'The Art and Craft of Chicken Cramming': Poultry in the Weald of Sussex 1850-1950

/ 'The Art and Craft of Chicken Cramming': Poultry in the Weald of Sussex 1850-1950 By BRIAN SHORT HE poultry industry of Sussex, while Low Weald offered good farmland in perhaps not as widely-known as that abundance; problems of soil acidity and T of South Lancashire or Eastern Nor- drainage were common to both heavy clay folk, serves to illustrate several facets of and the fine compacted sandstones; and pod- agrarian life. It demonstrates the inter- solization was a feature of the higher altitudes relationship of the social and physical environ- of the Ashdown and Broadwater Down ment; it shows the importance of environ- Forests. A great diversity of relief, soil, mental and spatial factors in the development drainage, vegetation, and micro climate thus of an innovation; and it shows how, by the provided the background to Wealden society development of a relatively minor aspect of and economy. agrarian economy, small undercapitalized farmers and labourers could weather severe economic fluctuations. Above all, it illustrates II. The Social Environment of the Chicken how an industry could develop in rural Industry England based on peasant traditions and with The Weald was for long a dependency of the little of the encouragement afforded to other areas around it. As an area containing much branches of agriculture by the gentry, nobility waste used for common grazing of swine and and landowners. latterly cattle, its settlement pattern was younger and less definable than that of the neighbouring downland and areas of Tertiary I. The Wealclen Environment rocks around the coasts of south-east The Weald constitutes a clearly-defined region England. Late settlement in the outliers of in south-eastern England. Fine-grained silts coastal manors took the form of scattered, and silty sandstones alternated with heavy isolated farmsteads and small hamlets. A 'bottomless' clays to produce a landscape of common pattern therefore by the nineteenth diversified relief and poorly drained soil. In century was for poly-nuclear settlement with the Kentish High Weald and in the Western few centralized villages and no single family High Weald, relatively flat dissected plateaux or squirearchy to control parish affairs. Much surfaces contrasted strongly with a series of of the heathland was marginal, and squatters sharply-incised, darkly-wooded ghylls -- the had been common in the medieval period headwaters of the rivers Ouse, Cuckmere, with the consent of the manorial lords, and Rother, and Medway -- on the edge of again in the eighteenth century when much of Ashdown Forest and along the Forest Ridge the upland and strictly marginal soils of which forms the central, highest section of Heathfield were settled. Today areas such as the Weald. The deep clay of the Low Weald Watkins Down (Punnetts Town) still bear forms a horseshoe-shaped depression stretch- the signs of this later development, with ing into Kent, Surrey and Sussex, and pre- small rectangular fields on poor soils which senting agriculturalist and traveller alike with are now reverting to scrub and gorse, and on problems which were indelibly described in which horses rather than cattle or crops are to contemporary literature. Neither High nor be found. The Wealden commons were often 17 I! 18 THE AGRICULTURAL HISTORY REVIEW loosely defined areas, and as a consequence hops, fruit, tanning, and work in the woods I disputes over common rights and boundaries in the winter months. 3 were fairly frequent. During the eighteenth However, Heathfield, like many of its century disputes in the Forest Ridge area Wealden neighbours, actually suffered severe between the Chichester family and the Ash- problems of poverty and lack of employment. burnhams were long and protracted, probably The resources were abundant but they could originating in the purchase of the manor of not be stretched effectively to provide a decent Burwash by Ashburnham from the living for more than a few. Without even the Chichesters (Pelhams) in 1767.1 The lack of wealth of charities which one might expect in control over supposedly lawless and the closed downland parishes the poor rates uncontrollable people was a point noted by soared during the nineteenth century. Bet- many. Anglican parsons, anxious at the ween 1801 and 1851 the population of Heath- spread of non-conformity and the lack of large field nearly doubled from just over 1200 to congregations in the area, inveighed against just over 2200. Landownership in the parish the Wealden 'heathens' whilst the open was diverse. In 1842 Sir Charles Blunt, MP nature of the parish vestry meetings, with no for Lewes, held more than 1000 acres, and strong squirearchical presence, could do Augustus Fuller owned 800 acres, but the nothing to stop a constant influx of settlers. remainder of the parish was divided among By 1850, therefore, there had been a long over 130 separate landowners. A select vestry