Day 61. Summer holidays

How many people have fond memories of the endless summer holidays?

For children well into the 20^th century, the holiday wasn't an idyllic time of fun and play. The original purpose of the school holiday was to free the children to work in the fields to help with the harvest. Preston's school registers in the 19^th century record that attendance was falling by early August, and the school closed soon afterwards. With few children in class, there was little point remaining open.

Prior to the invention of horse-drawn or tractor-drawn machinery, harvest was the most labour-intensive task of the rural calendar. No available pair of hands could be spared, and for poorer families there was no question of losing those few extra pennies their children could earn.

Endless hours bent double in the scorching sun, with hands, bare feet and shins cut by razor-sharp stubble, was brutal work for an adult, let alone an eight-year-old child, but these children had it easy compared to their forebears – before the Education Act of 1880 (see Day 39), labourers' children were often in full-time work aged four.

The back-breaking slog of scything and binding the corn was man's work, but women and children were employed for gleaning – picking up the individual dropped ears of corn from across the fields. Gleaning could provide up to half the family's annual income, which was meagre to say the least for 19^th century labourers. Beans and barley ears were taken to the farmers. Wheat was kept by the gleaners to provide their flour for the winter months. 

So when you look at children lounging in parks and playgrounds this summer, spare a thought for their bygone counterparts to whom they have to thank for the privilege.