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All trades necessary to supplying the wants of the villagers are represented in it. Besides the profits from his actual calling, nearly every man except the daily labourer, has a little bit of land which he farms, so as to eke out his scanty income. All possess a cow or two, a few goats, and probably a pair of plough-bullocks.
Wassailing exists in Lancashire, and the apple-wassailing has not quite died out on Twelfth Night. Plough Monday is still observed in Cambridgeshire, and the "plough-bullocks" drag around the parishes their ploughs and perform a weird play. The Haxey hood is still thrown at that place in Lincolnshire on the Feast of the Epiphany, and valentines are not quite forgotten by rural lovers.
It is now becoming so serious a trouble, that in many villages plough-bullocks are too few in number for the area of land under cultivation. The tillage suffers, the crops deteriorate, this reacts on prices, the ryot sinks lower and lower, and gets more into the grasp of the rapacious money-lender.
Old planters constantly tell you, that such cattle as they used to get are not now procurable for love or money. Within the last twenty years prices have more than doubled, because the demand for good plough-bullocks has been more urgent, as a consequence of increased cultivation, and the supply is not equal to the demand.
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