Making Bread Part III - The Gleaners

Millet saw it like this. I never was a gleaner. I always had resources. Anytime I wanted I could get on the plane and go home. But I saw gleaners and I know who they are and I still have some old photographs.

In general (though, not uniformly) the land in Castilla was owned by the people who worked it. Of course, not always. Much of it once belonged to the aristocracy, the church, or the knights. Some still does. Especially in other parts of Spain. Place names reflect that history; Carrión de los Condes, Jerez de los Caballeros.

To obtain the manpower necessary to work the land accommodations were always necessary; initially fiefdoms, later the lands were sold and held independently. But there have always been people without land and in a substance economy to be without land was to be without the means to produce food, i.e. subsist. Rather like being unemployed. You could learn a trade; tinker, tailor, candlestick maker - shepherd. Go into the priesthood. But, it was especially hard on widows. The first changes in what we might today call "women's rights" were made to allow women to hold title to land. It eased the burden on widows and kept the land in production.

As the land passed from generation to generation it was divided into parcels that were so small that in many cases they were too small to farm efficiently. Some were so small that it was impossible to turn a team around, never mind a tractor. Many sat idle. While working those small parcels I was taught that if I were to let a seed head fall to the ground I was not to pick it up. That too had been passed down through the generations.

“Let her glean even among the sheaves, and do not reproach her. And also pull out some from the bundles for her and leave it for her to glean, and do not rebuke her.”. Ru. 2,15-16

There were other safety measures. For example, oxen were insured through local pools.

By any modern measure we would have classed these people as poor and not just the gleaners. They worked terribly hard to feed themselves a diet of chickpeas, bread, eggs and maybe one or two hogs a year. Though, if you had all of those you wouldn't have been thought poor! Poor is relative. They all shared clean water, clean air, strong families, and strong communities to support themselves.

The tractor has replaced all of this. For both better and worse. More the worse I think. Though that isn't my call to make.