Haymaking in the Eighteenth Century
Journal Title: Martor. The Museum of the Romanian Peasant Anthropology Review - Year 2016, Vol 21, Issue 21
Abstract
Eighteenth-century historical records show that despite the large number of livestock in the Principalities, the reserves of hay prepared for their food in winter were minimal. The people rather relied on the livestock animals’ ability to find their own food in the fields when winters were not hard, on transhumance, or on the branches and shoots the people gathered from the forest and fed to the animals. There are numberless mentions in the documents issued by the royal chancelleries of haymaking day as corvée work, specifying only its temporal duration (from morning till evening), without any mention of the actual area that had to be mowed and then gathered. The hay was a valuable item; the hay price was set by royal decree in major cities including Bucharest to prevent excessive price rises. Hay storage was problematic because if left in the field, it had to be protected with fences so as not to be eaten by cattle left to find their own food; it could also be set on fire accidentally or purposefully. The Phanariot regime issued special hay regulations and procedures, especially for hay storage in the cities, to prevent fires as hay was highly flammable.
Authors and Affiliations
Ion Blajan
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP256028
- DOI -
- Views 132
- Downloads 0
«Regardez si ça germe et si ça pousse!». Le processus de re-«paysannisation» des zones rouges du front occidental après la Grande Guerre
World War I has destroyed within four years everything that the ancestral patience of cultivators had been building during millenniums of peasant labour. These traces are mostly visible on the occidental part of the anci...
Inge Daniels, What Are Exhibitions For? An Anthropological Approach, London and Oxford: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019, 256 p.
Inge Daniel’s book talks about the importance of everyday objects in museum displays, mul-tisensory exhibitions, theatricality, using photography not as object, but as context and as a facilitator of creating atmosphere,...
Curating Change in the Museum: Introduction to the Volume
Museums are places of conservation but they do not necessarily have to be conservative places. On the contrary, museums are sometimes at the vanguard of cultural innovation, changing the world rather than keeping up with...
The Károly Kós Experiment: Participatory Museography, Material Culture and Childhood
The present article is the result of ethnographic research1 in the counties of Covasna and Harghita, developed in two stages (June 2011 - January 2012) and discusses the methodological challenges posed by an exhibition p...
Y a-t-il un corps du péché et de la maladie ? La Paresse et la Peste dans l’iconographie religieuse roumaine (XVIIIe-XIXe siècles)
L’étude se propose d’analyser l’image de la Paresse et de la Peste dans le discours iconographique de l’espace roumain des XVIIIe-XIXe siècles. Le péché capital et la maladie par excellence de l’imaginaire collectif roum...