The next meeting of the Shinfield ad District Local History Society is this Tuesday and will feature ‘The Swallowfield Harvest Home of 1863’, a lecture by Prof. Richard Hoyle
A harvest home was a celebration of the end of a harvest successfully brought in. The Swallowfield Harvest Home is particularly interesting as perhaps the only one of which we have visual evidence as well as newspaper reports. It also welcomed Charles Kingsley – polymath intellectual, now best known as the author of The Water Babies – who gave a sermon but also made a revealing speech.
The lecture will show how the harvest home in southern England was a deliberate revival of the later 1850s and early 1860s. The new-style harvest home ceased to be a reward to farm labourers for their work. Instead, its overt purpose was to show the unity of the parish under its landlord and parish clergy. It may be read as a demonstration of where political power lay within the parish, and it shows a society where the voices of different social groups counted unequally. These themes are teased out from the newspaper reports of the Swallowfield Harvest Home.
All are very welcome at the meetings, which are every second Tuesday of the month from October to May. Entry is £3 on the door or £15 to join for the year. See www.shinfieldhistory.org.uk for more information.