A week ago the current ‘cost of living’ crisis was given a very medieval twist.
A charity originally set up to cut food waste has been salvaging fruit from fields to help people who rely on it as a "lifeline".
Still Good Food, in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, has taken up the biblical practice of gleaning and collects surplus produce during farm harvests.
This page has been on hiatus while I sorted out an alternative platform - glad to be on Substack now! -, but this news item (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-suffolk-63316236) stunned me. Not because it points to the extreme effects various crises are having on the cost of living in the UK, we’ve had that before, notably with the “austerity” measures back on 2010-12, but because I never imagined I’d read the word “gleaning” outside of a medieval history context. And then only economic or agricultural historians would have been familiar with the term.
I have only ever encountered “gleaning” in a discussion of English manorial by-laws relating to agricultural management. Back then I was researching rural poverty with particular regard to disabled people. Thirteenth and fourteenth century disabled peasants (that is old, blind, mobility impaired - anyone physically incapable of working) were the ONLY people ALLOWED to glean while the harvest was ongoing. Gleaning was a kind of privilege for the physically disabled while all able bodied folk had to contribute all hands on deck to get the harvest in, with penalties for any able bodied caught gleaning before the harvest was in.
Today, judging by this article, it is the economically disabled who are doing the gleaning.
I fear it’s a sign of things to come.
Good piece, thanks. I remember a lucky walk in the wine country of southern Baden several years ago, when the apple harvest was overwhelming, and there were thousands of apples left on the ground. You couldn't possible eat or gather them all.
A friend is an expert on the 19th-c French artist Millet, who did a painting "Des Glaneuses" (or Les Glaneuses, The Gleaners), which is how I learned about the term:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gleaners