2. Growing Up

When he was thirteen-years old, Will hired himself out on a farm. Few farmers had their own piece of land to plow, plant, and harvest in order to feed their families as in former times. Many farms had been taken over and combined into large ones by wealthy land owners who could afford to fence around them as required by Parliamentary law.1
In her book, Lark Rise to Candleford, Flora Thompson2 , who grew up in England during this period described what it was like for boys to be laborers on a big farm:
“Very early in the morning, before daybreak for the greater part of the year, the hamlet men would throw on their clothes, breakfast on bread and lard, snatch the dinner baskets which had been packed for them overnight, and hurry off across fields and over stiles to the farm. Getting the boys off was a more difficult matter. Mothers would have to call and shake and sometimes pull boys of eleven or twelve out of their warms beds on a winter morning. Then boots which had been drying inside the fender all night and had become shrunk and hard as boards in the process would have to be coaxed on over chilblains.”
With the increased resources now available to the landowner, the farmhouse would be surrounded with every needful thing to accomplish farming on a grander scale. Flora continues:
“...stables for the great, stamping, shaggy-fetlocked carthorses; barns with doors so wide and high that a load of hay could be driven through; granaries with outside staircases; sheds for storing agricultural implements; a dairy... “When the men and boys from the hamlet reached the farmyard in the morning, the carter and his assistant had been at work for an hour, feeding and getting ready the horses. If it rained they donned sacks, split up one side to form a hood and cloak combined. If it was frosty they blew upon their nails and thumped their arms across their chest to warm them. “With ‘Gee!’ and ‘Wert up!’ and ‘Whoa now!’ the teams would draw out.  The boys were hoisted to the backs of the tall carthorses and the men walking alongside... with cracking of whips, clopping of hooves and jingling of harness, the teams went tramping along the muddy byways... to the field where their day’s work was to be done. There were usually three or four ploughs to a field, each of them drawn by a team of three horses, with a boy at the head of the leader and the ploughman behind at the shafts.”3 They would plow all day going back and forth until the stubble was all turned under andther men went singly, or in rows of twos or threes to hoe, harrow, or spread manure in t he entire field was dark, rich, cultivated soil.  fields; still others cleared ditches and...drains, or sawed wood or cut chaff or did other odd jobs around the farmstead.”A farm bailiff might come riding by on a pony to make sure each worker was doing his part and give sharp correction if he were slacking off.  At noon the men and boys would unyoke the horses and give them their nosebags, then throw themselves down on spread-out sacks to have their own lunch. Can you imagine yourself doing that kind of job?  Each day as the boys observed the men doing their work at a steady pace, and did their own parts as directed, they learned the ins and outs of land work and gained a pride in being able to do it well.  On Friday evenings when the work was done they trooped up to the farm house to receive their wages. That kind of world, however, the slow world where men made their living from the soil by the power of their own muscles and those of their animals. and where things were hand-made one by one, was slipping away.5 In different places, men had been figuring out ways to power machines to do their work. People who could no longer earn a living by farming left to work in textile and other kinds of factories. Locomotive engines were being perfected making it possible for railroads to be built. Ships powered by steam now crossed the Atlantic. Machinery was also coming into use on the land with the invention of steam plows. Will and his parents and grandparents were witnessing the Industrial Revolution.