August is the beginning of the Harvest Months, when all the year’s work can go to good or ill. Harvest season begins at Lammastide on August 1st, with the weather usually continuing hot. The Dog Days that began in July last until August 11th, and the infamous Egyptian Days run from Lammas to the 16th, a time bad for letting blood, even by doctors. (Hence the king’s jest to two warring lords at the beginning of Shakespeare’s Richard II: “Our doctors say this is no month to bleed.”)

Early in the month, between haying’s end and the beginning of corn harvest, comes Rush Day when people everywhere go to the marshes and riversides to cut rushes for use through the coming year and carry some in procession with music, banners, and flowers to strew in the parish church’s floor, with perhaps dancing afterward before the rest of the rushes are stored or used on other floors and for basketry and roofing. Now, too, is bracken-cutting time, partly to give the stock more grazing land but mostly because bracken serves as under-packing for storing the coming harvest and as deep litter in animal sheds and for selling as packing for breakables for travel.

But those harvests are secondary to what begins after them: the Corn Harvest with its barley, rye, wheat, buckwheat for breads, vetches and corn and straw for fodder. A rich harvest now means a well-fed year ahead. A poor harvest means lean times and possibly starvation before summer comes again. This is the vital time of year, and although a wet August may be saved by a dry September, now is when the heavy work begins, and by now every corn owner has appointed a Harvest Lord to govern his harvest for him. This is no courtesy title. The Harvest Lord’s work is to oversee all the workers: That they start and stop on time, are arranged in the most efficient teams, have food and drink regularly and in sufficiency, and are equipped with what they need when they need it. On the Harvest Lord the efficiency of the harvest depends and the work begins as early as the fields are dry of dew in the mornings. After that the only pause is a brief rest for ale or “harvest mead,” until noon with its hour of rest for lunch and sleep. Drink is brought to the workers in the fields in leather bottles or wooden hoggins. Their food is bread, cheese, oatcake, barley beer, and onions. After midday their work goes on, with only one more brief pause before they end well toward evening. The days turn into the weeks that the harvest takes as the workers cut their way through the fields with sickles and scythes, tying and setting the grain to dry before it is carried to storage.

Interestingly, it seems that when only the short hand sickles were in use, men and women were paid the same daily wage for cutting the grain. Only after scythes were invented did men begin to be paid more than women, apparently because while the scythe is far more efficient for the work than the hand sickle, its greater size and weight made it a tool generally better used by men who were accordingly paid more for their expertise and greater productivity.

At harvest’s end, each place and people have their own special ceremony for cutting of the last handful of grain. It can be a casting of sickles at the grain, or braiding of corn dollies, or hunting of hares – whatever has become traditional in the area.

It’s said a fog in August foretells severe weather and plenty of snow to come, but this is the year's second warmest month.

Among lesser matters, this is the time for the selling and buying of lavender.

For hunters the time of grace from hunting continues from June.

On the 15th is the celebration of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, and about this time (since the late1300s), a special court is held at Tutbury for minstrels to gather, to be rewarded, licensed, punished if necessary, and to choose the next year’s King of the Minstrels, with feasting and processions.

On the 24th the famous St. Bartholomew’s Fair starts in London. Held since 1133, its specialty is cloth but much else is there as well. It is the first of the great autumn fairs for by now estimates of profits (or losses) to come from the harvest can be made and plans begun for what must (or may) be purchased and got ready for all the autumn-into-winter work still to come.

Summer 1450

- Margaret