Historically when people talk about 'corn' it's hard to know whether they meant wheat or barleycorn -- wheaten bread has certainly always been around, even if barley bread was peasant food. (The OED tells me that it was originally the Saxon 'hwaete'!)
Apparently another version of that rhyme is "Oats, peas, beans and barley grow", although I always knew it as 'oats and beans' -- I suspect it goes back before potatoes in any case. It sounds very mediaeval as a crop system.
I'm not quite clear about what triggered the shift from oats to barley?
Well, according to the chap on the radio, it was the loss of the market for horse-fodder -- oats and hay being the standard feed for any animals not 'out to grass', i.e. every animal in a town and a lot of those kept in peak working/riding condition elsewhere. I assume that the people who were previously raising oats for sale as fodder switched to raising barley as an alternative cash crop; by the end of the 19th century Britain was importing vast amounts of beef and wheat from North America, where the scale of the farms enabled them to undercut domestic production costs to such a degree that it was cheaper to pay to ship food across the Atlantic than it was to grow it locally. The British beef farmer had to cultivate and fence his pastures and move his herd from one small field to the next: the American rancher just let his steers fend for themselves, then drove them off to the nearest railhead and meatpacking plant.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2023-03-16 11:41 pm (UTC)Apparently another version of that rhyme is "Oats, peas, beans and barley grow", although I always knew it as 'oats and beans' -- I suspect it goes back before potatoes in any case. It sounds very mediaeval as a crop system.
Well, according to the chap on the radio, it was the loss of the market for horse-fodder -- oats and hay being the standard feed for any animals not 'out to grass', i.e. every animal in a town and a lot of those kept in peak working/riding condition elsewhere. I assume that the people who were previously raising oats for sale as fodder switched to raising barley as an alternative cash crop; by the end of the 19th century Britain was importing vast amounts of beef and wheat from North America, where the scale of the farms enabled them to undercut domestic production costs to such a degree that it was cheaper to pay to ship food across the Atlantic than it was to grow it locally. The British beef farmer had to cultivate and fence his pastures and move his herd from one small field to the next: the American rancher just let his steers fend for themselves, then drove them off to the nearest railhead and meatpacking plant.