all forgotten, God wot, down to the edge of our own times. The good old
days when there was snow at Christmas, and fairs were held and pamphlets
printed on the frozen Thames, when comets were understood as fate, and
when the corn laws starved half England--those were the times of the
flail. Every barn--and there were then barns on every farm, think of the
number--had its threshing-floor opposite the great open doors, and all
the dread winter through the flail resounded. Men looked upon it as their
most cherished privilege to get that employment in the bitter dark hours
of the hungry months. It was life itself to them: to stand there swinging
that heavy bit of wood all day meant meat and drink, or rather cheese and
drink, for themselves and families. It was a post as valued as a civil
list pension nowadays, for you see there were crowds of men in these corn
villages, but only a few of them could get barns to snop away in.

The flail is made of two stout staves of wood jointed with leather. They
had flails of harder make than that, harder than the iron nails used in
the wars of old times, _i.e._ Hunger, Necessity, Fate, to beat them on
the back, and thresh them on the floor of the earth. The corn laws are
gone, half the barns are gone, our granaries now are afloat, steam
threshes our ricks--in a few days doing what used to take months, and you
would think that this simple implement would have disappeared for ever.
Instead of which flails are still in use on small farms--which it is now
the cry to multiply--for knocking out little quantities of grain for
feeding purposes. The gleaners used to use them to thresh out their
collections. There would be no difficulty in getting a flail if anybody
had a mind to make a museum of such things; and if the force of modern
ideas should succeed in dividing the land among small occupiers, the
flail will become as common as ever.

There was an old waggon shown at the Royal Agricultural Show in London