Barnless

A BARNLESS COUNTRY. In any other country than California to talk of raising thousands of bushels of wheat, barley or oats, fitting and storing it ready for the market, by threshing, bagging and housing till opportunity of sale presents, and this without a barn or shelter for a single sack, would seem, at least to one unaccustomed to our climate, to be a most hazardous procedure, strange management for a prudent farmer to adopt. And yet, to a very great extent, our farmers are without barns. We do not mean to say, that they have not their fine house barns, or stables for the convenience of their working animals, and for housing the necessary grain and feed for their use, and for the storing of their farming implements when not in use; but what we mean to say is, that so far from erecting anything like barns or barracks for the sheltering of the gathered grain crop, not one in ten of our grain growers gives it the least thought whatever. Nature, the great world itself, is all the barn he wants. It is convenient, because at hand everywhere; commodious, because there is plenty of room in it; cheap because it costs nothing; and suitable, because perfectly dry and answering all the purposes desired. This one feature of our climate, the absence of rain from June till October, will ever render California peculiar as a grain growing country. The harvest commences after the last rains of the season have fallen, and it is continued from day to day and week to week, with no more regard to the probable state of the weather, than though every one had determined it couldn't rain anyhow, and therefore no use to give it a thought: and probably an exception of a single year will prove to be very rare. Harvesting continues from week to week till it actually becomes monotonous, for the bare want of a shower or something to give variety to the routine of farm labor; but no change comes till the harvesting is completed. All this time the entire crop, often of a thousand acres or more, lies as much spread and exposed to the weather, as simple sheaves of grain can be. Then commences the gathering, which is often not till the threshing machine is set and ready for operation. The grain threshed, it is then either left in a huge pyramidial pile upon a canvass floor, or sacked at once, and these piled up in squares or parallelograms, as large as many eastern barns, and without the slightest covering of any description, and in this condition to await the market or the convenience of the proprietor. And for months, often, do these sack stacks remain upon the grain fields, entirely unharmed by climate, and presenting a feature which can hardly be said to belong to any other grain growing country.

MEDIEVAL RURAL LIFE AND ORGANIZATION. The manorial village. Let us refresh our memory at first with a glance at country life in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. All rural life in England at this time was village life. Farmhouses were gathered into clusters sheltering a population ranging from fifty to a thousand persons. Radiating from and circling around each village were the plowlands, pastures, meadows, and woodlands, spreading open; for the most part houseless, barnless, shedless, mill-less, even fenceless, clear to the similar lands, commons, and open fields belonging to the inhabitants of each adjoining village. The landscape picture presented, then, is a village cluster, surrounded at the extremities of irregular radii by a ring of similar clusters, all varying in size but separated from one another by open, unfenced, agricultural land. But the memory of each villager sticks to his own parcels of land, whether held individually or in common, so definitely, that, even without ditch, wall, or survey stakes, a clean-cut, psychological boundary, very irregular in shape it may be surmised, divides the lands of one village from the lands of every adjoining village, and sets apart a certain group of villagers as a distinctive agricultural community.

The cows no longer huddled in fear beside the creek, but simply chewed their cuds under the night sky as they might chew cuds under any sky, fully adjusted to their barnless condition.