The Plough-day for a New Tenant

In the North Riding of Yorkshire, when a new tenant took a farm, his neighbours gave him a plough-day: the use of all their ploughs, ploughmen and horses on a fixed day to make his ground ready for sowing. The farmer’s wife fed them all. For one plough-day near Guisborough in 1808, with about eighty ploughs at work, she baked seventeen loaves and fifty-one currant dumplings from twelve bushels of wheat and served nearly two hundredweight of beef, two hams, pease puddings and five great cheeses, with ninety-nine gallons of ale and two of rum.