Perhaps curiously, we hear little about the actual detail of farming beyond the current health of specific crops and some details about rick management.  Frequent mentions to harvest occur, but we have no pictures that inform us about how exactly the Slades and the Fullers managed their estates, what methods they employed.  In fact, so few are the references that they stand out sharply: old Tom Jarvis breast plowing on the downs, mice in the ricks, the pregnant Peggy Harris reaping in the fields just before giving birth, the adventures of Wellingham Fuller at the Ilsley Fair.  Presumably, the Slades regarded details of this nature as natural as a trip to the supermarket today and therefore nothing to write about, especially when postage could cost so much.

We have to remember that farming provided the livelihood for the Slades, so we should not be surprised that where any mention of farming does occur, it contains a reference to grain or stock prices.  The timeline of the letters allows us to plot the relative hardness and softness of the agricultural market just at the time when the Corn Laws stood at the front of everybody’s minds.  Wellingham Fuller openly mentions this in his letter of January 1840.  He sees wheat holding its price, but anticipates its fall if ‘they repeal the Corn Laws, which they are trying to do with all their might’.  The letters tell us about the harvests for 1839, 1840, 1841 and 1844.  1839 had been bad, work not finishing until the second week in November.  1840’s harvest had finished by the middle of September.  In a good year, Mr Fuller could count on twenty days carting, but in 1840 he had finished after the ninth day.  In October 1841, they are still at it, the constant rains had prevented them from gathering.  August 1844 saw them virtually finishing.  We have information on prices for wheat, barley and sheep.  Barley sold at 53 shillings a quarter in 1839, holding its price in the winter of 1840, but it had fallen to 30 shillings a quarter by June 1840.  Wheat ran at £18 a load as the official price, but in reality the quality of the wheat seemed to affect the actual price paid.  The wheat they had gathered by October 1840 was so bad that it would not even fetch £10 a load.  By 1844, wheat ran at £14 a load and barley ‘sells well’, although we have no price for the latter.  Sheep prices are quoted for tegs, wetter, ewes and lambs.  Tegs went for 30 shillings a piece in 1840, rising to 33/6 the next year.  Ewes commanded a price of around 25 shillings between 1840 and 1844.  Lambs went for between 15 shillings and a pound, although cull lambs sold at 10/6 in 1840.  Generally, the Fullers and Slades took their sheep to Ilsley Fair, where, in 1844 they reckoned on as many as 40,000 going on the block.  We hear about wheat, barley, oats, and saintfoin and also about swedes, turnips and beans.  We have some indication of the stock volumetrics: 400 lambs sold in June 1840, 100 ewes and wetters each went to market in September 1840, shortly after they sheared 840 sheep; 400 lambs appeared in by April 1841, 500 ewes and 300 tegs for wintering that autumn.  The harvest of 1844 produced seven ricks of different grains and at least four barns full.  At other times, as we have seen, the year might prove less fruitful.  In 1841, for example, they encountered a shortage of hay and had to buy it in.  Contrast this with the summer of 1844 when they achieved 500 hundredweight of hay per acre.

In July 1840 swarms of Irishmen arrived for the summerwork.  Within a year, however, the writing started to appear on the wall for them, because technology came to the area.  For five shillings a day, the Slades hired a threshing machine.  It needed four men to work it and just as many as normal to fetch and carry, but it got through the rickstocks and did so very efficiently: it threshes remarkably clean.  Henry Slade and the two Fullers at Aston Farm and Copsestyle could see the machine’s potential.  They formed a syndicate and bought it for £16-10-0 in total.

We never hear of the Slades as running into financial difficulties, despite indifferent harvests at this time.  Nevertheless, they choose not to pay some of the bills trailing behind the younger Henry Slade as he transfers his operations from Swan River to Calcutta.  They claim the need to watch funds, but we might see their trying to pass a subtle message to their offspring about facing up to financial responsibilities.  Of course, farming did not guarantee an automatic fortune.  A chill wind came near, taking the form of Mr Webb of Shillingford.  He contracted to buy the bean harvest but then went bankrupt to the tune of £3000, offering to pay 9 shillings in the pound.  Henry Slade, Uncle Daniel Lousley, Uncle Caudwell, Cousin John, and Mr Parsons all caught a cold here.  Bankruptcy could take the farmers themselves as we saw in the sad case of Mr Cooper, the Harwell farmer.  He chose to take his own life.  Closer to home, Edward Humfrey senior, who died after an energetic morning’s coursing followed by a sporting lunch at The Bull at Streatley, was found to have fallen into embarrassed circumstances.  £3000 seemed a popular sum for bankrupts.  We learn about the Wallingford butcher, Beesley Munt, known from the records to supply the Union with meat, went down for that figure in the autumn of 1844.