Endure
Object in focus: Ox carter’s smock
A piece by Helen Corlett, Look Again project volunteer.
Recently I had the lovely opportunity to work with the Look Again project on a couple of the Salisbury Museum’s better-known items. How lucky that we were able to do this before the lockdown. Well, now at least we have time for reflection, and I am left with a sense of how very different our view of a garment is, depending on what we know, or don’t, of its story.
It is an object where we have the delight of an exact provenance and even a wearer. I know that some of the volunteers were a bit “smocked out” by the time the cataloguing of that section was complete, but this smock was still a bit special. We are told that its wearer was John King, an ox carter, and the last man to plough with ox at Beckhampton. Already it gathers about it a nostalgic aura of the world we have lost.
Close up of smocking, John King’s smock, c. 1850, ©The Salisbury Museum collection
It is made of thick blue linen, faded and worn like old denim jeans. There is a traditional white smocked box (central panel), and around it feather stitch, which is carried through onto the collar, shoulders and cuffs.
Hand-made and home-made, most likely by John’s wife Martha or one of his daughters.
I should confess at this point that I bring no needlework expertise to this.
I had lovely smocks as a child, and so did my dolls – worked by my great aunt. They always fascinated me, but I never quite got my head around how you made them.
Here I have focused instead on what we can piece together, mainly from censuses and newspapers, of John King’s life within this lovingly stitched garment.
He was born at Beckhampton, near Avebury, in 1836 or thereabouts – on the cusp of the Victorian age.
Through the censuses we can see him growing up, marrying and raising his own family, as he earned his keep ploughing John Wentworth’s farm there – 620 acres, tilled by twelve men and five boys in 1861.
John did not write – he signed with “his mark”. Perhaps he could read (more people could read than write); we do not know.
Out he went, year after year, with his oxen and plough, following the seasons and the time-worn furrows through the stony fields, no doubt throwing up a good crop of flint tools and ancient animal bones. As a youngster, he was the boy walking beside the oxen, soothing and cajoling what were inclined to be stroppy beasts. Later his own sons took their turn at the collar. The smock gave him a freedom of movement in his work – whether reaching out to steer the oxen round or to load his cart.
Some breeds of oxen were not good in the heat, so a summer start might be 3am – halters, collars and traces all in place, and out before the sun rose over Silbury Hill, so that he could “hitch off” before the day got too hot.
How do you know if the oxen are too hot?
“Their tongues would hang out like a dog’s, and a careful ox-carter would turn them round to face the wind in order that they might be cooled by the fresh breezes” - so the Wiltshire Times tells us.
The farmer Mr. J. Wentworth was highly commended at the Trowbridge Root, Cheese and Wool Show in November 1876 for his mangold wurzels – the product, most likely, of John King’s ploughing!
(Wiltshire Times and Trowbridge Advertiser, Saturday 11 November 1876)
Ploughing matches reported for these years were open both to teams of horses and of oxen. But by the 1890s ox ploughs were becoming a sufficiently rare sight on the hill farms around Salisbury Plain to attract the interest of Sunday cyclists.
The ox ploughed as well as the horse and was cheaper to feed and keep. Ultimately though, the greater speed of the horse had won the day.
The Wiltshire Times marked the end of 1910 with a look back at a disappearing way of life:
Sleeve detail, John King’s smock, c. 1850, ©The Salisbury Museum collection
“With the oxen has also disappeared the ox-carter, the patient taskmaster who understood alike the intricacies of the ox-harness and the peculiarities of the ox-temper, who coaxed his charges when cantankerous, cooled them when heated, watched their hoofs to see they did not wear to the quick, and got all the work he could out of them when climate, soil and beast were in good fettle.” - Wiltshire Times, 31st December 1910
By 1911 John King, aged 76, had hung up his harness, and was living with wife Martha and one of his sons in a two-room house in Avebury high street. He died in 1917.
The smock at some point came into the hands of William Edward Vincent Young, archaeologist and curator of the Alexander Keiller Museum at Avebury, a man clearly attuned to Avebury’s past. It came to Salisbury Museum via Dr. Clay.
By Helen Corlett, Look Again project volunteer