tradition of independent settlement in the was said to exist in 1820, comprising sixteen area. 2 leading figures of the parish and headed by Nevertheless the Weald was a strongly- Blunt, but by 1831 vestry meetings comprised endowed area in resource terms and did have all the inhabitants of Heathfield paying poor the ability to offer a living for those prepared, rates. The overseer reported in 1834 that there and able, to look outside the traditional was no select vestry, decisions being made by structure of agriculture. Water, fuel, and raw the 'majority of the Parish m vestry materials were abundant, and there was a assembled'. Although even the later diversity of craft industry and manufactures. nineteenth-century inhabitants of small In the parish of Heathfield in the mid- hamlets in the Heathfield area, such as Rush- nineteenth century there was employment in lake Green, might look up to leading families tanning, brickmaking, gloving, spinning and such as the Darbys or the Dunns, this could weaving, milling, rope-making, quarrying, not in any way match the strong patterns of and wood cutting. Hemp and flax were spun, patronage and deference exhibited in the and although the iron industry which had downland to the South. 4 brought prosperity to the area was now dead, the poultry industry could latterly provide employment for all members of the family. III. The Beginnings of the Poultry Industry Heathfield, therefore, offered a potential It is against this social and environmental multiplicity of employment and had many background that the poultry industry craftsmen who were also smallholders. developed. By its very nature the origins are Labourers here moved between agriculture obscure, for poultry have long been a and non-agricultural occupations and travelled common-place feature of farming; and addi- from place to place in Sussex at the particular tionally have long been regarded as a pre- harvest periods concerned with hay, cereals, 3 Lucas, op cit, pp 96-103. 4BPP, Poor Law Commissioners 1834 (10), Appendix B: 1 p Lucas, HeathfieldMemorials, 1910, p 10. Answers to questions circulated by the Commissioners in 21L Heath, The English Peasant, 1893 (reprinted 1978), Rural Districts; East Sussex Record Office (ESR.O), TD/E ch XI, 'Wealden Life and Character', pp 189-206. 16, Heathfield Tithe Map and Schedule. J; • !i ........................................ CHICKEN CRAMMING 19 r quisite of the farmer's wife and family, rather the established local interest in this part of than an essential and integral part of the Sussex .7 farming economy. The ancient practice of There are many conflicting accounts of the fattening chickens is described in detail in origins of artificial fattening (cramming) but Heresbach's Booke off Husbandry (B Googe's certainly fatting in Heathfield can be dated to translation of 1557). ~ about 1830-34, and S C Sharpe's book The The early centre of the poultry industry in Sussex Fowl (1920) includes drawings made of Sussex appears to have been around Horsham, prizewinning Sussex fowls in 1847. The 1832 'the great emporium of capons', where by edition of Baxter's Library of Agricultural and 1673 a flourishing trade had already been Horticultural Knowledge includes a description established with London. However, at this of cramming and fatting as 'kindly furnished time and in this area of West Sussex, poultry us by one of" the first higglers in Sussex, as reckoned at 6d per bird, never amounted to practised by him for many years with the more than about £2 in any inventory so far greatest success', s Interestingly there was no examined. By 1800 there were still 'great reference made to what must have been a very stores of poultry' accumulating weekly from thriving local activity in the report of James places such as North Chappell and Kirdford, Farncombe in his prize essay on the where the 'Dorking fowls', fattened on agriculture of Sussex in 1850; the writing of barley flour, milk, pot-liquor, and molasses, James Caird in his tour of England in were conveyed by carrier from Horsham to 1850-51; nor in the critical review of London .6 Wealden agriculture by L~once De Lavergne Although poultry were no doubt ubiqui- in 1855.0 It would seem that these writers tous by the nineteenth century, interest in concentrated only on agriculture as de- fattening and rearing spread gradually monstrated by the larger tenant-farmers and eastwards across the High Weald to finally landowners. Few writers ventured into the become located around Heathfield. It is said depths of the High Weald around Heathfield that the idea of sending chickens to London and so were unable to describe this exception via the carrier, to benefit from the higher to an otherwise largely unprofitable agri- prices, occurred in 1788 to Mrs Kezia Collins culture. of Cade Street, Heathfield. Her husband began collecting chickens (higgling) from the neighbourhood, and fattening for the market IV.

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