the decent feed, the cows are milking thinly at present. Their racks are halfway full and little is trodden that is not straw. My servant says it is the inclemency of the weather. Some of the udders are, indeed, cracked. Everything steams.
    The advantages of the turnwrest cannot be over-estimated. When combined with a draught of horses it is incomparable. My own draught remains of oxen but Mr King’s I have seen in action and his horses are easy of manoeuvre and appear faster, particularly at the headland turn, which in my lower fields is altogether too narrow for my heavy beasts. We replaced three shares in one morning, the soil being so brashy. The coulter cut deep, it being a dry month of March so far, and a drier February, this year 1712, but the crows and rooks and gulls followed close on our heels, which bodes well for the soil, which I have meliorated with much dung since the wheat harvest. The land’s chockiness was never so obvious as this morning, when the share was bone-white after the first furrow. I pray for a dripping summer which always spreads its juices easily in our dry chalk land. In dry summers the barley ears tend to blight and a shrivelled look.
    My uncle having made me of a bookish mind, despite it being viliorated with matters such as dung and mouldiness, I have on my shelves several volumes, of which the most-thumbed is Bunyan’s. His is the pilgrim who names the world a ‘wilderness’, and visits the valley of Humiliation. Perched before the fireside, reading by the glow (as we are low with candles, and my wife had settled early, not wishing to worsen her headache with drawing-up of old holes in old stockings), and still aching from the stilts of the turnwrest which I held for more than an hour while my ploughman rested, and the share too blunt already, and the tilth deep, I noted that, far from being a source of contentment, the pilgrim’s woes matched mine too greatly, and I likened my life to the handling of an oxen team on a chocky, declivous field, with the rooks so loud about me that I could not hear my own breath, or the ploughman shouting from the hedge that the coulter was loose, and but shallow cutting.
    Today I went to market and on my return, upon the scarp above Five Elms Farm, that was once old Anne Cobbold’s the witch, I noted one elm to be down, most likely in the January storm, and it being old, and wondered about the name, and that my own farm, being simply Plumm’s, which is my own family title, might lose that title when I pass on, which upset me greatly.
    Today we ploughed the last acre. There is much debate at present, among my neighbouring farmers who have come by, over the number of earths that is desirable after naked fallow. I have one field that has lain still for two summers, with only camomile and redweed upon it, being fallowed before I tried the clover and St Foin, and being a field much reduced in richness by my forefathers, who rested it not. It is a loose, spongy ground, and Farmer Barr was of the mind that, were I to plough it up and sow it to one earth, as I had considered, I would have much trouble with the redweed, or poppy. If the land is settled and fast, as it may be after three