The Reapers’ Year is a play born from the desire to set the record straight about the farmworker. So many plays about the pre-industrial agriculture either celebrated rural life with tales of harvest customs or to glorify the rural rebellion that followed the hardness of the village labourer’s existence. Neither presented the whole picture: this play attempts to weave the two strands together and find a connecting thread.

Our most important source of information was the men and women who could remember the old method of bringing in the harvest by hand. Their accounts were transcribed, edited and staged, and still form the backbone of the show.

Into their collective tale we wove another story, the struggle of the labourer in the last century to progress from a state of literal pauperism to political recognition. This research was carried out in libraries, museums and record offices, combing through letters, newspapers, posters, diaries, evidence of Parliamentary Commissioners and old harvest agreements. In some case the events were only a generation or two’s removal from our witnesses, including the gaining of the franchise in 1884.

Finally a third strand follows the typical but individual story of a family during the farming year of 1937-38. Just as the human dimension of history is easily forgotten, so are all the little inconsistencies of the historian’s tale. There was no date when horses gave way to tractors, only a long period of co-existence.